In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the life of a small family is rocked by the appearance of a mysterious woman named Beloved, who bears an uncanny resemblance to the long-dead daughter of the main character, Sethe. In Hamlet by William Shakespeare, young prince Hamlet’s life changes when he has an encounter with a ghost that claims to be the spirit of his dead father. Both of these works deal with ghosts in some way or another, but the attitudes are very different.
Beloved opens with a family consisting of Sethe, her daughter Denver, and the “baby ghost”, the ghost of Sethe’s unnamed daughter who she killed to protect her from a fate worse than death, living in the same house they’ve lived in for years. Sethe has no desire to leave the community, despite the fact that everyone in the area hates her for what she’s done to her family and her actions. But the arrival of Paul D., a man from Sethe’s past, causes Sethe to rethink this. He banishes the “baby ghost” and it seems that he might convince Sethe to move away, but then Beloved arrives and Sethe finds herself unable to leave. In Beloved, the character of the ghost — even when the ghost is made material in the form of Beloved herself — symbolizes inaction and an inability to let go of the past. The ghost makes it so that Sethe cannot do anything in a literal and metaphorical way: at first, it makes it so that she has a reason to stay, and then it weakens Sethe so much that she cannot even physically leave the house.
Hamlet’s attitude towards the character of the ghost is similar in some ways and different in others. The ghost of Hamlet’s father forces Hamlet to act rather than stay stagnant: the ghost tells Hamlet that he was murdered by Hamlet’s uncle in association with Hamlet’s mother. Hamlet is horrified by what he hears and begins to conceive a plot to avenge his father. The major difference in the attitudes of Beloved towards ghosts and Hamlet towards ghosts is that Beloved’s ghost symbolizes inaction; Hamlet’s ghost symbolizes action. But there is a similarity in that Hamlet’s ghost, too, represents memory. Hamlet had been trying to move on from the death of his father, but upon seeing the ghost “the memory of his father’s death is physically lodged in his mind and so he is forced to remember and continue to mourn” (Greg Bearnish, “The Ghost of Shakespeare’s Hamlet: Purpose is but the Slave to Memory”,. “The ghost […] almost always directs attention backwards in time and causes the living characters to reflect on prior events,” and that’s true for both Beloved and Hamlet. And in both works there are characters that try to forget the past: Paul D. tries to exorcise first the baby ghost and then Beloved from the house, and Hamlet’s mother Gertrude urges him to accept death as a simple fact of life and is very passive about her husband’s death.
In the end, however, the appearance of the ghosts of Beloved and Hamlet lead to tragedy: Beloved ends with Sethe on the brink of death and Hamlet ends with pretty much every character dead. The moral is clear — focusing too much on the past and being unable to move forward into the future is dangerous.
