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Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)
History of slavery/historical fiction, national amnesia, figure of beloved, memory and time, perspective, oral
tradition (narrative form), slavery and gender
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Beloved was her fifth
novel
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National Amnesia- Morrison set out to redress certain silences regarding history of slavery, both within
dominant discourse and black communities
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‘Slavery wasn’t in the literature at all […] on moving from bondage into freedom which has been our goal,
we got away from slavery and also from the slaves, there’s a difference
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Only recently is slaves’ history frequently visited
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Slavery wasn’t really talked about when Morrison was a child, erased from memory and she wanted
it addressed
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The kind of information you can find between the lines of history
[…] It’s right there in the intersection where an institution becomes personal, where the historical becomes
people with names’ - Morrison, ‘The Art of Fiction’, The Paris Review, 35, 128, (1995)
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Some of the documentation of her and her story from newspaper coverage on 3rd
page of handout
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One detail changed- child
Margaret Garner killed was v light skinned, probably fathered by a white man, yet made very clear that baby
that Seethe kills in the story is one of Halle’s children- not from a coercive sexual relationship
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North/South pole as slave narratives did- Seethe escapes from Kentucky to Ohio- escapes from the part
thought of south as to part thought of as north
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Morrison able to build in/chooses to build in certain occurrences which are perhaps beyond the bounds of
Western rationality- slave writers had to think about Western readership and what would be pleasing and
believable to them
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Although a slave
narrative, narrative present is set in 1870s, after end of Civil War and emancipation of the slaves- we are
aligned with the narrative which set in post-slavery times, yet we are constantly drawn back through memory
into the earlier period into the time of slavery
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We find ourselves sucked back, they are sucked back against they
will- choice to have a narrative present during reconstruction era serves to emphasise the ways in which the
legacies of slavery are enduring and ongoing, not just this terrible thing which is now over, now ended, not
something we can forget about- enduring
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In Beloved the titular character is a mysterious figure, she functions as a catalyst for other people to revisit
the past
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Ghostly and unidentifiable figure allows
Morrison to introduce to the novel some elements which aren’t usually found in historical fiction
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The middle
passage getting drawn into the text, done very obliquely- narrative in the 1870s manages to incorporate the
crossing on the slave ships from Africa to the Americas (North, South and Caribbean), not obvious but
dedication of the novel is to ’60 million and more’- 60 million is the number of people who were brought
across the middle passage
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- the passage
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Nothing
came down orally, a few written deathbed confessions
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Description of crowded slave ship during Atlantic passage, layers
of meaning and bleakness, can’t be sure what’s being described- the world of the dead, limbo, Morrison
leaves this very open
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Suggestivenes and ambiguity of Beloved herself allows Morrison to incorporate wider historical referenceBeloved being supernatural allows this because she is such an uncertain figure, we can’t dispute it because
she allows artistic licence
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Post-structuralist psychoanalytic reading of the novel- memory as informing the structure of Belovedenactment of remembering
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Different consciousnesses of different characters- Seethe and burning hair, death of her own mother through
burning, as readers our path is dictated for us by her thoughts and memories, in this case sparked by sense
(smell)
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Narrative with Seethe and Paul D- switching back and forth between their perspectives as they are lying in
bed
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Seethe attempting to explain what she was doing- ‘spinning round and round the room’
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Great deal of the richness of African American and black diasporic culture comes from non-literary or in
some cases non-literature traditions- story telling, music, performance, spoken poetry
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Figure of schoolteacher as representing education, always observing, things he is approaching his project
scientifically, we even overhear a taxonomy, Seethe hears dehumanising list of her human and animal
qualities, she also realises the dominant view of her
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Beloved herself as part of an oral tradition from Africa involving children
who came back from the dead- google Abiku child- Morrison perhaps drawing upon that African belief
system and story
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Manning and unmanning- slavery at sweet home pretty much the same as everywhere because ultimately he
is inferior
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Milk motif in the story- slavery disrupts the nurturing function (so she becomes a messed-up mother)

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