My first impression upon reading this was that this is a superstitious family; they are in denial about their past. There’s a chicken/egg question about the superstitious behavior and the suppression of memory; is it the case that in the absence of facts superstition takes over, or vice versa?
The residents of the house assign human qualities (spitefulness, “outrageous behavior”) to it, almost conflating the house and the ghost.
She faults Baby Suggs for intentionally pushing the memory of her eight children aside, but by believing that the ghost of a baby haunts the house (and has driven away her boys), it seems like she’s engaged in a form of denial as well.
We begin to discover that in the author’s diagesis (bam!), the ghosts and the feeling of “hauntedness” are intended to be real (the first evidence of this is when Paul D comes into the house for the first time and feels something strange about it). Later when the 20-year-old Beloved is discovered and brought back to the house, Denver begins to suspect that she is a spirit and not a real person. Beloved speaks in sibilant fragments; her body is described as soft, like a baby’s, and her clothing is black, perhaps funerary, and she has no knowledge of the outside world or a past life before she was discovered by the tree stump.
She does, however, feel like she has a purpose; she tells Denver she’s there for Sethe, and in being there seems to bring forth memories of Sethe’s previous life as a slave (such as the hanging of her mother, which Sethe had previously suppressed).
American Lit Journal 