Beloved—Toni Morrison
Haunting memories and a haunted past
Toni Morrison’s Beloved came out in 1987. Since then, it has become one of the most widely analyzed and discussed novels in modern literature. It has appeared in syllabi of countless English literature classes, and served as the focus of many theses and dissertations. I imagine that most of the people in my own audience have already read it and many have even written about it. So, I don’t fancy I’ll have anything startlingly new to say. Nonetheless, I will venture a few reflections.
Eight years after the end of the American Civil War, Sethe and her daughter, Denver, live on the western outskirts of Cincinnati. Sethe, a former slave, had escaped from a plantation in Kentucky. The novel begins when Paul D shows up. Paul D had escaped from the same plantation as Sethe, and his presence now disrupts the tiny household by exhuming many ghastly memories: the indignities, the beatings, the separation of families, the rapes, the murders, and much else that Sethe and Paul had locked away in an effort to hold themselves together. One deeply buried memory had relentlessly haunted Sethe for years: the loss of her youngest child, who had died nameless while still an infant. Before Paul D arrived, Sethe and Denver believed the dead child haunted the house. Thanks to the haunting, the child’s memory would not stay completely repressed, nor would it emerge whole. All of that changed shortly after Paul’s arrival when a dazed young woman appeared on Sethe’s doorstep, calling herself “Beloved.” Beloved’s past remains a mystery throughout the book, but everyone soon begins to think of her as Sethe’s dead baby come back. As though in confirmation, the haunting stops.
Stories may have many functions, but they almost all do this one thing: They deliver to the reader an experience. Words just sit there, inert ink on page; but each reader responds to that ink by building whole experiences as though following a recipe made of other people’s lives. I think it worthwhile to ask what experience Beloved offers us.
Beloved could easily lead a reader to think about historical events, or injustices, or the like; but if we go down those paths, I think we avoid the experience Morrison challenges us to have. The words before us make us struggle to form coherent meanings. Scattered fragments of fictional memories, associations, dialogue, and passing thoughts cajole us into making order from their chaos. Eventually we do, but mysterious allusions and associations that only make sense later make the first reading hard and create strong impressions. But, merely having fit the puzzle pieces together, we can’t stop there or we’ll miss the experience. This work demands at least one rereading. The first reading for me delivered shock, horror, disgust at the inhuman institution of slavery and those who reveled in the inhumanity sanctioned by that institution. But, since I already knew everything the characters desperately kept in abeyance with self-deceptions, euphemisms, and avoidance, the second reading immersed me in the pathos of a life defined by flight from buried memories that won’t stay buried.
I normally don’t worry too much about including spoilers in these reflections, but in this case, I feel that the horror of a first reading and the pathos of a second reading should remain their own distinct experiences. To quote one of my favorite critics, Harold Bloom, in speaking of the Western Canon, “One ancient test for the canonical remains fiercely valid: unless it demands rereading, the work does not qualify. … [T]he text is there to give no pleasure but the high unpleasure or more difficult pleasure that a lesser text will not provide.” While Morrison or her supporters may think of her works as anti-canonical, by Bloom’s criterion, Beloved clearly belongs right in there with Moby Dick, and Crime and Punishment.
I’ll give one minor example of what I mean. In one early scene, on the third day after Paul D arrives, Denver asks him “how long he was going to hang around.” Her question rattles him so much he spills a cup of coffee, sparking an argument over Denver’s manners. We may take that scene as simply a young woman’s resentment at an intrusion into her world and an older man’s response to her rudeness. But on first reading, Paul D’s reaction may seem overblown. Much later, though, Paul D recalls seeing his brothers lynched, so on our second reading we know that he reacts not to Denver’s “how long” but to her “hanging around,” and the memories that phrase wrenches from him. Repressed memories have ways of knocking us about, or at least our coffee cups. Morrison tells us as much in the first lines. Referring to the haunting of Sethe’s house on 124 Bluestone Road: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”
At the emotional center of the novel lives a horrific act of Sethe’s, around which all else revolves. Morrison hides this act from the reader while also hinting at it for a hundred and fifty some-odd pages. By describing the other horrors and indignities suffered by American slaves, she explains how someone could choose as Sethe chooses. Yet, I get no sense that Morrison offers the explanation to justify the action.
So what experience does Morrison offer us? I don’t think she only gives us a slave’s experience of slavery, although she does give us that. Had she only wanted to do that, she could have simply told Sethe’s story in first-person voice with a straightforward timeline. I also don’t think she writes in such a difficult, fragmented, poetic, and experimental style just for literariness. I suggest that she offers us not the experience of slavery but of freedom—certainly not the easy freedom most of her readers know from their own lives, but a freedom that starts from a place of anesthetized numbness and pulls us through an agonizing birth into wholeness by facing and integrating memories almost too painful for any one person to own without shattering. Morrison gives us the experience of reclaiming the territory of lost memory—not just our personal memory, but that of a people.
When Sethe had lived in slavery, her traumatic experiences made up her life. Afterward, they haunted her memory and she hid from them. The ghost of the house would not let her completely forget, but she never faced the ghost directly or the memories. When Beloved stepped into her life, as her past embodied in physical form, she could no longer hide, but had to engage in a complex interaction. Until she did this, she could not know freedom. As with Sethe, so too with all of us.
Toni Morrison took her inspiration for Beloved from a famous trial of one Margaret Garner who in 1856 had fled across the Ohio River to Cincinnati, where she lived as a free person and citizen of Ohio. While there, US Marshals apprehended her and her family and tried to force them back to her previous owners in Kentucky under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. During their recapture, she and her husband had injured others and committed murder, so the legal issue arose as to whether to try her as a person in Ohio or try her as property and send her back to Kentucky. Ironically, Garner’s defense lawyer argued that the state of Ohio had the right to protect its own citizens, while the slaver argued that federal law should overrule states rights. Margaret Garner lost her trial and went back to Kentucky, but, in the novel, Sethe spent time in jail and stayed in Ohio.
While it seems to me that Beloved must surely work best as a novel because of its lyricism and its plunge into the inner lives of its characters, it has also seen adaptations into other media. In 1998, Oprah Winfrey produced and starred in a film version directed by Johnathan Demme. BBC Radio 4 also aired an adaptation of it in 2016 as a ten-part radio play. The inspiration, the trial of Margaret Garner, has also attracted great attention over the years, inspiring poems, paintings, and murals. Toni Morrison herself wrote the libretto for the 2005 opera, Margaret Garner, by Richard Danielpour.
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I read Beloved because the book club to which I belong has agreed to focus on books that have found themselves on various lists of banned books. We will next discuss Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, so I’ll offer some thoughts about that one next. I first read Lord of the Flies as part of the Decade Project in 2008, so I look forward to seeing if I have changed enough for the experience to have also changed.
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Truly wonderful commentary. Thank you.
Hi, Robert! Thank you for this. In the late seventies, in an attempt to gain some insight into the black experience, I read a spate of books—The Outsider, Native Son, Soul On Ice and the Autobiography of Malcom X. Maybe others I’ve forgotten. In any case, I have read very little related literature since then. I have not read Beloved, nor The Color Purple. All of which is just to say thank you for putting this on my “radar screen” again.