Analysis of Morrison's novel, Beloved

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 c

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name from the word engraved on the tombstone of Sethe's dead child. It sounds as if Morrison has turned her novel into a ghost story. There is however, more than mere Gothicism in Beloved. Essentially, Morrison has utilized a supernatural remedy to the horrors of slavery. Yet, Beloved is more than a deus ex machina as found in ancient Greek drama. Morrison uses Beloved as a most effective method to handle a difficult sociological situation. THE FUNCTION OF BELOVED The Emancipation Proclamation was issued exactly ten years before the point in time when this novel commences. Although the blacks are technically freed, they find themselves in a post-Civil War existence in which they are unable to free themselves from memories of a system that provided them with no rightful ownership of self. Memories are so troubled for the characters in the novel, that hiding them in the back of the mind is a survival technique. The fragmented disclosure of the past is one of the great attractions of Morrison's narrative, which is woven with masterly art and linguistic endeavor. Under a system in which blacks were moved around like checkers, as Morrison expresses it, Sethe's murderous act was really a distorted rendition of her oppre

Category: Literature - A