Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. Sethe, a formerly enslaved mother of four, grapples with her traumatic past. Morrison sought to depict the limitations that enslaved women faced and to present a physical manifestation that was lacking in the world of literature. Moreover, Beloved explores the interior life of the formerly enslaved.
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a year after its publication, and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award.Hevesi, Dennis. (April 1, 1988). "Toni Morrison's Novel 'Beloved' Wins the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction". The New York Times. Archived copy A survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times ranked it as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006."What Is the Best Work of American Fiction of the Last 25 Years?", The New York Times, May 21, 2006. It was adapted as a 1998 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey.
Background The book's dedication reads "Sixty Million and more", referring to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. The book's epigraph is from Romans 9:25 (King James Bible): "I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved." In interviews, commentary, and the book’s foreword, Toni Morrison has described the image of Beloved’s introduction in the book as originating from an imaginative vision she had while at her boathouse on the Hudson River.Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am. Directed by Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Magnolia Pictures, 2019. The scene of a woman appearing as she walked out of the water, nice hat and all, is a scene she has described as an event that she actually “saw,” even though it was not a real event that happened in front of her. The inspiration of this scene, and how Morrison talks about it, reflects her intuitive approach as a storyteller, and contributes to the novel’s theme of blending memory and the supernatural.
Margaret Garner as inspiration The narrative of Beloved is loosely derived from the life of Margaret Garner, who was born into slavery in Boone County, Kentucky, and later attempted to run away to Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1856. She is remembered for killing her daughter to protect her from the cruelty of slavery. Morrison uncovered the story of Garner in an 1856 newspaper article, "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child," initially published in the American Baptist.Goulimar, Pelagia, "Beloved (1987)", in Toni Morrison, Routledge, 2011, p. 81. She discovered the newspaper article when working as an editor for The Black Book in 1974, a collection of texts on Black history and culture published by Random House.Yohe, Kristine. “Margaret Garner, Rememory, and the Infinite Past: History in Beloved.” Beloved, 2015, pp. 27–42. Morrison notably did not write a historical retelling; and there are many ways that Beloved diverges from Garner's story.
In January 1856, Garner fled Maplewood Farm in Richwood, Kentucky, alongside her husband, his parents, and their four children in hopes of attaining freedom from slavery in Cincinnati. After fleeing, they were subject to capture under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. The group first travelled by horse to Covington, Kentucky before continuing on foot to the home of their free relatives, the Kites, in Cincinnati. The family planned to proceed to Canada through the Underground Railroad. However, they were found at the Kites' home by their enslaver, Archibald Gaines, and U.S. marshals. As law enforcement broke into the home, Garner attempted to kill her children, hoping to spare them from being returned to slavery. Before being caught, she succeeded in killing her two-year-old daughter, Mary, with a butcher knife. The family was then captured and re-enslaved. Gaining national attention, the public debated whether Garner should be charged with murder or destruction of property.
Plot summary Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio, with Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, and her 18-year-old daughter, Denver, who live at 124 Bluestone Road. The site has been haunted for years by what they believe is the ghost of Sethe's youngest daughter. Denver is shy, friendless, and housebound. Sethe's sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away from home by the age of 13, which she believes was due to the ghost. Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband, Halle, died soon after the boys fled, eight years before the start of the novel.
One day, Paul D, one of the formerly enslaved men from Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe, Halle, Baby Suggs, and several others were once enslaved, arrives at Sethe's home. He forces out the spirit, receiving Denver's contempt for driving away her only companion, but persuades them to leave the house together for the first time in years for a carnival. Upon returning home, they find a young woman sitting in front of the house who calls herself Beloved. Paul D is suspicious and warns Sethe, but she is charmed by the young woman and ignores him. Denver is eager to care for the sickly Beloved, who she begins to believe is her elder sister come back.
Paul D begins to feel increasingly uncomfortable in the house and that he is being driven out. One night, Paul D is cornered by Beloved, who tells him to touch her on her "inside part." While they have sex, his mind is filled with horrific memories from his past, including the sexual violence inflicted upon him and the other men while in a chain gang. Paul D tries to tell Sethe about it, but cannot. Instead, he says that he wants her pregnant. Sethe is afraid to have to live for a baby. When Paul D tells friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react fearfully. One, Stamp Paid, reveals the reason for the community's rejection of Sethe by showing Paul D a newspaper clipping of an article about a fugitive woman who killed her child.
Paul D confronts Sethe, who tells him that after escaping and joining her children at 124, four horsemen came to return her children and her to a life of slavery. Sethe, terrified of returning to Sweet Home and its vicious manager Schoolteacher, ran to the woodshed with her children to kill them, but only managed to kill her younger infant daughter. Sethe says that she was "trying to put my babies where they would be safe". Paul D leaves, telling her her love is "too thick" and chastising that "you've got two feet, not four." Sethe retorts that "thin love is no love", adamant that she did the right thing.
Sethe comes to believe that Beloved is the daughter she had killed, as "BELOVED" was all she could afford to have engraved on her tombstone. She is overjoyed, holding onto a hope that Halle and her sons will come back and they will all be a family together. Out of guilt, she begins to spend all of her time and money on Beloved to please her and try to explain her actions, and loses her job. Beloved becomes angry and demanding, throwing tantrums when she does not get her way. Beloved's presence consumes Sethe's life. She hardly eats, while Beloved grows bigger and bigger, eventually taking the form of a pregnant woman. Denver reveals her fear of Sethe, having known that she killed Beloved, but not having understood why, and that her brothers shared this fear and ran away due to it. Sethe and Beloved's voices merge until indistinguishable, and Denver observes that Sethe becomes more like a child, while Beloved seems more like the mother.
Denver reaches out to the Black community for help, from whom they had been isolated because of envy of Baby Suggs' privilege and horror at Sethe killing her two-year-old daughter. Local women come to the house to exorcise Beloved. At the same time, their White landlord, Mr. Bodwin, arrives to pick up Denver for her first night-shift as a companion in his house. Not knowing this, Sethe attacks him with an ice pick, thinking he was Schoolteacher coming back for her daughter. The village women and Denver hold her back and Beloved disappears.
Denver becomes a working member of the community, and Paul D returns to a bed-ridden Sethe, who, devastated at Beloved's disappearance, remorsefully tells him that Beloved was her "best thing". He replies that Sethe is her own "best thing", leaving her questioning, "Me? Me?" As time goes on, those who knew Beloved gradually forget her until all traces of her are gone.
Major themes
Mother-daughter relationships The maternal bonds between Sethe and her children inhibit her own individuation and prevent the development of her self. Sethe develops a dangerous maternal passion that results in killing one daughter, her own "best self." Her surviving daughter becomes estranged from the Black community. Both outcomes result from Sethe trying to salvage her "fantasy of the future," her children, from a life in slavery.
In Ohio, Sethe fails to recognize her daughter Denver's need for interaction with the Black community to enter into womanhood. At the end of the novel, Denver succeeds in establishing her own self and embarking on her individuation with the help of Beloved. Sethe only becomes individuated after Beloved's exorcism. Then, she is free to fully accept the first relationship that is completely "for her," her relationship with Paul D. This relationship relieves her from the self-destruction she was causing based on her maternal bonds with her children.
Beloved and Sethe are both emotionally impaired, which comes from Sethe having been enslaved. Under slavery, mothers lost their children, with devastating consequences for both. Baby Suggs dealt with this by refusing to become close with her children and remembering what she could of them, but Sethe tried to hold onto them and fight for them, to the point of killing them so they could be free. Sethe was traumatized by having had her milk stolen, unable to form the symbolic bond between herself and her daughter by feeding her.
Psychological effects of slavery Because of the suffering under slavery, most former slaves tried to repress these memories in an attempt to forget the past. This repression and dissociation from the past causes a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. Sethe, Paul D., and Denver all suffered a loss of self, which could only be remedied when they were able to reconcile their pasts and memories of earlier identities. Beloved serves to remind these characters of their repressed memories, eventually leading to the reintegration of their selves.
Slavery splits a person into a fragmented figure.Fulton, Lara Mary (1997). "An unblinking gaze: Readerly response-ability and racial reconstructions in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Beloved" (M.A. thesis). Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University The identity, consisting of painful memories and unspeakable past, denied and kept at bay, becomes a "self that is no self". To heal and humanize, one must constitute it in a language, reorganize the painful events, and retell the painful memories. As a result of suffering, the "self" becomes subject to a violent practice of making and unmaking, once acknowledged by an audience becomes real. Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs, who all fall short of such realization, are unable to remake themselves by trying to keep their pasts at bay. The "self" is located in a word, defined by others. The power lies in the audience, or more precisely, in the word—once the word changes, so does the identity. All of the characters in Beloved face the challenge of an unmade self, composed of their "rememories" and defined by perceptions and language. The barrier that keeps them from remaking of the self is the desire for an "uncomplicated past" and the fear that remembering will lead them to "a place they couldn't get back from".
Definition of manhood