Beloved (book)
From AwardAnnals
| Book: | Beloved |
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| Author: | Toni Morrison |
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| Publisher: | Plume Books |
Woven into this circular, mesmerizing narrative are the horrible truths of Sethe’s past: the incredible cruelties she endured as a slave, and the hardships she suffered in her journey north to freedom. Just as Sethe finds the past too painful to remember, and the future just “a matter of keeping the past at bay,” her story is almost too painful to read. Yet Morrison manages to imbue the wreckage of her characters’ lives with compassion, humanity, and humor.
Part ghost story, part history lesson, part folk tale, Beloved finds beauty in the unbearable, and lets us all see the enduring promise of hope that lies in anyone’s future.
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Reviews
Amazon.com
In the troubled years following the Civil War, the spirit of a murdered child haunts the Ohio home of a former slave. This angry, destructive ghost breaks mirrors, leaves its fingerprints in cake icing, and generally makes life difficult for Sethe and her family; nevertheless, the woman finds the haunting oddly comforting for the spirit is that of her own dead baby, never named, thought of only as Beloved.
A dead child, a runaway slave, a terrible secret—these are the central concerns of Toni Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Beloved. Morrison, a Nobel laureate, has written many fine novels, including Song of Solomon, The Bluest Eye, and Paradise—but Beloved is arguably her best. To modern readers, antebellum slavery is a subject so familiar that it is almost impossible to render its horrors in a way that seems neither clichéd nor melodramatic. Rapes, beatings, murders, and mutilations are recounted here, but they belong to characters so precisely drawn that the tragedy remains individual, terrifying to us because it is terrifying to the sufferer. And Morrison is master of the telling detail: in the bit, for example, a punishing piece of headgear used to discipline recalcitrant slaves, she manages to encapsulate all of slavery’s many cruelties into one apt symbol—a device that deprives its wearer of speech. “Days after it was taken out, goose fat was rubbed on the corners of the mouth but nothing to soothe the tongue or take the wildness out of the eye.” Most importantly, the language here, while often lyrical, is never overheated. Even as she recalls the cruelties visited upon her while a slave, Sethe is evocative without being overemotional: “Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft—hiding close by—the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn’t look at at all. And not stopping them—looking and letting it happen…. And if he was that broken then, then he is also and certainly dead now.” Even the supernatural is treated as an ordinary fact of life: “Not a house in the country ain’t packed to its rafters with some dead Negro’s grief. We lucky this ghost is a baby,” comments Sethe’s mother-in-law.
Beloved is a dense, complex novel that yields up its secrets one by one. As Morrison takes us deeper into Sethe’s history and her memories, the horrifying circumstances of her baby’s death start to make terrible sense. And as past meets present in the shape of a mysterious young woman about the same age as Sethe’s daughter would have been, the narrative builds inexorably to its powerful, painful conclusion. Beloved may well be the defining novel of slavery in America, the one that all others will be measured by. —Alix Wilber
Barnes and Noble
The Measure of a Life: Toni Morrison
“I’m not trying to cast blame,” explained author Toni Morrison in a recent interview about her racially revisionist literature. “I’m just trying to look at something without blinking.” That is certainly an apt description of her approach to the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved: In it she has focused her steady gaze on a dreadful episode in American history—slavery and its aftermath—and the result is a spellbinding masterpiece of both exquisite beauty and pain. Set shortly after the Civil War in rural Ohio, the story revolves around Sethe, a runaway slave literally haunted by the legacy of her past—a past that she tries desperately to repress, but one that the supernatural forces in her house won’t let her forget. Her home is “spiteful…full of baby’s venom,” and reverberates with the angry rumblings of her dead baby daughter. Eerie red light, rattling furniture, and overturned dishes are commonplace. Sethe’s love for this child was so deep that it proved deadly: She murdered the girl rather than see her returned to a life of slavery. Terrorized by the ghost, Sethe’s sons have run off; her treasured mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, has died; and she lives in virtual isolation with her adolescent daughter, Denver. When Paul D.—an ex-slave from the Sweet Home plantation where Sethe was held in bondage—shows up on her doorstep, Sethe’s life changes abruptly. Not only must she endure a surge of memories, but the previously incorporeal ghost suddenly manifests itself in the form of a strange but seductive young woman named Beloved.
Beloved is but one of many critically acclaimed works by the prolific Morrison. Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in 1931, Morrison read ravenously as a child and went on to earn an English degree from Howard and a master’s from Cornell University. She has held teaching positions at countless colleges—Yale University, Bard College, and Rutgers among them. Before devoting herself fully to her own fiction, she worked for 20 years as a senior editor at Random House. Since 1989, she has held a university chair in humanities at Princeton University, and has won numerous awards, most notably the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature. As the eighth woman and the first African American to have received the award, she is now one of the most respected figures in American letters.
A vocal force in the once-silenced community of African-American women, Morrison is devoted to the potency and potential of language. “We die,” she has said. “That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” If language is indeed the measure of our lives, then she has lived one of unparalleled eloquence. For her prose is unquestionably dazzling. Like an alchemist transforming dross to gold, Morrison turns words into living, breathing, shimmering entities, into pulsating colors, vibrant sounds, pungent smells. So vivid is Beloved’s fictional world—the white staircase in Sethe’s house, Denver’s boxwood hiding place—that the reader becomes a part of it. And so acutely are the characters’ emotions drawn—Beloved’s bottomless rage, Baby Suggs’s bone-tired exhaustion—that we identify with each of them. Whether writing in narrative form or indulging in occasional poetic riffs, Morrison taps into universal human dilemmas and reaches us at the deepest level.
This is not to say that her prose is easy. Her convoluted narrative style is often compared with that of fellow Nobel laureate William Faulkner. In Beloved, neither plot nor time is linear. The past overlaps the present; memory—or “rememory,” as she calls it—bleeds into every scene. To maintain suspense, Morrison withholds information, but drops clues on every page—tantalizing hints of Sethe’s crime or Beloved’s identity. The details accumulate until you find yourself suddenly gasping with comprehension, and then wildly rifling back through the pages to reread earlier scenes that only now make sense.
Readers intimidated by such complexity might be tempted to skip the book and head straight for the new movie adaptation, which producer Oprah Winfrey and director Jonathan Demme have handled with grace and dexterity. Their lushly photographed film stays faithful to the book’s lyricism, dialogue, and memory-driven structure. The casting is ideal: Danny Glover makes an endearing Paul D., and Oprah Winfrey plays Sethe with just the right iron-eyed determination. Although Thandie Newton’s portrayal of Beloved is at times over the top—veering into Exorcist territory—the uninhibited force she brings to the role is riveting.
And yet, no film adaptation—not even one as artistic and insightful as Demme’s—can match the power of Morrison’s novel. The movie shares the book’s slowly unraveling mystery and its unflinching depictions of slavery, but it loses much, simply due to its medium. Three hours are not nearly enough to cover the array or depth of Morrison’s characters. We only skim the surface of Denver, Baby Suggs, Paul D., and others. We never learn the intimate details of their pasts. Nor do we hear their internal dialogue—so essential in a novel of ever-shifting perspectives. Plenty of vital characters don’t appear at all. And the importance of the African-American community—whose support, or lack thereof, plays such a huge role in all of Morrison’s books—is diminished in the film.
Though Beloved is Morrison’s undisputed masterpiece, all her books are remarkable. Each bears her trademark touches: elegant prose, fantastical occurrences, striking characters, and racial tension. Her first and perhaps most accessible novel is the short and searing The Bluest Eye, in which a girl is driven mad by her hunger for an unattainable symbol of white beauty—blue eyes. Her second novel, Sula, is an oft-overlooked gem, a portrait of female friendship between a conformist and a rebel. Song of Solomon, winner of the 1977 National Book Critics Award, distinguishes itself from her other works for its straightforward plot flow and its male protagonist, who must embrace his heritage in order to mature. Although Tar Baby, with its Caribbean setting and its privileged characters—a pampered black model and a rich white couple among them—is sometimes considered Morrison’s most commercial book, it is as provocative and sumptuously rendered as the rest. Her most challenging books are her most recent ones: a trilogy of novels (each with a different cast of characters) intended as a retelling of the black experience in America from slavery to the present day. Jazz, the second in the trilogy after Beloved, evokes a jealous love triangle in early black Harlem, in a literary style as dizzy and ingenious as a Coltrane improvisation. And in Paradise, the third and most controversial of the series, a posse of men from an all-black town descends upon a convent of wayward women to murder the inhabitants. Published earlier this year, Paradise is a complex work that has received plenty of praise, but also substantial criticism. In addition to her seven novels, Morrison has written a play, “Dreaming Emmett,” and a book of essays entitled Playing in the Dark.
“My job,” she says, “is to make sure whatever journey I invite a reader to, I am there to accompany them, to offer a palm to hold.” And it is our job, as readers, to take that hand and to dive fearlessly into the fictional worlds she has created. To decline Morrison’s invitation would be to deprive ourselves of some of the most sublime, transformative literature of our time. —Lilan Patri
Related works
Beloved: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
It makes perfect sense that Beloved, Jonathan Demme’s adaptation of Toni Morrison’s acclaimed novel, brims with haunting and mysterious melodies. This is, after all, a story about the repercussions of slavery. Native American flutes and African percussion permeate Rachel Portman’s score, as do the haunting vocals of Oumou Sangare. The powerful yet sparse contributions from the Malian vocalist give the disc heavenly atmospherics, while the music—though ponderous at times—brims with intensity. “Cincinnati Streets” and “Vaccine” both feature a frantic patter…
