Toni Morrison's exploration, in Beloved, of maternal love restricted by the conditions of slavery is an inquiry into the special psychological, as well as moral, problems which may arise. The central theme (or scene) of the novel is Sethe's murder of her own baby daughter (Beloved) in order to prevent her from living life as a black slave of white (especially male) masters. But years later Beloved returns (at least in Sethe's mind) as a ghost. The mother-"daughter" relationship, grounded in the mother's guilt and her sense of having been deprived (due to slavery) of her own mother (one of the psychological determinants of her infanticide) as well as in the daughter's sense of deprivation and all-consuming hunger for maternal love, can be read as an expression of the mother's own warped and distorted conception of motherhood. Sethe has never had, never been allowed to have, a clear sense of her own (free) self or individual subjectivity; the whole space of her subjectivity is occupied by "others," mainly her children. Morrison thus explores the interrelation between the historical and socio-political forces (enslavement) which have formed Sethe and the operation of the psychic forces themselves, especially in the Sethe-Beloved relationship; as a "ghost from the past" Beloved also may be tied metaphorically to historical guilt and the "mourning of the past"-that is, to the tragic historical weight, the cultural memory of black slavery in the United States. Just as this traumatic experience must be remembered (and mourned) in order to be forgotten, so Sethe must remember and mourn her dead baby in order to forget and get beyond her, even if the child's desire for the mother here threatens to devour its own maternal origin. Here, within this context of the narrative interweaving of purely psychological with historical-political and even mythic forces in the mother-daughter relationship, I want to further explicate the psychological dimension via notions of maternity and the maternal body.