Beloved - Tony Morrison

 Tony Morrison's Biography:

Toni Morrison (Chloe Ardelia Wofford) was born on February 18, 1931,  the second of four children from a working-class, Black family, in Lorain, Ohio, to Ramah and George Wofford. 

Morrison graduated from Howard University in 1953 with a B.A. in English. She earned a master's degree in American Literature from Cornell University in 1955.

In 1957 she returned to Howard University, While teaching at Howard University from 1957 to 1964, she met Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect, whom she married in 1958, and had two children before divorcing in 1964. 

After her divorce and the birth of her son Slade in 1965, Morrison began working as an editor for L. W. Singer, a textbook division of publisher Random House, in New York, where she became their first black woman senior editor in the fiction department in the 1960s.

In 1987, Morrison published her most celebrated novel, Beloved. It was inspired by the true story of an enslaved African-American woman, Margaret Garner, whose story Morrison had discovered when compiling The Black Book. Garner had escaped slavery but was pursued by slave hunters. Facing a return to slavery, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter but was captured before she could kill herself. Morrison's novel imagines the dead baby returning as a ghost, Beloved, to haunt her mother and family.

Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks. The New York Times book reviewer Michiko Kakutani wrote that the scene of the mother killing her baby is "so brutal and disturbing that it appears to warp time before and after into a single unwavering line of fate."

Not all critics praised Beloved, however. African-American conservative social critic Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic that the novel "reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries," and that Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials".

Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. It also won an Anisfield-Wolf Book Award.

Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy. Morrison said that they are intended to be read together, explaining, "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you."

Trilogy of Beloved:

Beloved

Jazz

Paradise 

Before the third novel of the Beloved Trilogy was published, Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. The citation praised her as an author "who in novels characterised by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality." She was the first Black woman of any nationality to win the prize.

Morrison died in New York City, on August 5, 2019, from complications of pneumonia. She was 88 years old.

Themes and practices in Tony Morrison's Novels:

Sense of Loss; Freedom and "Bad" Men;  Roots, Community, and Identity; Responsibility; Ancestors; Good and Evil; Extreme Situations; Loss of Innocence.

Toni Morrison's Novels:

THE BLUEST EYES (1970);

SULA (1973);

SONG OF SALOMON (1977);

TAR BABY (1981);

BELOVED (1987);

JAZZ (1992);

PARADISE (1997);

LOVE (2003);

A MERCY (2008);

AWARDS

1977 - National Book Critics Circle Award for Song of Solomon;

1993- Nobel Prize for Literature;

1977 - American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award;

1994 - Condorcet Medal, Paris;

1987-88 - Robert F. Kennedy Book Award;

1988 - Helmerich Award;

2005 - Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Oxford University;

1988 - American Book Award for Beloved;

2011 - Honorary Doctor of Letters at Rutgers University Graduation Commencement;

1988 - Anisfield-Wolf Book Award in Race Relations for Beloved;

2011-  Honorary Doctorate of Letters from the University of Geneva;

1988 - Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved;

2012-  Received Presidential Medal of Freedom;

Beloved:-

Beloved is a 1987 novel by American novelist Toni Morrison. Set in the period after the American Civil War, the novel tells the story of a dysfunctional family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. The narrative of Beloved derives from the life of Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in the slave state of Kentucky who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856.

Morrison's main inspiration for the novel was an account of the event titled "A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child" in an 1856 newspaper article initially published in the American Baptist and reproduced in The Black Book, an anthology of texts of Black history and culture that Morrison had edited in 1974.

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction a year after its publication, and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. A survey of writers and literary critics compiled by The New York Times ranked it as the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006. It was adapted as a 1998 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey.

Beloved:

Written: 1980s

Published: 1987

Theme: Slavery, Grief, Past Memory, Motherhood and Family & Community.

Setting: Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky & Cincinnati, Ohio

Genre: Historical novel, Gothic horror story & Bildungsroman

Slavery:

Through the memories and experiences of a wide variety of characters, Beloved presents unflinchingly the unthinkable cruelty of slavery. In particular, the novel explores how slavery dehumanizes slaves, treating them alternately as property and as animals. To a slave-owner like Schoolteacher, African-American slaves are less than human: he thinks of them only in terms of how much money they are worth, and talks of “mating” them as if they are animals. Paul D’s experience of having an iron bit in his mouth quite literally reduces him to the status of an animal. And Schoolteacher’s nephews at one point hold Sethe down and steal her breast milk, treating her like a cow.

Even seemingly “kind” slave-owners like Mr. and Mrs. Garner abuse their slaves and treat them as lesser beings. Slavery also breaks up family units: Sethe can hardly remember her own mother and, for slaves, this is the norm rather than an exception, as children are routinely sold off to work far away from their families. Another important aspect of slavery in the novel is the fact that its effects are felt even after individuals find freedom. After Sethe and her family flee Sweet Home, slavery haunts them in numerous ways, whether through painful memories, literal scars, or their former owner himself, who finds Sethe and attempts to bring her and her children back to Sweet Home. Slavery is an institution so awful that Sethe kills her own baby, and attempts to kill all her children, to save them from being dragged back into it. Through the haunting figure of Beloved, and the memories that so many of the characters try and fail to hide from, Beloved shows how the institutionalised practice of slavery has lasting consequences physical, psychological, and societal even after it ends.

Motherhood

At its core, Beloved is a novel about a mother and her children, centred around the relationship between Sethe and the unnamed daughter she kills, as well as the strange rebirth of that daughter in the form of Beloved. When Sethe miraculously escapes Sweet Home, it is only because of the determination she has to reach her children, nurse her baby, and deliver Denver safely. Similarly, Halle works extra time in order to the freedom of his own mother, Baby Suggs, before seeking his own freedom. The strength of mother-child bonds are further illustrated by the close relationship between Denver and Sethe, upon which Paul D intrudes. But, within the novel, the strength of motherhood is constantly pitted against the horrors of slavery. In a number of ways, slavery simply does not allow for motherhood. On a basic level, the practice of slavery separates children from their mothers, as exemplified by Sethe’s faint recollections of her own mother. Since it is so likely for a slave-woman to be separated from her children, the institution of slavery discourages and prevents mothers from forming strong emotional attachments to their children. As Paul D observes of Sethe and Denver, “to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love.” The scene in which Sethe is held down and robbed of her own breast milk shows, on a cruelly literal level, Sethe being robbed of her very bodily capability to be a nurturing mother. The conflict between motherhood and slavery is perhaps clearest in the central act of the novel: Sethe’s killing her own daughter. The act can be read two ways: on the one hand, it represents an act of the deepest motherly love: Sethe saving her children from having to endure slavery, believing that death is better. But on the other hand, it can also be interpreted as Sethe refusing to be a mother under slavery. Slavery would not allow her to be a real mother to her children, so she would rather not be a mother at all.

Storytelling, Memory, and the Past

The past does not simply go away in Beloved, but continues to exert influence in the present in a number of ways. The most obvious example of this is the ghost of Sethe’s dead daughter. Though literally buried, the baby continues to be present in 124 as a kind of ghost or poltergeist. But beyond this instance of the supernatural, Sethe teaches Denver that “Some things just stay,” and that nothing ever really dies. Sweet Home, for example, although firmly in Sethe’s past, continues to haunt her through painful memories and the reappearance of Schoolteacher and even Paul D. As the novel continually moves between present narration and past memory, its very form also denies any simple separation between past and present. Sethe’s term for this kind of powerful memory is “rememory”, a word that she uses to describe memories that affect not only the person who remembers the past, but others as well. One of the ways in which memories live on is through storytelling. The novel explores the value but also the danger of storytelling. Storytelling keeps memories alive and Sethe’s telling Denver about her family and her miraculous birth gives Denver some sense of personal history and heritage. As stories spread between Sethe, Baby Suggs, Paul D, and Denver, personal memories give rise to a kind of collective oral tradition about the past, and offer former slaves the ability to tell their own story and define themselves, as opposed to constantly being defined by slave-owners, such as Schoolteacher (who takes notes for his own writings about his slaves). But storytelling also awakens painful memories, especially for Sethe and Paul D. Bringing up past pain can prevent characters from moving on. The end of the novel suggests that, after Beloved’s disappearance, people had to forget about her in order to go on living, as it repeats, “It was not a story to pass on.” But nonetheless, Toni Morrison’s novel does pass on the story of Beloved, suggesting that there still is some value in our learning about this painful story of the past, that as a nation we should not (and cannot) forget about the history of slavery.

Community:

One of the ways that communities find expression in Beloved is through song. Baby Suggs’ sermons are centered around song and dance, while the group of women that forces Beloved from the house does so by singing. Paul D and his fellow chain gang prisoners get through their labor by singing. A chorus of singing people provides the perfect example of the strength of operating as a community. The combined effect of a singing group is greater than that of all its individuals singing alone. Similarly, in order to endure slavery and its lasting effects, characters in Beloved rely on each other for strength.

As the practice of slavery breaks up family units, Beloved provides numerous examples of slaves and ex-slaves creating and relying upon strong communities beyond the immediate family. Baby Suggs’ congregation that gathers in the woods illustrates this, as neighbouring African-Americans come together as a community. They come together again toward the end of the novel, as different families provide food for Sethe and Denver when they are in need and a large group of women come to 124 to exorcize, in a manner of speaking, Beloved from the house.

Even in the depths of slavery, when Paul D is on the chain gang, he and the other prisoners escape by cooperating as a team. And it is only through the communal network of the Underground Railroad that Sethe and many other slaves are able to find their way to freedom and establish new lives in the north. At the same time, the novel’s most tragic act—Sethe’s killing of her baby—is partially caused by a failure of community. The community’s resentment about the joyousness and opulence of the feast that Baby Suggs puts together—which the community interprets as being prideful—leads to the community’s failure to warn Baby Suggs or Sethe of Schoolteacher’s approach, and thus Sethe is unable to hide and instead is forced to act quickly and radically.

Home:

Beloved is split into three major sections, and each of these sections begins not with any description of a character, but with a short sentence describing Sethe’s house: “124 was spiteful.” Then, “124 was loud.” And finally, “124 was quiet.” As 124 is haunted, it seems to have a mind of its own and is almost a character of the novel in its own right. The house is extremely important to Baby Suggs and Sethe as a matter of pride. After escaping slavery, they are proud to finally have a home of their own (the ironically named Sweet Home was neither sweet nor a home for its slave inhabitants).

But the idea of a home is important in Beloved beyond the walls of 124. As a child, Denver finds a kind of home in a growth of boxwood shrubs, a place that feels her own. Paul D spends practically the whole novel searching for a home. He is unable to settle down anywhere and, after much wandering, finally arrives at 124 but gradually moves out of the home into the outdoor cold house before leaving to sleep in the church basement. Slavery has robbed Paul D, like many others, of a home so that, even after he finds freedom, he can never find a place where he feels he truly belongs. These characters’ attempts to find a home can be seen as a consequence of the original dislocation of African-American slaves from their African home, the horrible voyage known as the middle passage that is vividly recalled by Beloved.

Symbols:

The Supernatural

Morrison enhances the world of Beloved by investing it with a supernatural dimension. While it is possible to interpret the book’s paranormal phenomena within a realist framework, many events in the novel most notably, the presence of a ghost push the limits of ordinary understanding. Moreover, the characters in Beloved do not hesitate to believe in the supernatural status of these events. For them, poltergeists, premonitions, and hallucinations are ways of understanding the significance of the world around them. Such occurrences stand in marked contrast to schoolteacher’s perverse hyper- “scientific” and empirical studies.

The Haint

The haint is the spirit of Sethe’s baby daughter who haunts house 124. A temperamental spirit whose behaviour vacillates between calm and turbulent, the haint reflects the violent conditions under which Sethe’s baby daughter died. In its invisible form, the haint is also a representation of Sethe’s residual anger and pain over the hardships she experienced during her enslavement. Despite the unstable nature of her pain, Sethe’s repression causes her to ignore the magnitude of her suffering as well as the extent of the haint’s destruction in the house. Paul D suggests to Sethe that the haint’s temper may have something to do with an unfulfilled desire: “‘Must be something you got it wants’”. As Paul D notices, the haint is attached to Sethe’s traumas and reacts to the intensity of her internal struggle.

The haint eventually takes on corporeal form as Beloved when Paul D chases the spirit out of the house. In the form of a beautiful young woman, the haint becomes even more frightening and dangerous, as she cannot be physically ignored in the way the spirit, who came and went, could. Beloved quickly becomes a permanent resident of 124 and grows in strength when the three women live alone together in the house. When Sethe’s focus is no longer divided between her daughters and Paul D, Beloved’s demands for motherly affection grow in intensity. Sethe indulges Beloved’s demands as though “she doesn't really wants forgiveness given; she wants it refused”. At this point, Beloved has become the manifestation of Sethe’s guilt and inability to overcome her traumatic past. Sethe permits Beloved’s needs to overtake her, driving herself toward death until Denver’s intervention.

The Home

The house numbered 124 is a crucial setting for the haunted circumstances of the novel and represents the various means by which its residents try to overcome their traumatic pasts. Owned by the Bowdins and given to Grandma Baby Suggs’ care when they are no longer able to tend to it on their own, the house is an initial step toward freedom from slavery. However, since the traumatic events in the shed, the house has been conflated with the haint that haunts it. According to Denver, the house is “a person rather than a structure”. She further personifies this house as a “child approaching a nervous, idle relative someone dependent but proud”. Through this portrayal, Denver foreshadows the eventual appearance of Beloved, Sethe’s baby daughter returned to the world of the living to haunt the house in corporeal form. Beloved draws her strength from the house and by keeping Sethe bound to it. House 124 also consists of the shed in the backyard where Sethe goes to kill her children and herself to avoid being caught by slave catchers. The shed continues to be a place of darkness and indiscretion for the house’s residents.

Beloved utilises it to cruelly seduce Paul D and draw him away from Sethe. The shed is also where Beloved disappears during a mean-spirited game of hide-and-seek with Denver. During the game, Beloved gestures to the space between light and darkness in the shed and declares, “‘This is the place I am’”. In this way, Beloved refers not only to her existence between worlds, between the living and the afterlife, but also to her intimate ties to house 124.