The longings of the three women, echoed by Lady Jones, Ella, Janey Wagon, and Patsy, expand coming-of-age into a coming-of-era, when human beings of both sexes can grasp their rightful heritage of personhood. Denver, the next in the chain of female victims, lacks security and self-esteem but knows instinctively that the beguiling phantom is the sister for whom she has yearned. Sethe was likewise wrenched from her mother and handed into the maimed arms of a wet nurse.

Baby Suggs was wrenched from Africa and forced aboard a slave ship. Stunted by slavery, each of the women travels the unfamiliar path with imperfect directions. Like successive ocean waves, Baby Suggs wearies of life, leaving the household to Sethe, who in turn crumbles, takes to her bed, and abdicates authority to Denver. coming-of-age, which allies Sethe's realization of adult powers with a similar growth in Denver.Reunited with Sethe, he is at last able to surrender himself to the nurturing role that Baby Suggs enjoined her followers to embrace - to love the body, to honor self. In stereotypically male fashion, Paul D follows his own route and, by deliberate indirectness, arrives at the same point.

The physical journey, made arduous by a mutilated back, swollen feet, and a premature infant, hardly compares with the spiritual journey, which introduces Sethe to freedom and the most precious reward of all, a real family life.

the journey, which takes Sethe from Sweet Home to Baby Suggs's home, across the river from Kentucky on the southern rim of Ohio.Without becoming tedious or pedantic, Morrison blends a number of traditions: Beloved, a sophisticated and powerfully evocative stream-of-consciousness novel, seems at once as old as Homer, as terrifying as Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, as philosophical as the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and as familiar as the Bible.

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