This paper analyzes Beloved, a novel by Toni Morrison. A predominant theme which runs throughout the book is the interior life of post-Civil War blacks still in bondage to their past.
Toni Morrison (nee Wofford) was born in 1931 in Ohio. She is a writer of great depth and is probably the most important black novelist in the United States since Ellison. Morrison published her first book when she was almost forty years of age. Literary critics frequently say that she uses symbolism in an overly obtrusive manner. She has never given in to any convenient or simply cerebral techniques. As one critic writes: "She is, too intelligent to be 'against whites', or 'against men' in any stridently generalized manner; indeed, of all living woman writers, her portraits of men are among the fullest, most sympathetic and penetrating" (Seymour-Smith 129).
Morrison's writing is filled with loss: lost friendship, lost love, lost customs, and lost possibilities. Yet, the blacks in her works endure and survive.
BELOVED & THE INTERIOR LIFE OF BLACKS
In Beloved, the interior life of blacks is recreated with an emotional fervor no other novelist has previously approached. Morrison has drawn a picture of an existence of almost unimaginable precariousness. This was a world in which it was against the law for slaves to be taught to read or write, to love and marry with any expectation of a lasting relationship, to become parents with any expectation of being with their children to maturity. The description of Baby Suggs's plight demonstrates their interior life quite well: "Baby Suggs didn't even raise her head. From her sickbed she heard them go but that wasn't the reason she lay still. It was a wonder to her that her grandsons had taken so long to realize that every house wasn't like the one on Bluestone Road. Suspended between the nastiness of life and the meanness of the dead, she couldn't get interested in leaving life or livin...