Toni Morrison's BELOVED

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison looks back to the era after the end of the Civil War and tells the story of Sethe, a woman who had been a slave and who escaped with her four children from a Kentucky plantation in 1855. She is a woman understandably affected by her past, and her memory of that time is bound with her belief that her dead daughter, Beloved, haunts the house in which she lives with her youngest daughter, Denver. Beloved is actually a real woman Sethe believes is her daughter reincarnated, though it is suggested rather that Beloved came on a slave ship with her mother and saw her mother throw herself overboard. Morrison's characters often have to find a way to live freely in the world after the experience of slavery, an experience that denied the humanity of black people and that continues to affect black Americans long after the end of the slave era.

In this novel, Morrison considers the moral taint of slavery, connected here with the mother-daughter relationship. Morrison does not simply show how bad slavery is as an imposition on blacks by whites. She considers more complex ills that derive from subsequent relations between slaves and former slaves. The mother-child relationship carries echoes of abandonment and suicide because of the past of these two women and because of the separation slavery often forced on families. Sethe and her daughter are isolated from the black community because of memories of their earlier slavery. Deborah Horvitz indica

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son uses these elements in order to create a particular kind of literary experience: Beloved (1987) reverses/undermines our expectations of what ghost stories should be, as well as any conceptions we have about succubi, shapeshifters, and demons. In that undermining, Morrison also blurs the lines of demarcation between history and fiction, folklore and legend, and makes it difficult for us to distinguish clearly what is art and what is life. Beloved also extends Morrison's use of folkloristic techniques in the shaping of her tale. By using multiple voices of creation in the novel Morrison illustrates how characters can be the subject as well as the transmitter/author of tales about themselves. Morrison also suggests here, as earlier, that a communal storytelling session is in progress, one in which the reader is as intimately involved as are the characters and the author. By breaking down the barriers between fiction and folkloristic process, Morrison . . . makes clear how saturated the folk materials are within her texts (Harris 13). It is important that Sethe's despair centers on her family, and her new-found freedom only suggests to her how terrible her slavery was so that she kills her child rather than allow the chi

Category: Literature - T