Houses+or+Homes+Imagery

= Record Images of houses/homes in //Beloved// Here. Please include the quote and the page/section number. =

Denver is confused as to why Sethe and Paul D would not stay at a place called "Sweet Home" where they had so many memories. Their response is that "Sweet Home" was not their home, merely a place in their lives. Morrison is stating that home is not about where you are located and that home is not always the place you think it is.
 * Section 1.1, p. 16 "How come everybody run off from Sweet Home can't stop talking about it? Looks like if it was so sweet you would have stayed."..."She's right, Sethe. It wasn't sweet and it sure wasn't home" He shook his head. "But it's where we were," said Sethe. "Altogether."

Denver thinks of her house as a person (her sister). The house does not frighten Denver because she thinks of the hauntings as a sign that her dead sister is with her. She defends the house claiming that it is her mother, not her house, that drives potential visitors away.
 * Section 1.1, p. 29 "Shivering, Denver approached the house, regarding it, as she always did, as a person rather than a structure. A person that wept, sighed, trembled and fell into fits. Her steps and her gaze were te cautious ones of a child approaching a nervous, idle relative (someone dependent but proud)."

Sethe led Paul D up the white stairs "where light came straight from the sky because the second-story windows of that house had been placed in the pitched ceiling and not the walls." At that time there is excitement in the air and the light shining down might represent hope, happiness, good, and purity. After they have sex "they lay side by side resntful of one another and the skylight above them." It is alost as if they feel betrayed by the light because it tricked them into the joy and excitement that turned out to be false. Section 1.2 p. 24

The house is "pitching", it is leaning slightly. This shows how it is warn and has been through a lot of weathering, this can be compared to the trials Sethe and the others have been through.
 * "The house itself was pitching" Section 1.1 pg. 21.

Throughout section 1.9, the house that the family lives in isn't refered to as "home", it's refered to as //124// or //a house//, but never //home//. When the house is being remembered, it is being pictured as being alive, a place that was focused on life and happiness, but now it is associated with death and sadness. Nobody likes going there now, so it gives the house and residents a feeling of isolation.
 * Page 101 "Before 124 and everybody in it had closed down, veiled over and shut away; before it had become the plaything of spirits and the home of the chafed, 124 had been a cheerful, buzzing house where Baby Suggs, holy, loved, cautioned, fed, chastised and soothed."
 * Page 102 "It was in front of //that// 124 that Sethe climbed off a wagon..."
 * Page 105 "124 shut down and put up with the venom of its ghost."
 * Page 105 "However many times Baby [Suggs] denied it, Sethe knew the grief at 124 started when she jumped down off the wagon..."
 * Page 112 Hardcover. "Years ago- when 124 was alive- she had women friends, men friends from all around to share grief with."

A house can make men feel uncomfortably bound sometimes, as in the case of Paul D here.
 * Section 1.11 Hardcover pg. 135 "He believed he was having house-fits, the glassy anger men sometimes feel when a woman's house begins to bind them when they want to yell and break something or at least run off. He knew all about that -- felt it lots of times -- in the Delaware weaver's house, for instance. But always he associated the house-fit with the woman in it."

This shows that the house is seen as a dark and not comfroting place to be. Even when it is light and cheerful outside, the inside is dark and doesn't have any life in it.
 * In Section 1.12 it reads, "It is noon, quite light outside; inside it is not. .... Darkness is stronger and swallows them like minnows."


 * Section 2.1, Pg. 199 " 124 WAS LOUD. Stamp paid could hear it even from the road." Stamp paid talks thinks about how 124 seems to be vexed and that something isn't right. The loudness symbolizes confrontation of the supernatural-kind.

Sometimes a "house" can have a double meaning. In the following case, they talk about the physical house, but also as a place to live.
 * Section 1.15 Pg. 172 Hardcover "You going to a nice house. Big too. A preacher and his family was in there. Eighteen children."

A church is the house of God, and it's representation often shows the piety of the congregation. Hardcover- pg. 256, "It was a tiny church no bigger than a rich man's parlor. The pews had no backs, and since the congregation was also the choir, it didn't need a stall. Certain members had been assigned the construction of a platform to raise the preacher a few inches above his congregation, but it was a less than urgent task, since the major elevation, a white oak cross, had already taken place."