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Beloved
Toni Morrison, 1987
316 pp.

In Brief

Pulitizer Prize, 1987

Set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War, this profoundly affecting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is Toni Morrison's greatest novel, a dazzling achievement, and the most spellbinding reading experience of the decade.

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. (From the publisher.)

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About the Author

• Real Name—Chloe Anthony Wofford
• Birth—February 18, 1931
• Where—Lorain, Ohio, USA
• Education—Howard University B.A., English, 1953; Cornell,    MA, 1955
• Awards—Nobel Prize, 1993, National Book Critics' Circle    Award, 1977; Pulitzer Prize, 1988.
• Currently—lives in Princeton, NJ and New York, NY


With her incredible string of lyrical, imaginative, and adventurous modern classics Toni Morrison lays claim to being one of America's best novelists. Race issues are at the heart of many of Morrison's most enduring novels, from the ways that white concepts of beauty affect a girl's self image in The Bluest Eye to themes of segregation in Sulu and slavery in her signature work Beloved. Through it all, Morrison relates her tales with lyrical eloquence and spellbinding mystery.

Born Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison's unique approach to writing stems from a childhood spent steeped in folklore and mythology. Her family reveled in sharing these often tales, and their commingling of the fantastic and the natural would become a key element in her work when she began penning original tales of her own.

The other majorly influential factor in her writing was the racism she experienced firsthand in, as Jet magazine described it, the "mixed and sometimes hostile neighborhood" of Lorain, Ohio. When Morrison was only a toddler, her home was set afire by racists while her family was still inside of it. During times such as these, she found strength in her father, who instilled in her a great sense of dignity. This pride in her cultural background would heavily influence her debut novel. In The Bluest Eye, an eleven-year old black girl named Pecola prays every night for blue eyes, seeing them as the epitome of feminine beauty. She believes these eyes, symbolizing commonly held white concepts of attractiveness, would put an end to her familial woes, an end to her father's excessive drinking and her brother's meandering. They would give her self-esteem and purpose. The Bluest Eye is the first of Toni Morrison's cries for racial pride and it is an auspicious debut told with an eerie poeticism.

Morrison next tackled segregation in Sulu, which chronicles the friendship between two women who, much like the author, grew up in a small, segregated village in Ohio. Song of Solomon followed. Arguably her first bona fide classic and certainly her most lyrical work, Song of Solomon breathed with the mythology of Morrison's youth, a veritable modern folktale pivoting on an eccentric whimsically named Milkman Dead who spends his life trying to fly. This is one of Morrison's most breathtaking, most accomplished and fully dimensional novels, a story of powerful convictions told in an unmistakably original manner.

In Song of Solomon, Morrison created a distinct world where the supernatural commingles comfortably with the mundane, a setting that would reappear in masterpiece. Beloved is a ghost story quite unlike any other, a tale of guilt and love and the horrendous legacy of slavery. Taking place not long after the end of the Civil War, Beloved finds Sethe, a former slave, being haunted by the daughter she murdered to save the child from being sold into slavery. It is a gut wrenching story that is buoyed by its fantastical plot device and the sheer beauty of Morrison's prose.

Beloved so moved Morrison's literary peers that forty-eight of them signed an open letter published in The New York Times demanding she be recognizing for this major effort. Subsequently, the book won her a Pulitzer Prize. A year after publishing her next novel Jazz in 1992, she would become the very first African American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Towards the end of the century, Morrison's work became increasingly eclectic. She not only published another finely crafted, incendiary novel in Paradise, which systematically tracks the genesis of an act of mob violence, but she also published her first children's book The Big Box. In 2003, she published her first novel in five years, a complex meditation on family and the way one man fuels the obsessions of several women called Love. The following year she assembled a collection of photographs of school children taken during the era of segregation. What makes Remember: The Journey to School Integration so particularly haunting is that Morrison chose to compose dialogue imagining what the subjects of each photo may have been thinking.

That imagination, that willingness to take chances, to examine history through a fresh perspective, is such an integral part of Morrison's craft. She is as vital as any contemporary artist, and her stories may focus on the black American experience, but the eloquence, imaginativeness, and meaningfulness of her writing leaps high over any racial boundaries.

Extras
Chloe Anthony Wofford chose to publish her first novel under the name Toni Morrison because she believed that Toni was easier to pronounce than Chloe. Morrison later regretted assuming the nom de plume.

In 1986, the first production of Morrison's sole play Dreaming Emmett was staged. The play was based on the story of Emmett Till, a black teen murdered by racists in 1955.

Morrison's prestigious status is not limited to her revered novels or her multitude of awards. She also holds a chair at Princeton University.

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Critics Say. . .
This work well deserves its place in the pantheon of enduring Literature. Possibly the most powerful and imaginative rendering of slavery that exists, Beloved confronts the horror of both its practice and its legacy. While sometimes raw, we are always returned to the redemptive presence of family and community. This is a work you must not overlook—it is the story of our country. Read more...
A LitLovers LitPick - March '08



A work that brings to the darkest corners of American experience the wisdom, and the courage, to know them as they are.
New York Review of Books



"I'm not trying to cast blame," explained author Toni Morrison in a recent interview about her racially revisionist literature. "I'm just trying to look at something without blinking." That is certainly an apt description of her approach to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved: In it she has focused her steady gaze on a dreadful episode in American history -- slavery and its aftermath -- and the result is a spellbinding masterpiece of both exquisite beauty and pain. Set shortly after the Civil War in rural Ohio, the story revolves around Sethe, a runaway slave literally haunted by the legacy of her past -- a past that she tries desperately to repress, but one that the supernatural forces in her house won't let her forget. Her home is "spiteful...full of baby's venom," and reverberates with the angry rumblings of her dead baby daughter. Eerie red light, rattling furniture, and overturned dishes are commonplace. Sethe's love for this child was so deep that it proved deadly: She murdered the girl rather than see her returned to a life of slavery. Terrorized by the ghost, Sethe's sons have run off; her treasured mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, has died; and she lives in virtual isolation with her adolescent daughter, Denver. When Paul D. -- an ex-slave from the Sweet Home plantation where Sethe was held in bondage -- shows up on her doorstep, Sethe's life changes abruptly. Not only must she endure a surge of memories, but the previously incorporeal ghost suddenly manifests itself in the form of a strange but seductive young woman named Beloved.

Beloved is but one of many critically acclaimed works by the prolific Morrison. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, Morrison read ravenously as a child and went on to earn an English degree from Howard and a master's from Cornell University. She has held teaching positions at countless colleges -- Yale University, Bard College, and Rutgers among them. Before devoting herself fully to her own fiction, she worked for 20 years as a senior editor at Random House. Since 1989, she has held a university chair in humanities at Princeton University, and has won numerous awards, most notably the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. As the eighth woman and the first African American to have received the award, she is now one of the most respected figures in American letters.

A vocal force in the once-silenced community of African-American women, Morrison is devoted to the potency and potential of language. "We die," she has said. "That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives." If language is indeed the measure of our lives, then she has lived one of unparalleled eloquence. For her prose is unquestionably dazzling. Like an alchemist transforming dross to gold, Morrison turns words into living, breathing, shimmering entities, into pulsating colors, vibrant sounds, pungent smells. So vivid is Beloved's fictional world -- the white staircase in Sethe's house, Denver's boxwood hiding place -- that the reader becomes a part of it. And so acutely are the characters' emotions drawn -- Beloved's bottomless rage, Baby Suggs's bone-tired exhaustion -- that we identify with each of them. Whether writing in narrative form or indulging in occasional poetic riffs, Morrison taps into universal human dilemmas and reaches us at the deepest level.

This is not to say that her prose is easy. Her convoluted narrative style is often compared with that of fellow Nobel laureate William Faulkner. In Beloved, neither plot nor time is linear. The past overlaps the present; memory -- or "rememory," as she calls it -- bleeds into every scene. To maintain suspense, Morrison withholds information, but drops clues on every page -- tantalizing hints of Sethe's crime or Beloved's identity. The details accumulate until you find yourself suddenly gasping with comprehension, and then wildly rifling back through the pages to reread earlier scenes that only now make sense.

Readers intimidated by such complexity might be tempted to skip the book and head straight for the new movie adaptation, which producer Oprah Winfrey and director Jonathan Demme have handled with grace and dexterity. Their lushly photographed film stays faithful to the book's lyricism, dialogue, and memory-driven structure. The casting is ideal: Danny Glover makes an endearing Paul D., and Oprah Winfrey plays Sethe with just the right iron-eyed determination. Although Thandie Newton's portrayal of Beloved is at times over the top -- veering into Exorcist territory -- the uninhibited force she brings to the role is riveting.

Though Beloved is Morrison's undisputed masterpiece, all her books are remarkable. Each bears her trademark touches: elegant prose, fantastical occurrences, striking characters, and racial tension. Her first and perhaps most accessible novel is the short and searing The Bluest Eye, in which a girl is driven mad by her hunger for an unattainable symbol of white beauty -- blue eyes. Her second novel, Sula, is an oft-overlooked gem, a portrait of female friendship between a conformist and a rebel. Song of Solomon, winner of the 1977 National Book Critics Award, distinguishes itself from her other works for its straightforward plot flow and its male protagonist, who must embrace his heritage in order to mature. Although Tar Baby, with its Caribbean setting and its privileged characters -- a pampered black model and a rich white couple among them -- is sometimes considered Morrison's most commercial book, it is as provocative and sumptuously rendered as the rest. Her most challenging books are her most recent ones: a trilogy of novels (each with a different cast of characters) intended as a retelling of the black experience in America from slavery to the present day. Jazz, the second in the trilogy after Beloved, evokes a jealous love triangle in early black Harlem, in a literary style as dizzy and ingenious as a Coltrane improvisation. And in Paradise, the third and most controversial of the series, a posse of men from an all-black town descends upon a convent of wayward women to murder the inhabitants. Published earlier this year, Paradise is a complex work that has received plenty of praise, but also substantial criticism. In addition to her seven novels, Morrison has written a play, "Dreaming Emmett," and a book of essays entitled Playing in the Dark

"My job," she says, "is to make sure whatever journey I invite a reader to, I am there to accompany them, to offer a palm to hold." And it is our job, as readers, to take that hand and to dive fearlessly into the fictional worlds she has created. To decline Morrison's invitation would be to deprive ourselves of some of the most sublime, transformative literature of our time.
Lilan Patri - Barnes and Noble




When Toni Morrison was an editor at Random House, she edited The Black Book, an anthology/scrapbook of African American history. While working on the book, she ran across a newspaper article about a woman named Margaret Garner, a runaway slave who killed her children, slitting the throat of one and bashing in the skull of the other, to prevent them from being recaptured by the slave hunters hot on their trail. This upside down story of motherly love expressed through child murder haunted Morrison for many years and finally manifest itself in fictional form in her Pulitzer Prize-winning fifth novel, Beloved. A poetic chronicle of slavery and its aftermath, it describes how that inhuman ordeal forced cruel choices and emotional pain on its victims and gave them memories that would possess them long after they were released from their physical bondage. Morrison uses the story to address a key question for black people then and now: How can we let go of the pain of the past and redeem the sacrifices made in the struggle for freedom?

Beloved is both beautiful and elusive: beautiful for its powerful and captivating language, and elusive not just because of its reliance on visions of haints and apparitions, but in its narrative interweaving of the past and present, the physical and the spiritual. For all of its supernatural elements, however, Beloved is most notable as a powerful tribute to the real-life struggles of a generation of black men and women to reconcile the horrors of the past and move on. The spirit of Beloved and the recurring memories of the tribulations Sethe endured on the plantations she lived on and escaped from were both testaments to the tangibly powerful hold that slavery had on her. In the end, she is able to recover her life only by finding within herself and her community the spiritual tools strong enough to exorcise her of this haunting. In this, Sethe's struggle is the struggle of all African Americans: the struggle to redeem ourselves, our families, and our communities from the wreckage of the past even as we honor the sacrifices made for survival.
Sacred Fire



Mixed with the lyric beauty of the writing, the fury in Morrison's . . . book is almost palpable...a haunting chronicle of slavery and its aftermath set in rural Ohio in the wake of the Civil War. The brilliantly conceived story . . . should not be missed.
Publishers Weekly



Powerful is too tame a word to describe Toni Morrison's searing new novel of post-Civil War Ohio. Morrison, whose myth-laden storytelling shone in Song of Solomon and other novels, has created an unforgettable world in this novel about ex-slaves haunted by violent memories. Before the war, Sethe, pregnant, sent her children away to their grandmother in Ohio, whose freedom had been paid for by their father. Sethe runs too, but when her "owners'' come to recapture her, she attempts to murder the children, succeeding with one, named Beloved. This murder will (literally) haunt Sethe for the rest of her life and affect everyone around her. A fascinating, grim, relentless story, this important book by a major writer belongs in most libraries. -- Ann H. Fisher, Radford Public Library, Va.
Library Journal

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Book Club Discussion Questions
Dearly Beloved, we are gathered here without questions from the publisher.

But don't despair. Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:

   • Generic Discussion Questions
   • Read-Think-Talk About a Book

Also consider the following points for discussion

1. Consider the extent to which slavery dehumanizes individuals by stripping them of their identity, destroying their ability to conceive of the self. Consider, especially, Paul and how he can't determine whether screams he hears are his or someone else's. How do the other characters reflect self- alienation?

2. Discuss the different roles of the community in betraying and protecting the house at 124. What larger issue might Morrison be suggesting here about community.

3. What does Beloved's appearance represent? What about her behavior? Why does she finally disappear—what drives her departure? And why is the book's title named for her?

4. Talk about the choice Sethe made regarding her children when schoolteacher arrives to take them all back to Sweet Home (don't you love that name?). Can her actions be justified—are her actions rational or irrational?

5. What does the narrator mean by the warning at the end: this is not a story to pass on." Is he right...or not.