In Exploring Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987): A Deep Dive into Its Themes and Characters,” we embark on an illuminating journey into one of the most profound works of American literature.
Morrison’s novel, a haunting exploration of the legacy of slavery, intricately weaves together the lives of its characters, each shaped by trauma, love, and the struggle for identity. Set against the backdrop of post-Civil War America, “Beloved” invites readers to confront the complexities of memory, motherhood, and the quest for freedom.
Through a rich tapestry of lyrical prose and vivid imagery, Morrison challenges us to reflect on the past’s enduring impact and the ways in which history shapes our understanding of self and community.
Introduction
After publishing four novels, the American author Toni Morrison had already established herself as one of the most popular and successful black female writers of her time.
With the publication of her fifth novel Beloved, however, critics worldwide recognized the depth and universality of her work. In this tale set in Reconstruction [the period of rebuilding after the American Civil War] Ohio, Morrison paints a dark and powerful portrait of the dehumanizing effects of slavery.
Inspired by real events, Beloved tells the story of a mother who in the past murdered her daughter to save her from slavery, and who is now haunted by her daughter’s spirit. Part ghost story, part realistic narrative, the novel examines the mental and physical trauma caused by slavery as well as the lingering damage inflicted on its survivors.
In a prose, both stark and lyrical, Morrison addresses several of her enduring themes: the importance of family and community, the quest for individual and cultural identity, and the very nature of humanity.
Although Beloved was critically acclaimed when it first appeared in 1987, the novel inspired considerable controversy several months after its publication.
When it failed to win either the National Book Award or the National Book Critics Circle Award, accusations of racism were levelled. Demonstrating their support for the author, 48 prominent black writers and critics signed a tribute to Morrison’s career and published it in the January 24, 1988, edition of the New York Times Book Review.
Beloved subsequently won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, and the secretary of the jury addressed the issue by stating that it “would be unfortunate if anyone diluted the value of Toni Morrison’s achievement by suggesting that her prize rested on anything but merit”. Despite the controversy, the novel has had few detractors, and Beloved remains one of the author’s most celebrated and analysed works.
As the critic John Leonard concluded in the Los Angeles Times Book Review, the novel “belongs on the highest shelf of American literature, even if half a dozen canonized white boys have to be elbowed off. …Without Beloved our imagination of the nation’s self has a hole in it big enough to die from.”
Ban on Beloved
In Tennessee and several other states, books like Toni Morrison’s Beloved are facing bans due to their content, which some authorities deem “se*xually explicit” or inappropriate for minors.
The recent decision by the Rutherford County Board of Education to remove six titles, including Beloved, highlights a broader trend of censorship driven by fears surrounding themes of race, racism, and complex human experiences.
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has criticized these actions, arguing that literature addressing the realities of race and history is essential for education and understanding. The growing number of book bans—spurred by vague legislation targeting materials considered “harmful to minors”—has resulted in a significant rise in censorship attempts, with books by and about marginalized voices disproportionately affected.
Beloved has faced significant censorship in U.S. schools, with at least eleven schools banning the novel during the 2021–2022 academic year.
Common reasons for these bans include themes of bestiality, infanticide, se*xual content, and violence. In 2007, after nearly completing the novel in an AP English class at Eastern High School in Kentucky, a complaint about language led to an abrupt ban ordered by the principal. Following pushback from the teacher, fellow educators, and alumni, the ban was eventually lifted.
In Virginia, Beloved was considered for removal from the Fairfax County reading list due to a 2017 complaint about graphic sexual violence. This prompted the proposed “Beloved Bill,” which aimed to require schools to notify parents of any sexually explicit content.
Although the bill was vetoed, it became a pivotal topic in the 2021 gubernatorial race.
In Texas, the student activist group Voters of Tomorrow planned to distribute banned books, including Beloved, which led to further reviews and restrictions on the book in the Katy Independent School District.
Parents and students voiced their opposition at school board meetings, and the ACLU of Texas subsequently argued that the book’s removal violated constitutional rights and district policies.
As the battle over educational content intensifies, the implications for students’ access to diverse perspectives and critical discussions about history become increasingly concerning.
Plot Summary of Beloved
A Part I
In Beloved, Toni Morrison chronicles the hardships Sethe and her family endure before, during, and after the American Civil War.
The novel opens with a description of the “spiteful” atmosphere of 124 Bluestone Road in rural Ohio in 1873, where Sethe, her daughter Denver, and a troublesome spirit live. They are soon joined by two others: Paul D, who knew Sethe from their years as slaves on the Kentucky plantation, Sweet Home, and a strange woman who calls herself Beloved.
All quickly become caught up in conflicts that have their roots in the past, which Morrison reveals to the reader in the fragmented flashbacks of Sethe’s memory.
Paul D Garner comes to Ohio looking for Sethe, who, while pregnant, had escaped Sweet Home 18 years previously after sending her baby girl and two sons on ahead to her mother-in-law’s house on Bluestone Road. He meets Denver, a teenage girl consumed with a loneliness that “wore her out” after her brothers ran off and her grandmother died. As they reminisce about the past, Sethe shows Paul her back covered with scars that resemble a tree with many branches.
After he responds sympathetically, the spirit begins to shake the house. When Paul smashes everything in the house, the spirit flees.
Paul decides to stay and share Sethe’s bed, which upsets Denver who wants all of her mother’s attention.
On their way home from a carnival, Sethe, Denver, and Paul find a sickly but well-dressed young woman named Beloved sitting near the steps of the house.
They take her in and nurse her back to health. Denver feels a special sympathy for and possessiveness of this young woman whose illness seems to have erased her memory.
As she recovers, Beloved hovers around Sethe “like a familiar”, her eyes displaying a “bottomless longing”. Soon, although he tries to resist, Paul secretly begins to have se*x with Beloved after she comes to him one night.
One day Sethe takes Denver and Beloved with her to the clearing in the woods, where Baby Suggs often preached and offered solace to black men, women, and children.
In the clearing, Sethe senses a strange connection between Beloved and her daughter, also named Beloved, who died soon after Denver’s birth.
Sethe has told Denver only part of the story of her birth and the surrounding events in order to shield her from the past. She tells Denver that when she ran away from Sweet Home, a white girl named Amy, also on the run, helped her when she was in labour. Then a black man named Stamp Paid helped her get to Baby Suggs’s home where she was reunited with her children.
When the schoolteacher, Sweet Home’s cruel overseer, found her there, Sethe chose jail rather than return to a life of slavery.
When Denver was seven, she suspected but refused to hear the complete truth about her dead sister and so encased herself in a silence “too solid for penetration” for the next two years.
Sethe had left out of the story the details about how Beloved died. Soon after Sethe arrived at Baby Suggs’s, she saw the schoolteacher arrive on horseback with the sheriff, one of the schoolteacher’s nephews (who had been especially cruel to her), and a slave catcher. Inside the shed at the back of the house, the men found Sethe and her children, whom she was in the act of killing so that they would not have to return to Sweet Home.
She succeeded in killing only one of them, Beloved, before Stamp Paid was able to stop her.
Sethe tells the full story to Paul—including the details of what she suffered under the control of the schoolteacher at Sweet Home—after Stamp Paid shows him a newspaper clipping about the event, which he calls “the Misery”. She tries to explain to Paul that her great love for her children prompted her need to kill them so that they would not have to suffer the horrors of slavery that she endured.
Yet her story shocks Paul who insists, “your love is too thick. …There could have been a way. Some other way. …You got two feet, Sethe, not four.” A distance immediately opens up between them, and Paul moves out.
Part II
Stamp feels “uneasy” ever since he told Paul about “the Misery”.
Since that time, Sethe and Denver have been ostracized from the black community, due partly to the infanticide, but also to Sethe’s proud refusal to ask for help. When Stamp tries to visit Sethe, he hears “loud, urgent voices, all speaking at once” coming from the house.
He determines that they are the voices of the suffering ghosts of blacks who have been killed by whites.
No one comes to the door when Stamp knocks. After Paul left Bluestone Road, certain incidents have prompted Sethe to conclude that Beloved was the reincarnation of the daughter she lost, which initially fills her with joy and a sense of peace. She decides to cut herself off from the outside world that Paul had introduced her to and then closed off, and focus instead on her daughters and her hope that her sons will return.
Stamp finds Paul living in the church basement and expresses regret that no one in the community offered him a place to stay.
He tries to explain that Sethe’s actions resulted from her love for her children and not from any mental imbalance. Paul admits, however, that he is afraid of her.
When, despondent over the situation, he implores, “How much is a nigger supposed to take?” Stamp responds, “All he can.” Paul then cries out, “Why?”
Part III
At first Sethe, Denver, and Beloved played together, happily cut off from the rest of the world, but “then the mood changed and the arguments began”.
Sethe and Beloved start to exclude Denver when both come to realize that Beloved is Sethe’s lost daughter. Their battles revolve around Beloved recounting the anguish she has experienced and Sethe pleading for forgiveness and telling of the suffering she has endured for her children.
Denver notes, however, that Sethe’s inability to leave the subject alone suggests that she “didn’t really want forgiveness given; she wanted it refused, and Beloved helped her out”. At this point, Denver’s concern shifts from Beloved‘s safety in her mother’s presence to Sethe’s as she confronts Beloved‘s anger. She is also anxious about the fact that since Sethe has been sacked from her job at a local restaurant, there has been no food on the table.
When Denver asks a woman in the neighbourhood for help, food starts appearing in the yard.
Denver decides she must find a job to help support her family and she is employed by Mr Bodwin, a white abolitionist who helped get Sethe released from jail. Word of the family’s distress reaches the entire black community and, as a result, one morning, 30 women congregate outside their home. There, the women begin to pray and sing in an effort to chase away the ghosts of the past.
In the midst of this congregation, Mr Bodwin arrives to pick up Denver for work.
When Sethe sees a white man arriving at her home, she experiences a flashback and confuses him with one of the four white men who came to return her to slavery. She tries to kill him with an ice pick. As the women, including Denver, wrestle the pick away from her, Beloved, who has been standing on the porch observing the scene, seems to disappear.
Soon after the incident, Paul returns to Bluestone Road.
Finding Sethe in a dazed state, he realizes she has given up on life as Baby Suggs had before she died. He tells her, “Me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow.”
When Sethe cries out that she has lost Beloved, her “best thing”, Paul tells her, “You your best thing”, as he holds her hand. The novel closes with Sethe questioning, “Me? Me?”
Characters
1. Stamp Paid
Stamp Paid was originally named Joshua, but he renamed himself after he “handed over his wife to his master’s son” and gave in to his wife’s demand that he stay alive and not take revenge.
“With that gift, he decided that he didn’t owe anybody anything.” This “debtlessness” does not satisfy him, however, and so he takes to helping runaways across the Ohio River, “helping them pay out and off whatever they owed in misery”.
He is witness to “the Misery” that occurs when the schoolteacher comes to take Sethe back into slavery and prevents her from killing Denver as well. He is concerned about “truth and forewarning”, and so he shows Paul D a newspaper clipping about Sethe’s arrest.
Stamp Paid has second thoughts about his actions after Paul D leaves Bluestone Road, however, and thinks that maybe he does owe the family something. When he returns to the house to try to set things straight with Sethe, he sees Beloved, and it is through Stamp Paid that the community comes to learn of Sethe’s trouble.
2. Beloved
There are several signs that seem to indicate that the mysterious stranger who suddenly turns up at 124 Bluestone Road is the spirit of Sethe’s daughter returned in the flesh.
She has “new skin, lineless and smooth”, is the same age Sethe’s daughter would have been had she lived, and her name is “Beloved”, the same word carved on the baby’s gravestone. She has little memory of where she has been or why she is here, but somehow knows to ask Sethe, “where your diamonds?” and, “your woman she never fix up your hair?”
Sethe responds by telling the girl stories that were too painful to recall to anyone else. Beloved devours the stories and cannot take her eyes off Sethe. She also has an “anger that ruled when Sethe did or thought anything that excluded herself”.
She drives away the suspicious Paul D by seducing him, and leads Sethe to eliminate Denver from their games.
The way in which she begins to punish Sethe for leaving her suggests that the ghost is finally taking revenge for her murder, while her sudden disappearance from the house seems supernatural.
Is Beloved really a ghost, however, or is her acceptance in the house a case of mistaken identity? There are hints that she is actually an escapee from a slave ship, where she lost her mother. She tells Denver of where she was before: a dark place with “nothing to breathe down there and no room to move in” until she came up to “the bridge”.
Denver interprets this as a picture of the underworld, but it could easily be the hold of a slave ship. Beloved’s stream of consciousness chapter—telling of a place with little water or daylight and a “little hill of dead people“—also seems to describe the suffering of a slave hold during the Atlantic passage.
The critic Deborah Horvitz offers another interpretation of Beloved’s character in Studies in American Fiction: “She represents the spirit of all the women dragged onto slave ships in Africa and also all Black women in America trying to trace their ancestry back to the mother on the ship attached to them”.
Thus Beloved’s descriptions of the ship’s passage reflect the experiences of Sethe’s own mother; her search for “the woman with my face” mirrors Sethe’s loss of her own mother; and Beloved’s abandonment by her mother, who “goes into the water”, resembles the desertion suffered by Sethe’s dead daughter.
“As the embodiment of Sethe’s memories,” the critic concludes, “the ghost Beloved enabled her to remember and tell the story of her past, and in so doing shows that between women words used to make and share a story have the power to heal.”
3. Edward Bodwin
Edward Bodwin is one of the abolitionist siblings who assist Baby Suggs when she first arrives in Cincinnati. “He’s somebody never turned us down”, Stamp Paid says, and it is primarily Bodwin’s efforts that save Sethe from the gallows after she murders her daughter.
He also helps Sethe find a job after she is released from prison.
Bodwin’s most distinguishing features are his snow-white hair and his dark velvety moustache, a combination of black and white that leads his enemies to call him a “bleached nigger”. Even when Sethe comes at him with an ice pick, Bodwin chooses not to interpret her actions as a personal attack and continues to aid the family by giving Denver a job in his home.
4.. Miss Bodwin
Miss Bodwin is one of the abolitionist siblings who provide Baby Suggs with a house and a job after she is freed from Sweet Home. She is described as “the whitewoman who loved [Baby Suggs]”, and her kindness extends to Sethe and her daughter after Baby Suggs’s death.
5. Buglar
Sethe’s second son finally leaves home, presumably to fight in the Civil War, after a mirror shatters simply from him looking at it.
Denver remembers fondly how he and Howard would make up “die-witch!” stories. One of the few things Sethe tries to remember is the way her son looked—not the fact that he would not let her near him after his sister’s death, or how he always slept hand-in-hand with his brother after that day.
6. Paul D
“For a man with an immobile face,” Sethe thinks of Paul D, “it was amazing how ready it was to smile, or blaze or be sorry with you.” Perhaps it is this ability to “produce the feeling you were feeling” that makes him “the kind of man who could walk into a house and make the women cry”.
However, the cruelty of slavery has left Paul D with a “tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be.
Its lid rusted shut.” He is the only man left from Sweet Home; his brothers Paul F and Paul A were sold away or hung, while Sixo was burned and Halle was broken. Paul D is sold from Sweet Home and put into a Georgia prison after trying to kill his new master. He is kept in a hole in the ground and put to work on a chain gang.
A hard rain that turns their cells to mud also allows the gang to escape. A tribe of sick Cherokee frees him from his chains and points the way North.
Since then Paul D has wandered around, thinking he could not stay in any one place for more than a couple of months.
Seeing Sethe, however, “the closed portion of his head opened like a greased lock”, and he tells her, “We can make a life, girl.” The way he makes people respond to him at the carnival starts to convince even Denver that this might be true.
Beloved’s arrival changes things, however. The girl seduces Paul, and his inability to resist her leads him to doubt his manhood. When Sethe explains the newspaper clipping to him, Paul D condemns her, moving quickly “from his shame to hers”.
He leaves the house, but his rusted tin has sprung open, making him wonder for the first time “what-all went wrong”. Paul D returns to Sethe after Beloved leaves—but not because of it: “Paul D doesn’t care how It went or even why. He cares about how he left and why.” Their shared history makes it more bearable, and he realizes, “only this woman Sethe could have left him his manhood like that. He wants to put his story next to hers.”
7. Denver
Isolated in the house with her mother Sethe, lonely Denver’s only companions are from the past: memories of her brothers, her imaginings of her father, her mother’s stories of Denver’s birth, and the baby ghost that haunts the house.
The reader is allowed hints of the kind of bright, happy child Denver might have been had Sethe not isolated the family from the community.
However, Denver “had taught herself pride in the condemnation Negroes heaped upon them”, and is also proud of her secret knowledge about the ghost. Another way she deals with her isolation is by creating an emerald play world in a section of boxwood bushes. There her imagination “produced its own hunger and its own food, which she badly needed because loneliness wore her out”. The only story Denver wants to hear is the one of her birth; she “hated the stories her mother told that did not concern herself. …The rest was a gleaming, powerful world made more so by Denver’s absence from it.”
Thus she feels threatened by Paul D’s arrival, and sobs out her loneliness for the first time in ten years.
The idea that he and her mother might form a “twosome” that would make Sethe “look away from her own daughter’s body” is too much to bear. The next day, when the three of them see their shadows holding hands, Sethe thinks it means that the three of them might form a family.
However, Paul D recognizes that Denver has “something she’s expecting and it ain’t me”.
When Beloved appears, it seems to Denver as if this is what she has been waiting for: her sister returned to her in the flesh.
Although she loves her mother—the only person left who has not abandoned her—she has uneasy memories about “the thing in Sethe” that could make her harm her children.
She begins to transfer her affection to Beloved, whom she thinks needs her protection.
Thus when Sethe nearly chokes in the clearing, “Denver was alarmed by the harm she thought Beloved planned for Sethe, but felt helpless to thwart it, so unrestricted was her need to love another.” Nevertheless, it soon becomes evident to Denver that Beloved may be more of a danger than Sethe is. “Frightened as she was by the thing in Sethe that could come out, it shamed her to see her mother serving a girl not much older than herself.” She fears losing her mother—being abandoned yet again—and takes steps to support the family that finally result in Sethe returning to the community.
Denver provides another example of how the rupture of families caused by slavery forces people to survive without familial or community support.
As Judith Thurman observes in The New Yorker, Sethe never truly finished delivering Denver, so the girl “will be forced to complete the labour by herself”.
8. Amy Denver
Amy Denver is the “whitegirl” who helps Sethe through childbirth shortly after her escape from Sweet Home.
Although she is white, she is “trash”, and her situation is not so different from many slaves.
She is escaping beatings and indentured servitude—paying off the debt her mother incurred coming to America. Amy is on her way to Boston in single-minded pursuit of “carmine velvet” when she finds Sethe lying on the wrong side of the Ohio River. Her “fugitive eyes and her tenderhearted mouth” lead Sethe to trust her, and with Amy’s encouragement she gets up and crosses over the river to freedom.
Amy’s “good hands” help bring Sethe’s baby into the world, and Sethe names the girl Denver in her memory.
9. Ella
Ella is a practical woman who had “been beaten every way but down”. Ella and her husband John are part of the Underground Railroad, picking up fugitives after Stamp Paid ferries them across the river.
She is friendly with Sethe until the attempt on the children, because “she understood Sethe’s rages in the shed twenty years ago, but not her reaction to it”. Ella’s disapproval of Sethe’s proud isolation leads her to ignore Paul D’s need for shelter, when she would usually offer to help any black man in need.
However, when news comes that Sethe’s dead daughter is beating her, “it was Ella more than anyone who convinced the others that rescue was in order”.
10. Mrs Lillian Garner
Although Mrs Garner and her husband seem fairly benevolent owners, their attitudes betray how slavery dehumanizes its victims, no matter how kindly the slaves are treated.
When Sethe and Halle decide to get married, and Sethe asks Mrs Garner if there will be a wedding, the woman laughs and pats Sethe on the head as if she were a pet. She calls Baby Suggs “Jenny”, assuming that the name on the slave papers is what she calls herself.
After her husband’s death, Mrs Garner brings in her schoolteacher brother-in-law to run the farm—not because they need the help, but because she does not want to be the only white person there.
She becomes ill with a tumour in her throat, and is thus too weak to intervene when the schoolteacher’s methods become too severe.
11. Mr Garner
Mr Garner allows his slaves more privileges than most owners do: they are encouraged to think for themselves, suggest and implement improvements to the farm, and even handle guns.
He claims he has the only “nigger men” in Kentucky and is proud because it shows he is “tough enough and smart enough to make and call his own niggers men”. When he delivers Baby Suggs to the Baldwins, having allowed her son Halle to purchase her freedom, he brags that she never went hungry or received a beating under his care.
However, his kindness cannot disguise the inherent evil of slavery. As Baby Suggs thinks, “You got my boy and I’m all broke down. You be renting him out to pay for me way after I’m gone to Glory.”
Garner dies of a stroke, which Sixo says was caused by a jealous neighbour.
12. Howard
Sethe’s oldest child leaves home, presumably to fight in the Civil War.
Denver remembers fondly how Howard and his brother would make up “die-witch!” stories and let her have the whole top of the bed. Howard “had a head shape nobody could forget”, and it is one of the few things Sethe can remember about him: otherwise, she might recall how he never let her touch him after his sister’s death, or how he always slept hand-in-hand with his brother after that day.
13. Lady Jones
Lady Jones is a light-skinned black woman with “grey eyes and yellow woolly hair” that make her the focus of envy and hatred within the black community.
She has received privileges because of her light skin, including being picked to receive schooling in Pennsylvania, “and she paid it back by teaching the unpicked”. Denver is one of the unpicked, and she attends Lady Jones’s school until a fellow student reminds her of her family’s shame.
Thus it is Lady Jones whom Denver turns to for help feeding the family, and it is Lady Jones’s kind “Oh, baby” that “inaugurated [Denver’s] life in the world as a woman”.
14. Nelson Lord
Nelson Lord is in Denver’s class with Lady Jones. He is “a boy as smart as she was”, but it is his question about her family history that leads her to leave school and begin a period of silence.
When Denver takes steps to save the family, however, it is Nelson’s words that open her mind to the idea of having a self to preserve. At the end of the novel, it is implied that he is courting Denver.
15. Schoolteacher
The schoolteacher is the husband of Mr Garner’s sister, and perhaps provides the best example of the dehumanizing effects of slavery.
The schoolteacher comes to oversee Sweet Home after Mr Garner’s death. He sees it as an opportunity to study the slaves, whom he considers to be no different from animals.
Sethe says that she thinks it was the schoolteacher’s questions “that tore Sixo up …for all time”, and his listing of her “animal characteristics” strengthens her resolve to resist capture: “No one, nobody on this earth, would list her daughter’s characteristics on the animal side of the paper”, Sethe says, explaining her actions to Beloved.
The schoolteacher teaches his nephews that the slaves are like animals, but he fails to prevent them from “mishandling” them and so there is “nothing there to claim” when they discover Sethe and her children in Cincinnati.
16. Sethe
Sethe has “iron eyes and a backbone to match”.
Slavery, however, has “punched the glittering iron out of Sethe’s eyes, leaving two open wells” that reflect the emptiness in her soul.
She has spent all of her efforts “not on avoiding pain but on getting through it as quickly as possible”.
She avoids planning anything, because “the one set of plans she made—getting away from Sweet Home—went awry so completely she never dared life by making more”. So instead of counting on family or community to aid her, Sethe creates a small, insulated world in which her only goals are to escape her memories of the past and protect the one child she has left.
By herself, she can face anything: she is “the one who never looked away”, who can watch a man get stamped to death or repair a pet dog with a dislocated eye and two broken legs.
Paul D’s arrival changes things for Sethe, adding “something she wanted to count on but was scared to”. His stories also give Sethe “new pictures and old rememories that broke her heart”.
Even so, she eventually decides that she wants him to stay because he makes her story “bearable because it was his as well”.
When Paul D discovers the truth behind her escape from the schoolteacher, however, he moves out.
Sethe “despised herself for having been so trusting”, but soon forgets this trouble when she determines that Beloved is really the ghost of her dead baby daughter. She can forget everything, now, Sethe thinks: “I don’t have to remember nothing. I don’t even have to explain. She understands it all.” Sethe devotes herself to Beloved, cutting Denver out of their games, and subjecting herself to the girl’s whims.
When Denver tells Janey Wagon about their problems, Janey thinks, “Sethe had lost her wits, finally, as Janey knew she would—trying to do it all alone with her nose in the air.”
Insanity or fear of yet again losing her “best thing” causes Sethe to attack Mr Bodwin. In the aftermath, with Beloved gone and Denver growing up, Sethe seems to have given up. She retreats to Baby Suggs’s bed to rest.
However, Paul D recognizes, even if she doesn’t, “you your best thing, Sethe”, and promises her that together they can build “some kind of tomorrow”.
17. Sixo
One of the Sweet Home men, Sixo is “indigo with a flame-red tongue”.
His dark colour, his night-time dancing, his folk knowledge, and his “knowing tales” indicate that he is probably a first-generation slave brought over from Africa.
He maintains a relationship with Patsy the “Thirty-Mile Woman” despite the distance and difficulties that keep them apart. After the schoolteacher arrives, his questions “[tear] Sixo up” and Sixo stops speaking English because there “was no future in it”. Sixo is captured shortly after the group escape attempt, and his wild singing convinces the schoolteacher, “this one will never be suitable”.
They tie him to a tree and light a fire at his feet, but have to shoot him to stop his laughter and singing. Sixo laughs because he has beaten the white men by fathering a child with the Thirty-Mile Woman (“Seven-O!”) and his song is a “hatred so loose it was juba”.
18. Baby Suggs
Baby Suggs’s life serves as an illustration of how slavery separates families: “Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone loved, who hadn’t run off or been hanged, got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen or seized.”
Although her sale document says that her name is “Jenny Whitlow”, she claims the name “Baby Suggs”, given to her by a “husband” who escaped and left her when he had the chance.
Halle is the only one of her eight children whom she sees grow to adulthood, and this leads her to say: “A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son? Well now, that’s somebody.” After Halle buys her freedom, Baby Suggs turns the house on Bluestone Road into a place where friends and strangers can meet, refresh themselves, and talk.
She also preaches in a nearby field, “offering up to [people] her great big heart”. When Sethe attempts to murder her grandchildren rather than see them returned into slavery, Baby Suggs “could not approve or condemn Sethe’s rough choice.
One or the other might have saved her, but beaten up by the claims of both, she went to bed.” She remains in bed, contemplating the harmlessness of colours, until she dies, her great heart finally giving up.
19. Halle Suggs
Halle is the youngest of Baby Suggs’s eight children, and the only one whom she has been able to see grow to adulthood.
He rented himself out on Sundays to buy his mother’s freedom, and Paul D believes that strong love is why Sethe chose Halle out of all the Sweet Home men.
Sethe similarly remembers a tender care that “suggested a family relationship rather than a man’s laying claim”. Halle does not appear when it is time to escape from Sweet Home, however, and Sethe thinks he is dead—better that than believe he abandoned her and their children. Paul D reveals that he saw Halle alive, however, but empty-eyed and with butter smeared on his face. He works out that the final straw for Halle must have been witnessing the attack on Sethe that deprived her of her breast milk.
Baby Suggs claims that she felt Halle die—in 1855, on the same day that Denver was born.
20. Janey Wagon
Janey Wagon has worked at the Bodwins’s since she was 14, and helps Denver find a job when she comes asking for help.
It is interesting to note the change in Janey’s attitude over her years with the Bodwins. When Baby Suggs first visits, young Janey tells her to “eat all you want; it’s ours”, implying that she feels she is part of the household.
Her attitude is a little different some 20 years on, however. Although she says of her employers that she “wouldn’t trade them for another pair”, she is concerned that the Bodwins want “all my days and nights too”, not recognizing that she is her own person, with a life separate from their house.
Themes
1. Race and Racism
“You got two feet, not four”, Paul D tells Sethe when she reveals her secret to him, and the dehumanizing effect of slavery is a primary theme of Beloved.
According to the schoolteacher, slaves are just another type of animal. Not only does he list their “animal characteristics”, he considers them “creatures” to be “handled”, similar to dogs or cattle. In some ways, they are not even worth as much as animals.
“Unlike a snake or a bear,” he thinks while pursuing the runaways, “a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin.” Treated no better—and sometimes worse—than animals, the slaves question what it is to be human.
While Mr Garner was alive, for instance, Paul D truly believed that he was a man. However, after the schoolteacher arrives, he learns a different lesson: “They were trespassers among the human race.” There is another side to the dehumanizing effects of slavery, however: just as it turns slaves into animals, it turns owners into monsters.
As Baby Suggs thinks of white people, “they could prowl at will, change from one mind to another, and even when they thought they were behaving, it was a far cry from what real humans did”.
Stamp Paid understands this effect as well: “The more colouredpeople spent their strength trying to convince [whites] how gentle they were, how clever and loving, how human, …the deeper and more tangled the jungle grew inside. But it wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them,” Stamp Paid thinks, but “the jungle whitefolks planted in them.
And it grew. It spread …until it invaded the whites who had made it. Touched them every one.
Changed and altered them. Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the jungle they had made.”
2. Freedom
For people treated no better than animals, freedom can be a difficult concept to grasp.
When Halle buys his mother’s freedom, for instance, Baby Suggs thinks that he “gave her freedom when it didn’t mean a thing”.
When she steps across the Ohio River, however, “she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn’t; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew there was nothing like it in this world”. While under the schoolteacher’s control, Paul D sees Mister, the cock, and thinks, “Mister, he looked so …free. Better than me.”
The reason for this, Paul D explains, is that “Mister was allowed to be and stay what he was. But I wasn’t allowed to be and stay what I was.” Once he has escaped from prison and earned his first money, Paul D decides that “to eat, walk and sleep anywhere was life as good as it got”. Freedom is more than this, however, as Sethe has discovered.
While waiting for Halle to turn up, Sethe had to learn to become her own woman. “Freeing yourself was one thing,” she thinks, “claiming ownership of that freed self was another.”
This can be a difficult task, especially if one is tormented by painful memories of slavery. In the end, Paul D comes to agree with Sethe about the nature of freedom: “A place where you could love anything you chose—not to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom.”
3. Motherhood
One of the cruellest effects of slavery is how it severs bonds of love, particularly those between mother and child.
Sethe still feels the pain of separation from her mother, while Baby Suggs has lost all but one of her eight children.
One reaction to this loss of love is to deny it; as Ella says, “If anybody was to ask me I’d say ‘Don’t love nothing.’” After having her first three children sold away and a fourth fathered by the man who sold them, Baby Suggs “could not love [that child] and the rest she would not”.
Sethe similarly understands that she could not love her children “proper” at Sweet Home “because they wasn’t mine to love”. Paul D also knows mother love is risky: “For a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.” When he nevertheless suggests to Sethe that they should have a baby together, Sethe thinks, “Lord, deliver me. Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer.”
This comment is terribly ironic coming from a woman who murdered her child for such a love.
Despite the pain mother love can bring to a woman, the maternal impulse is often too powerful to deny.
As Baby Suggs says, “A man ain’t nothing but a man. But a son? Well now, that’s somebody.” Sethe similarly thinks her children are “her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—that part of her that was clean”.
A mother’s love has no time limits, either, as Sethe tells Paul D: “Grown don’t mean nothing to a mother…. I’ll protect [Denver] while I’m live and I’ll protect her when I ain’t.” It is this need to care for her children that drives Sethe on to Ohio despite her pain. When telling Paul D about the beating she received before escaping, she keeps repeating, “they took my milk!”—emphasizing how important it was to her to save her milk for her baby.
Unfortunately, Sethe’s experiences with slavery have confused her maternal protective impulses. “To keep them away from what I know is terrible”, Sethe attempts to murder her own children.
This love may be “too thick”, as Paul D says, but motherless Sethe never had a chance to learn the difference: “Love is or it ain’t,” she replies. “Thin love ain’t love at all.”
4. Memory and Reminiscence
The physical wounds of slavery heal quickly compared to the mental and emotional scars suffered by its victims.
Throughout Beloved, characters struggle with their memories, trying to recall the good things without remembering the bad. Paul D has “shut down a generous portion of his head” so that he will not “dwell on Halle’s face and Sixo laughing”.
Of her first seven children, Baby Suggs can only remember that the oldest liked the burned bottom of the bread. “That’s all you let yourself remember,” Sethe says, and for her, “the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay”.
For Sethe, “rememories” are so powerful that they exist for her as physical objects: “if you go there and stand in the place where it was, it will happen again”, she tells Denver. In contrast, Ella seems to have a healthy attitude towards the past: “The past [was] something to leave behind. And if it didn’t stay behind, well, you might have to stomp it out.”
However, Sethe has a “rebellious brain” that does not allow her to forget: “there is still more that Paul D could tell me and my brain would go right ahead and take it and never say, No thank you. I don’t want to know or have to remember that.”
Beloved seems to have “disremembered” almost all of her past, and when Sethe comes to believe the girl is her lost daughter she “was excited to giddiness by the things she no longer had to remember”.
Her words seem to imply that Sethe tortures herself with memories as a sort of punishment. Now that her daughter is returned, however, “I don’t have to remember nothing. I don’t even have to explain. She understands it all.” The conclusion of the novel seems to imply that finally putting the past behind her will enable Sethe to survive. “We got more yesterday than anybody,” Paul D tells Sethe, “We need some kind of tomorrow.” “Remembering seemed unwise”, the narrator similarly notes, and so Beloved is “disremembered”—deliberately forgotten: “This is not a story to pass on.”
5. Creativity and Imagination
Despite the statement that “this is not a story to pass on”, stories and the imagination play an important role in the novel.
Denver’s imagination is her only weapon against loneliness and it “produced its own hunger and its own food”. Sethe’s “deprivation had been not having any dreams of her own at all”.
Her brain has been “loaded with the past and [is] hungry for more”, leaving her “no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day”. For Beloved, listening to Sethe’s stories “became a way to feed her”, and the “profound satisfaction Beloved got from storytelling” allows Sethe to share things that had been too painful to speak about before.
When the lonely Denver tells stories to Beloved, she gives her subjects “more life than life had”. Denver uses these stories to keep Beloved with her, trying to “construct out of the strings she had heard all her life a net to hold Beloved”.
Stories have the effect of bringing listener and teller together, for in the telling “the monologue became, in fact, a duet”. It is this kind of sharing that allows Sethe to begin to heal, and eventually brings her to the brink of a new life with Paul D.
Planning to make “some kind of tomorrow” with Sethe, Paul D “wants to put his story next to hers”.
Literary Style
1. Narration and Point of View
For the most part, Beloved employs an omniscient, third-person narrator.
This third-person narration remains fairly constant throughout the novel, but the point of view from which the story is told changes from section to section.
In the first chapter alone, for instance, the point of view switches from Baby Suggs (“Baby Suggs didn’t even raise her head”) to Sethe (“Counting on the stillness of her soul she had forgotten the other one”) to Paul D (“He looked at her closely, then”) to Denver (“Again she wished for the baby ghost”). This changing perspective is important to the novel for several reasons.
Firstly, by including the thoughts and memories of several different characters, the narrator enables the reader to witness the various ways in which slavery violates its victims.
Secondly, the changing point of view allows the reader to gain a fuller portrait of each character than if the focus was on a single person.
These portraits are made even more intense when Morrison changes the narrative style. In the middle of Part II, the narration switches from the third person to the first in four consecutive sections that are told directly by the characters. In these sections, Sethe, Denver, and Beloved contemplate how Beloved‘s arrival has changed their lives.
By adding these first-person sections late in the novel, the author enhances the portrait of these characters even further.
2. Flashback
A flashback is a literary device used to present action that occurred before the beginning of the story.
In Beloved, the narrator structures the story in such a way that past events are related as a way of explaining the present.
In the first paragraph, for instance, the narrator says that “by 1873, Sethe and her daughter were [the ghost’s] only victims”.
This sets the main action in 1873, but the paragraphs that follow explain how Baby Suggs and the two boys escaped from the ghost prior to that date. Flashbacks are also presented as the memories or stories of several of the characters. When Paul D first sees Sethe, for instance, he begins to recall how the men of Sweet Home reacted to her arrival over 20 years before.
As Paul D and Sethe spend time with each other, they remember moments of their previous time together and tell stories of what has happened to them since their time at Sweet Home.
There are more direct flashbacks in the narrative as well, when past events are related directly, without present-day comment from the person telling or remembering the tale. Examples of this direct style of flashback occur when Beloved first hears the story of Denver’s birth and when Paul D recalls how the Plan went wrong. Deborah Horvitz notes in Studies in American Fiction that the flashbacks in the novel reflect one of its most important themes, as they “succeed in bridging the shattered generations by repeating meaningful and multi-layered images.
That is, contained in the narrative strategy of the novel itself are both the wrenching, inter-generational separations and the healing process.”
3. Idiom
Idiom refers to a word construction or verbal expression that is closely associated with a given language or dialect.
In Beloved, Morrison makes use of idiom to help recreate the sense of a specific community, that of African Americans in Reconstruction Ohio.
When the characters use words like “ain’t” and “reckon” and phrases like “sit down a spell”, it helps to place their characters within that community. One particularly interesting example of this idiom is the way in which it describes people of different races. In compound words such as “whitegirl”, “blackman”, and “colouredpeople”, a person’s race is part of the word that describes them.
This seems to indicate that there is a fundamental difference between blacks and whites, for if the only difference between them were colour one would say “black woman” and “white woman”.
Instead, the compound words seem to indicate that blacks and whites are entirely different creatures.
These words thus reinforce one of the themes of the novel: the way in which slavery dehumanizes all people, both black and white.
4. Motif
A motif (sometimes called a motive or leitmotiv) is a theme, character type, image, metaphor, or other verbal element that is repeated throughout a piece of work.
Throughout Beloved, there is one such motif that is repeated with regularity: the description of the characters’ eyes and how they see. “The eyes are windows to the soul,” goes the common saying, and the eyes of the novel’s characters are likewise revealing.
Sethe, for instance, has had the “glittering iron” punched out of her eyes, “leaving two open wells that did not reflect firelight”. When the schoolteacher catches up with Sethe, her eyes are so black she “looks blind”, and after too much conflict with Beloved her eyes turn “bright but dead, alert but vacant”.
Similarly, the disturbing thing about Beloved’s eyes is not that the “whites of them were much too white” but that “deep down in those big black eyes there was no expression at all”. When Paul D recalls his time on the chain gang in Georgia, he remembers that “the eyes had to tell what there was to tell” about what the men were feeling.
When the schoolteacher comes upon the scene in the shed, he decides to turn back for home without claiming any of the survivors because he has had “enough nigger eyes for now”.
The way people use their eyes is also important.
Denver thinks of her mother as one “who never looked away”, not even from pain or death. Paul D thinks he is safe from Beloved’s advances “as long as his eyes were locked on the silver of the lard can”.
Denver thinks it is “lovely” the way that she is “pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes” of Beloved. Shortly after Beloved asks Sethe, “you finished with your eyes?” Sethe realizes that Beloved is the ghost of her baby daughter. “Now,” she thinks, “I can look at things again because she’s here to see them too.”
However, as Beloved drains the energy from Sethe, “the brighter Beloved’s eyes, the more those eyes that used never to look away became slits of sleeplessness”. When Paul D wants to return to Sethe, he considers how he looks through other people’s eyes: “When he looks at himself through Garner’s eyes, he sees one thing. Through Sixo’s, another. One makes him feel righteous. One makes him feel ashamed.”
Finally, however, he considers how he looks through Sethe’s eyes. After he does this, he returns to the only woman who “could have left him his manhood like that”.
5. Imagery
Critics frequently describe Morrison’s writing as “lyrical” or “poetic” because of her use of vivid, powerful imagery.
One such image is that of the “chokecherry tree” on Sethe’s back. Instead of having the narrator give a simple description of the oozing wounds on Sethe’s back, Amy Denver describes them as a chokecherry tree, complete with sap, branches, leaves, and blossoms.
The picture this comparison draws in the reader’s mind is much more disturbing than any straightforward description would be.
Historical And Social Context
1. The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
One of the central events of the novel—Sethe’s attack on her children—is described as “her rough response to the Fugitive Bill”.
Prior to 1850, United States law permitted slave owners to attempt to recover escaped slaves, but state authorities were under no obligation to assist them. Many Northerners aided and protected fugitive slaves as part of the fight against slavery.
Escaped slaves who settled in free states were therefore relatively safe from capture, since their abolitionist communities rarely cooperated with slave owners. This sense of safety was jeopardized by the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850.
As the United States expanded its borders, slavery was a continuing source of controversy. The addition of territory acquired in the Mexican-American War of 1846-1848 sparked a heated debate over the status of slavery in these new lands.
When the Pennsylvania representative David Wilmot proposed that “neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part” of the territory acquired from Mexico, Southern states strongly objected.
The Wilmot Proviso was defeated, and Kentucky congressman Henry Clay brokered a new deal. The resulting Compromise of 1850 was a series of bills designed to satisfy both North and South. As well as admitting California as a free state and allowing Utah and New Mexico to decide the slavery issue for themselves, the Compromise of 1850 enacted a much stricter fugitive slave law.
Under this law, fugitive slaves were denied a jury trial, and faced a court-appointed commissioner instead. This commissioner received $10 for certifying delivery of an alleged slave, but only $5 when he refused it.
Not only did federal officials take part in the capture and return of fugitives, but they could compel citizens to help enforce the law—and jail or fine them if they refused.
Anti-slavery forces were outraged by this new law and often took matters into their own hands to combat it. In cities such as Boston, Detroit, Milwaukee, Syracuse, New York, and Christiana, Pennsylvania, mobs rescued alleged fugitives from their captors and in some cases even killed slave owners.
Less confrontational forms of protest increased as well, as the new law inspired an increase in organized assistance to slaves, such as with the Underground Railroad. In 1850-1852, Harriet Beecher Stowe was inspired by the Fugitive Slave Law to write her classic anti-slavery novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin.
Despite these very visible activities in protest against the law, most Northerners complied with it. Of an estimated two hundred African Americans arrested during its enforcement, only 20 were released or rescued; the remainder were returned to slavery.
2. The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan
Even after the abolition of slavery ended the threat of being returned to servitude, African Americans still found their rights and even lives in danger. Many white Southerners found the Reconstruction Act of 1867—the Republican government’s plan for returning the South to the Union—difficult to accept.
The act replaced the mostly all-white state governments created after the war with five military districts.
Each district had 20,000 troops, commanded by a Union general. Southern states were forced to grant new rights to African Americans, and more than a dozen black congressmen and two senators were elected. In response to what they perceived as Republican oppression, white Southerners formed a secret society whose aim was to intimidate these unwanted administrators.
The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) grew from a social club into a terrorist organization that used arson, beatings, and even murder to achieve its ends, which is also mentioned by Margeret Mitchel in her novel Gone With The Wind.
Klan activity stepped up after the 15th Amendment, guaranteeing all men the right to vote, was passed in 1870.
Not only did this amendment ensure the voting rights of Southern blacks, it expanded the right to vote to African Americans in Northern states. Klan activity also increased, as its violence spread to northern states. In Beloved, Paul D considers Cincinnati “infected by the Klan”, which he calls “desperately thirsty for black blood”.
The KKK terrorized African Americans to keep them from voting, often with great success. Many African Americans were murdered, and their killers had little fear of prosecution. To combat this violence, Congress passed the Ku Klux Act in 1871, which strengthened the penalties for interfering with elections. This led to almost three thousand indictments that year, and the 1872 elections were relatively peaceful.
Nevertheless, the Klan had demonstrated their strength, and after the last federal troops left the South in 1877, white supremacists were free to establish a deeply segregated society that openly oppressed African Americans until the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
3. Toni Morrison and the Post-Aesthetic Movement
Mirroring their increased presence in politics, African Americans also became highly visible as writers during the 1960s.
Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston had been prominent in the 1920s, while Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison achieved both literary and popular acclaim in the 1940s and 1950s.
Many of these works were popular because of the way in which they were able to interpret the black experience for a white audience. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, writers within the “Black Aesthetic Movement” attempted to produce works that would be meaningful to the black masses. Writers such as Amiri Baraka, Haki R. Madhubuti, and Sonia Sanchez highlighted the disparity between blacks and whites and affirmed the value of African American culture, thus creating a sense of pride and identity in the black community.
In the late 1970s and 1980s, however, many African American writers chose a slightly different approach. Instead of focusing on the differences between blacks and whites in America—and thus placing themselves within or against a white social context—these “Post-Aesthetic” writers used a wholly African American context for their work.
Rather than looking to the outside world for solutions or validation, the African Americans in these works found answers within their own families or communities. Toni Morrison is considered one of the most prominent writers within this Post-Aesthetic movement, which includes such authors as Alice Walker, Kristin Hunter, and John Edgar Wideman.
By emphasizing the importance of family and community in dealing with life’s challenges, Morrison’s Beloved provides a notable example of this literary movement.
10 Valuable Takeaways from Beloved
- The Impact of Trauma: The novel explores how past traumas, especially those related to slavery, can haunt individuals and communities, affecting their present and future.
- The Complexity of Motherhood: Morrison presents various facets of motherhood, emphasizing the deep emotional bonds and sacrifices that come with it, even in the face of unimaginable circumstances.
- The Nature of Memory: The narrative reveals how memories shape identity and influence behaviour, highlighting the importance of confronting rather than repressing the past.
- The Legacy of Slavery: The book provides insight into the historical and psychological scars left by slavery, emphasizing that its effects are not confined to the past.
- Community and Isolation: Morrison illustrates the importance of community support in overcoming hardship, contrasting it with the isolating effects of trauma and guilt.
- The Power of Storytelling: The novel underscores the significance of oral histories and storytelling as a means of preserving culture, identity, and collective memory.
- Resistance and Resilience: Through the characters’ struggles, readers learn about the resilience of the human spirit and the power of resistance against oppressive forces.
- The Intersection of Race and Gender: Morrison highlights the unique challenges faced by Black women, showing how race and gender intersect to create distinct experiences of oppression and strength.
- Redemption and Forgiveness: The story explores themes of redemption, emphasizing the possibility of healing through forgiveness—both of oneself and others.
- The Complexity of Freedom: The novel challenges conventional notions of freedom, illustrating that liberation from physical bondage does not equate to emotional or psychological freedom.
These lessons make Beloved a profound exploration of human experience, encouraging readers to reflect deeply on history, identity, and healing.
Adaptation
The 1998 film adaptation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, directed by Jonathan Demme, sought to bring the haunting narrative of the novel to the screen with a focus on its emotional depth and historical context.
Starring Oprah Winfrey, who also acted in The Color Purple as Sofia, as Sethe, the film captures the harrowing journey of a formerly enslaved woman grappling with the traumatic memories of her past and the ghost of her deceased daughter. The adaptation is noted for its ambitious attempt to translate the complex themes of memory, trauma, and motherhood that permeate the novel, while also emphasizing the visceral impact of slavery on individual lives.
Despite its artistic intentions, the film received mixed reviews from critics and audiences.
While some praised Winfrey’s powerful performance and the film’s visual storytelling, others felt that it struggled to fully convey the intricate layers of Morrison’s prose. The adaptation faced challenges in translating the novel’s nonlinear narrative and rich symbolism, which left some viewers feeling disconnected from the characters’ emotional experiences.
Nevertheless, the film remains a significant cultural artefact, highlighting the importance of Morrison’s work and sparking discussions about race, history, and the legacies of slavery in America.
Toni Morrison
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio.
Growing up during the Depression, Morrison witnessed the struggle of her parents, George and Ramah Wills Wofford, as they worked in countless jobs to support their four children. Despite their daily routine of hard and often demeaning work, her parents held on to a sense of pride and self-respect, which they passed on to their children.
Furthermore, their experiences of racism led them to place great emphasis on the value and strength of African-American individuals, families, and communities. Music and storytelling were also valued in Morrison’s home, and dreams and ghostly apparitions often featured in the stories people told each other.
Reading was highly regarded in the family—one grandfather was a figure of respect because he had taught himself to read—and Morrison learned the skill at an early age. As she matured, Morrison became a capable student and read widely, from Russian novels to Jane Austen. While these works did not speak directly to her experience as a young black woman, they taught her about creating setting and atmosphere.
As she told Jean Strouse in Newsweek: “I wasn’t thinking of writing then—I wanted to be a dancer like Maria Tallchief—but when I wrote my first novel years later, I wanted to capture that same specificity about the nature and feeling of the culture I grew up in.”
Following secondary school, Morrison attended Howard University, Washington, D. C., where she studied English and classic literature in preparation for becoming a teacher.
She graduated in 1953 and became a postgraduate student at Cornell University. After earning her master’s degree in 1955, she became an English lecturer at Texas Southern and then Howard University. During this time the author met and married the architect Harold Morrison, with whom she had two sons. After the marriage ended in divorce in 1964, Morrison moved to New York, where she worked as an editor for Random House.
Although she was working in the publishing industry, it took her several attempts to find a publisher for her first novel. When The Bluest Eye was published in 1970, reviews were generally positive and she became established as a promising new writer. Her next works, Sula (1973) and Song of Solomon (1977), fulfilled the promise of her early works.
The former earned a nomination for the National Book Award, while the latter won the National Book Critics Circle Award and became the first work by a black author since Richard Wright’s Native Son to be a Book of the Month Club selection.
Morrison’s fourth novel, Tar Baby, was published in 1981 and remained on the bestseller lists for four months.
At the same time, Morrison was still working at Random House, where she influenced several upcoming African-American writers.
In addition to editing their works, she edited several nonfiction collections. While preparing the 1974 anthology The Black Book, Morrison came across the shocking but true story of Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who attempted to murder her children rather than allow them to be captured and sent back into slavery.
For the author, Garner’s story epitomized one of the chief horrors of slavery—the deliberate separation of families and the destruction of the bond between parent and child. Morrison used this story as the inspiration for her novel Beloved.
Morrison left publishing in 1985 for academia and became in 1989 the Robert F. Goheen Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University. In 1993 she was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, becoming the first African American and only the eighth woman to earn the accolade.
The National Book Foundation similarly honoured her in 1996 with its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Morrison continues to teach, lecture, and write. As she stated in Black Women Writers: A Critical Evaluation, fiction “should be beautiful, and powerful, but it should also work.
It should have something in it that enlightens; something in it that opens the door and points the way. Something in it that suggests what the conflicts are, what the problems are. But it need not solve those problems because it is not a case study, it is not a recipe.”