The Life of the Author
Toni Morrison was born in semi-integrated Lorain, Ohio in 1931. Her birth name was Chloe, but after converting to Catholicism, she took the name of St. Anthony, from which her nickname Toni derives. She “grew up in a house suffused with narrative and superstition” which left its mark on her rich body of work that often delves into spirituality. Living in an area where “racial discrimination was a constant threat,” Morrison used reading and writing as an escape from reality.
Throughout her early life, Morrison’s experiences with segregation inspired her to “place African Americans, particularly women, at the heart of her writing at a time when they were largely relegated to the margins both in literature and in life.” Deeply interested in literature and black culture, she chose to attend Howard University to study English. After her education, she began a career in academia, teaching at Texas Southern and her alma mater Howard, before becoming an editor for Random House in 1963. While working there in the 60s, she was exposed to the writings of black political thinkers such as Angela Davis and became interested in the lives of enslaved people.
Reading about the story of Margret Garner led her to explore the stories of other enslaved people “particularly women and mothers and inspired her to write Beloved” later in her career. Her perspective of the way that racial hierarchy fuels a social divide inspired her first novel, The Bluest Eye, which she published at 39 years old. Following the success of her first novel, Morrison wrote the novels Sula and Song of Solomon, earning her nationwide recognition. Morrison’s life experiences inspired the majority of her work, as her unique writing style stuck out to readers for the way that she effortlessly conveyed “the nature of black life in America, from slavery to the inequality that went on more than a century after slavery ended.”
Morrison is widely considered to be among the greatest writers of the 20th century. She has won numerous literary awards including the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, the Nation Humanities Medal, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, and the Nobel Prize. The Swedish Academy cited “her epic power, unerring ear for dialogue, and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of Black America” in their explanation from awarding her the Nobel Prize in 1993. Despite her immense critical acclaim and commercial success, Morrison continued to work in academia, serving as a professor of creative writing from 1989 to 2006, giving many university talks, and sitting on conference panels. Morrison’s work continues to inspire even after her death in 2019, as she “continues to influence culture in the United States through her writing.”
Critical Discourse Surrounding the Work
Bell, Sophie. “This Is Not a Story to Pass On’: Teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute, 2019, teachersinstitute.yale.edu/curriculum/units/files/99.01.03.pdf.
This article approaches Toni Morrison’s Beloved from a unique perspective: a guide on how to teach this text to students. Bell argues that this text is an extremely beneficial tool in classrooms, as it introduces “a new kind of life familiar and unfamiliar elements of slave experience” (Bell 4). Bell continues her main point of arguing the importance of Beloved being a core component of American education when she discusses the duality that Beloved encompasses between reality and the supernatural. The way in which Morrison “alludes frequently to other stories of suffering in the lives of this community and the African-American community” is incredibly significant in how it exposes the reality of slavery, even after slavery had been abolished. (Bell 4). The exposure of “the awful magnitude and far reach of slavery’s effects through many interwoven stories of suffering” provides Beloved’s readers with an inside look on the magnitude of injustice during this period in time (Bell 4).
Bidney, Martin. “Creating a Feminist-Communitarian Romanticism in Beloved: Toni Morrison’s New Uses for Blake, Keats, and Wordsworth.” Papers on Language & Literature, vol. 36, no. 3, 2000, p. 271. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A65863549/AONE?u=cofc_main&sid=AONE&xid=b297b550. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
Bidney argues that Morrison alludes to iconic British Romantic writers, specifically William Blake, William Wordsworth, and John Keats, to both reconstruct and contribute to the tradition of Romantic-esque literature motifs and themes many twentieth-century American authors have adopted. This is profound against a backdrop of white male narratives because she is a Black woman telling a story that revolves around the strength of four Black women (Baby Suggs, Denver, Beloved, and Sethe) as they navigate an emotionally and physically traumatic world.
Bidney focuses on Morrison’s “feminist-communitarian insight” created by the “symbolism of psychological and spiritual progress” as well as the theme of the power of the past many white male Romantics employed in their poetry, made possible through a remembrance of African American oral traditions and slave histories present in Beloved. She argues for a connection between Beloved and Blake’s pieces through the “door” and “window” imagery, the importance of color, and the divinity in imagination. Wordsworth’s presence emerges in a more narrative sense with the settings of a few of Beloved’s most notable scenes: the carnival “freak” show, Amy Denver and Sethe’s boat stealing, Denver, Beloved, and Sethe’s ice skating, and the gigantic shadow that appears in a final scene before Beloved disappears.
Christian, Barbara. “Beloved, She’s Ours.” Narrative, vol. 5, no. 1, 1997, pp. 36–49. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/20107099. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
In this article, Christian argues that Morrison subverts ideas about African American experience as being solely political by asserting that love, and especially motherly love, is both a socio-political action as well as a deeply subjective one. Because enslaved people did not own their own bodies and white people saw them purely as economic commodity, the love of self was deeply tied to the political conditions of the society around them and could never fully transcend them. Morrison draws heavily on slave narratives as a literary genre and accurately captures the difference between the ideologies of free labor in male narratives that value the first dollars earned as a freedman and those of female narratives where opportunities to earn money were much different.
In order to make the moral dilemma of Sethe’s actions more clear, Morrison changes the story of Margaret Garner to fit her own purposes. For example, Sethe is freed so she must deal with the psychological consequences of her actions, and Beloved is not a mulatto offspring of a rape by a white man but instead the product of a marriage between Black people. Thus Morrison resituates the story so that Sethe’s love must be placed in context of the political environment of slavery but cannot be exclusive to it. Finally, Christian cites John Mbiti, a Christian theologian from Kenya, to argue that Beloved serves as an example of ancestor worship in which ancestors are not necessarily the subject of veneration. Instead, as long as someone on Earth remembers them, a dead person retains agency on Earth from beyond the grave.
Coonradt, Nicole M. “To Be Loved: Amy Denver and Human Need–Bridges to Understanding in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” College Literature, vol. 32 no. 4, 2005, p. 168-187. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lit.2005.0053.
Coonradt argues that there is another, formally unrecognized “Beloved” in the novel besides the baby that reincarnates as the ghostly Beloved: Amy Denver, the white, runaway, indentured servant who saves Sethe’s life after she escapes Sweet Home and helps deliver newborn Denver in a boat. Coonradt points out the importance of naming in the novel and hypothesizes that the name “Amy” is derived from the Latin word “amatus,” meaning “beloved.” She views Amy Denver as an increasingly important character in the novel and its theme, which she believes is rooted in hope, human connection, and love in a time and place where racial discrimination is rampant and toxifying.
Morrison complicates the race relations between white and black people as she includes white characters who do good (although, she writes, they are not innocent); Amy Denver serves as a metaphorical bridge between black and white people, demonstrating the possibility of emotional connection and healing that emerges through this bridging. The characters in this book are all broken in some way and struggling to heal. Coonradt notes the interesting absence of the “3” in 124 Bluestone road, and attributes it to reflect the absence of the “crawling already?” third child. She also points out many similarities between Sethe and Amy Denver, such as speech, circumstance (fleeing capture), and age.
Elliott, Mary Jane Suero. “Postcolonial Experience in a Domestic Context: Commodified Subjectivity in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” MELUS, vol. 25, no. 3/4, 2000, pp. 181–202. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/468242. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
In this article, Elliott argues that Morrison’s idea of self-liberation can only be achieved through mutual recognition between community and individual in a post-colonial context. She borrows various ideas from other post-colonialist thinkers such as bell hooks, Homi Bhabha, and Satya Mohanty. Elliott reads Beloved through the lens of the latter’s idea of decolonizing an individual as being able to develop a perspective from outside of the mainstream, dominating one imposed by those in power.
Sethe begins the novel as a colonial subject; she escaped slavery, yes, but she had not yet escaped the psychological traumas that she sustained as a result of slavery yet. She must work through the community to be able to address that damage, but crucially, the community strands her after she kills Beloved. Morrison, shows that one cannot simply look to the community for help, but the community also has to recognize them. Elliott then cites the free Black community of the novel as an example of Anzaldua’s borderlands, in this case between the larger enslaved Black population and the free White society. Sethe’s choice to kill Beloved is thus a “counter-stance,” another concept borrowed from Anzaldua, against colonialism even though it denies the baby the opportunity to assert itself as a subject. The realization of Sethe asserting herself as a subject only occurs when the community chooses to readmit Sethe and thus banishes Beloved, as a symbol for unreckoned with trauma, from Sethe’s life.
George, Sheldon. “Approaching the Thing of Slavery: A Lacanian Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review, vol. 45 no. 1, 2012, p. 115-130. Project MUSE, https://muse.jhu.edu/article/502550/pdf
This article compares the techniques utilized within other African American literature to those that Morrison employs in Beloved. George argues that repetition and revision are common traits of African American literature, as “black authors read and revise one another, address similar themes and repeat the cultural and linguistic codes of a common symbolic geography,” that “we can think of them as forming literary traditions” (George). Because Beloved is inspired by a true story, Morrison remixed actual events in order to compile the plot of her novel. Thus, George notes that Beloved is an “articulation of a psychoanalytic conception of the role that repetition plays in the lives of both its African American characters and many of the members of its contemporary African American reading audience” (George). George furthers his argument by restating that Beloved can be classified as a historical trauma due to the way in which the details of the text “reemerges in the moment of our identification with its past location” (George).
Harting, Heike. “‘Chokecherry Tree(s) v: Operative Modes of Metaphor in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’” A Review of International English Literature, Oct. 1998, file:///Users/callieandrew/Downloads/34072-Article%20Text-87021-1-10-20090813.pdf.
This scholarly report is an in-depth analysis of the use of metaphors within Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Harting references Morrison’s essay “The Site of Memory” in order to analyze how “the inner lives of former slaves presuppose a ‘literary archaeology’ that excavates memories from within.” In particular, Harting focuses on the multidimensional elements of the Chokecherry Tree, expanding on the rhetorical figures Morrison utilizes to further the concept of repressed memories.
Harting argues that Morrison portrays a purposeful “process of imagining and remembering [that] involves a constant shifting and manipulation of language, images, and literary form” in order to develop the complex metaphors used within Beloved. Harting notes that Morrison’s use of imagery of the chokecherry tree is a performative metaphor because of the way it “contests historically and politically prescribed matrices of essentializing and totalizing modes of identity-formation.” Harting suggests that Morrison’s metaphors “become a textual field” as they are deliberate ways to portray a “wide field of semantic connotations” that “indicates the palimpsestic structure of memory, which in turn provides the reservoir for the rhetorical ‘subsoil’ of Morrison’s text.”
Holden-Kirwan, Jennifer L. “Looking into the Self That Is No Self: An Examination of Subjectivity in Beloved.” African American Review, vol. 32, no. 3, 1998, pp. 415–426. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3042242. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
In this article, Holden-Kirwan examines the way that Beloved’s memory of a slave ship during the Middle Passage serves as a primal scene (which is an event in childhood that leads to neurosis in adulthood) as described by Freud. She cites Elizabeth House in her argument that Beloved’s stream of consciousness represents experience aboard a slave ship. Holden-Kirwan then criticizes the reading that the scenes of the Middle Passage are both the real memories of a character and an experience of some other-worldly force because it allows readers to equate the real experience of enslaved people with a spiritual force that a reader can discard.
Ultimately, she argues that Beloved is not simply a girl who has suffered the horrors of slavery and misidentifies Sethe as her mother, nor is she simply the reincarnation of Sethe’s daughter, nor is she a being with the identity of both Sethe’s mother and her daughter. Rather she is the identity of Sethe’s mother reborn because Beloved’s appearance is associated with various memories and images of Sethe’s mother. The songs that Sethe thinks she invented may have been based on an African song sung by her mother. The most compelling piece of evidence, Holden-Kirwan argues, is that by the end of the book, any attempt Sethe makes to assert herself as a mother results in Beloved retaining her authority of Sethe’s actions. Because of the violence of enslavement, patterns of undeveloped familial relationships repeat themselves throughout many generations of Black people. Thus, the confusion and misrecognition of the characters as to who Beloved is make sense without precluding other valid readings of her identity.
Krumholz, Linda. “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review, vol. 26, no. 3, 1992, pp. 395–408. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3041912. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
In this article, Krumholz argues that the creative process of developing a historical perspective of slavery from outside the white elite serves to heal some of the trauma of slavery for the characters as well as the author and the reader. Morrison depicts history making as a set of rituals, and in borrowing techniques such as nonchronological narratives and multiple narrators from earlier Modernist writers she invites the reader to create their own ritual space to decipher the story in the same way that Sethe must decipher her own past to heal from its wounds.
These techniques also blend well with traditions of African American oral histories with their emphasis on repetition that moves the words from merely the discursive realm to the transformative and ritual one. The healing takes place in three stages, the first, an unhealthy repression of the trauma, the second, a confrontation with the memories, and the third, an emergence from the trauma. Baby Suggs, with her own takes on ritual serves as a moral guide, creating an interpretive framework for the characters of the novel. Krumolz identifies Beloved as a trickster who both reanimates the traumas of the past and serves as the vehicle for their mending. Sethe must negotiate the relationship between both of them, and because Denver was born on the border of slavery and freedom, she too must navigate the manifestations of her mother’s trauma through the lens of history. Krumholz argues that history is a personal ritual of reckoning with the pain of the past in order to emerge from it as a healed person.
Kumari, Y. Kusuma, et al. “Psychological Agonies In Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Study.” International Journal Of Scientific & Technology Research, Jan. 2020, www.ijstr.org/final-print/jan2020/Psychological-Agonies-In-Toni-Morrisons-Beloved-A-Study-.pdf.
This article provides an overview of the physiological elements discussed in Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved. Kumari proposes that Morrison’s text can be inferred as a “motto of supreme genius,” as it “presents the hoary African culture, the traditions of their ancestors, the ethos of their race and finally to protect their racial identity.” Morrison has been praised for her seemingly effortless ability to translate real life experiences into knowledge. This article analyzes the way that this text showcases the way that “human spirit is squeezed and squashed to nothingness through the barbarous treatment of the slaves.” Kumari proposes that Morrison attempts to emphasize Sethe’s guilt through the embodiment of Beloved. This idea suggests that Sethe’s “internal conflict to find herself after slavery and the death of her child, keeps the focus on most of the conflict within her head and not on how it affects the community.” This article argues that the reason Morrison’s writing is so successful in educating its readers about the reality of slavery is because of her use of “highly poetic language, striking novel images, modern technique and superb characterization evokes infinite variety of characters to fullness of life,” as overall “the reader never doubts the reality of what the author reports.”
Meljac, Eric. “Beloved as a Symbolic Bridge: An Examination of the Symbolism of Connected Spaces in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” CEA Critic, vol. 82 no. 1, 2020, p. 38-51. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/cea.2020.0001.
Meljac argues for a previously-ignored importance in the symbolism of the “bridge” that Beloved notes as her first memory before she came upon the house at 124 Bluestone road, using sociologist Georg Simmel’s essay “Bridge and Door,” which explains the significance of human architecture to emphasize both the separation and the connection between spatial components in our world, to prove how this unique architectural feature works to demonstrate how Beloved connects spaces in the novel, essentially “[acting] as a bridge herself.”
Meljac, drawing inspiration from Simmel, notes the other-worldly feeling one gets from walking across a bridge as they transcend the limited abilities of man to walk on water, also representing artistic connectedness. This critic is interested in the function of Beloved to the freed slaves in the novel and believes that Beloved acts as a metaphorical bridge between Paul D. and Sethe, slavery and freedom, the present and past, and life and death. The novel often treats the past as a space itself, something almost tangible. Meljac points out the numerous times Beloved is associated with a bridge and proves that even if she is not a ghost, which is a literal manifestation of the place between living and dead, the concept of her being a child stolen from her home country and brought through the Middle Passage also evokes bridge imagery.
O’Reilly, Andrea. Toni Morrison and Motherhood: A Politics of the Heart, State University of New York Press, 2004. ProQuest Ebook Central, https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cofc/detail.action?docID=3408430.
O’Reilly focuses on the complex relationships and historical trauma of mother and daughter created from the severance of matrilineal ties by slavery, and argues against the popular interpretation of Beloved as a real person and not a ghost because she deems it problematic through its insinuation of motherhood as something “dangerous, devouring, and destructive”; indeed, the poetic section in Part II of the novel repeats phrases of possession and this idea that the mother and child are not separate beings but can only be whole when they are together. Instead, O’Reilly insists that Beloved is a “ghostly reincarnation” of the dead child, symbolizing the African American mother line in both its healing and its severance. She harkens back to the introductory epitaph, “sixty-million and more,” as she posits that Beloved is an embodiment of the pain created by slavery, of the daughters and mothers who were unaccounted for, unremembered, lost to time, of the women who became either gaps in a matrilineage or marked the end of one.
Schapiro, Barbara. “The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved.’” Contemporary Literature, vol. 32, no. 2, 1991, pp. 194–210. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1208361. Accessed 30 Mar. 2021.
In this article, Schapiro applies Jessica Benjamin’s conception of an autonomous self as one that is defined by the recognition of others. As such, the relationships of Beloved depict what happens when the system of self-recognition through other is subverted, in this case by the alienation of slavery. Under the inhumane conditions of enslavement, the fundamental relationships between mother and child deny the characters to come to self-realization. Sethe is breast fed by an enslaved wet nurse, and her mother dies before Sethe understands her. Beloved is deprived of her mother’s milk by the pupils of schoolmaster who steal Sethe’s milk and deprived of her life by Sethe herself.
Further, these deprivations of food lead to other examples of ample food leading to the degradation of relationships such as when Baby Suggs throws too lavish a feast and when Beloved eats so much that she seems to be feeding on Sethe herself. Seeing, as a force of mutual recognition also plays an important role in the novel by creating a conflict between appropriation and absorption of other character’s selves. Paul D is the only character that exists outside this dynamic, Schapiro argues, but he is not fully a force of male-coded rationality nor fully beyond the power of Beloved since she does compel him to do things. The stress of enslavement and its aftermath impedes the natural process of self-recognition, so the conflict of the story is primarily about the struggle when selves cannot develop properly.
Selfridge, Janeen. Beloved: The Physical Embodiment of Psychological Trauma. Duquesne University, 2021, research.monm.edu/mjur/files/2019/02/MJUR-i09-2018-5-Selfridge.pdf.
This article discusses the multifaceted elements of Beloved by analyzing Sethe’s murdered daughter, Beloved, as “an embodiment of the traumatized slaves Sethe and Denver.” The trauma displayed in Beloved is displayed during Beloved’s time at Sethe’s home, as there are instances of “loss of time and language, generational violence, and oral fixation” that are “directly reflected by Beloved.” Selfridge emphasizes the killing of Sethe’s daughter as a focal point for the remainder of the plot, as she centers her argument around the trauma that it caused. Beloved presents the effects of slavery as having a “fracturing effect on the human mind.”
Furthermore, the first time that Sethe and Denver meet Beloved is a crucial moment in both of the character’s personal developments, as they are transitioning into a new phase of life after years of routine. Selfridge furthers her ideas by proposing that “Beloved enters at an illusory high point in the protagonists’ lives as a physical manifestation of the split identities of Sethe and Denver.” This novel uniquely can be simply put as a story that portrays the struggles of motherhood caused by slavery. The physical manifestation of Sethe and Denver’s trauma through the character of Beloved successfully “speaks to the unspeakable, and somewhat incommunicable, rawness of trauma.” Selfridge argues that the characters of this novel “speak to the pervasiveness of psychological trauma through its content and form; “the principal narrative strategy of the novel is to drop an unexplained fact on the reader, veer away into other matters, then circle back with more information.”
Yeates, Robert. ““The Unshriven Dead, Zombies on the Loose”: African and Caribbean Religious Heritage in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 61 no. 3, 2015, p. 515-537. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mfs.2015.0033.
Yeates argues that the interpretation of the vast majority of readers as viewing Beloved from a Euro-American perspective is an important but not full, in-depth analysis of the rich work, specifically when it comes to the presence of the ghost and supernatural. He points out the fragmented form of the novel, which reflects the lives and identities disrupted by the trauma of slavery, and homes in on the scene where the community comes together to perform the exorcism against Beloved to show the varied, confused, ambiguous yet non-Christian religions many of them practiced in their African homelands, and how much of their tradition and culture has been muddled and stolen from them.
Traditions of Vodou and the zombi or zombie, as well as many other native religious/cultural practices, have been suppressed by white colonizers and their ideologies of supremacy, furthering the themes in Beloved. The Zombi of Haitian folklore haunts the living if they have been abandoned; this idea corresponds to the one between Beloved and Sethe. Yeates traces the origin of the Euro-America idea of “ghost” back to many different African religious traditions, many of which see death as not an end but a “change in form.” He brings up the Swahili belief that someone who is nearing death spends a significant amount of time between “Sasa,” living, and “Zamani,” the dead, immersed in a time-transcending space between past and future. He makes a connection between the importance of naming in Beloved with that same importance in the belief that the dead can only be raised if they are called by their name.