ABSTRACT
The household made of father, mother, and granddaughter may reproduce the structure of the original family made of father, mother, and daughter. But father and granddaughter in fact come from quite different nations. As the pure daughter—who suddenly shows up as a full-grown woman dressed in white—Beloved is not simply one more example of the daughter's return but a gloriously violent disembodiment of the ruling idea that cultural identity depends on remaining true to one's biological origins. The racial claims of that tradition are what the novel challenges in challenging the essentialism of the daughter's narrative. The racialized sense of the term seems to have emerged during the nineteenth century and in American English. In 1985, Jane Tompkins rose up in defense of sentimental women writers. She argued that their desire to feminize American culture had nothing to do either with emasculating men or with feeding the banal appetites of a new mass readership.
