- Chloe Anthony Wofford Morrison, known as Toni Morrison, was an American novelist. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published in 1970. The critically acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977) brought her national attention and won the National Book Critics Circle Award. In 1988, Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Beloved (1987); she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993.
- Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American writer Toni Morrison. Set after the American Civil War, it tells the story of a family of formerly enslaved people whose Cincinnati home is haunted by a malevolent spirit. Beloved is inspired by an event that actually happened: Margaret Garner, an enslaved person in Kentucky, who escaped and fled to the free state of Ohio in 1856. She was subject to capture in accordance with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850; when U.S. marshals burst into the cabin where Garner and her husband had barricaded themselves, she was attempting to kill her children, and had already killed her two-year-old daughter, to spare them from being returned to slavery.
- The book’s dedication reads “Sixty Million and more”, referring to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. The book’s epigraph is Romans 9:25.
- The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted as a 1998 movie of the same name, starring Oprah Winfrey. 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.
- Morrison had come across an account of Garner titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child” in an 1856 newspaper article published in the American Baptist, and reproduced in The Black Book, a miscellaneous compilation of black history and culture that Morrison edited in 1974.
- The publication of Beloved in 1987 resulted in the greatest acclaim yet for Morrison. Although nominated for the National Book Award, it did not win, and 48 African-American writers and critics—including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Angela Davis, Ernest J. Gaines, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Rosa Guy, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Louise Meriwether, Eugene Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, John Edgar Wideman, and John A. Williams—signed a letter of protest that was published in The New York Times Book Review on January 24, 1988. Yet later in 1988 Beloved did receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award, the Melcher Book Award, the Lyndhurst Foundation Award, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award.
- Awards
- Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, 1988
- Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, 1988
- Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award
- Melcher Book Award
- Lyndhurst Foundation Award
- Elmer Holmes Bobst Award
- In 1998, the novel was made into a film directed by Jonathan Demme, and produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey.
- Characters:
- Sethe: Sethe is the protagonist of the novel. She escaped slavery from a plantation called Sweet Home. She lives in the house named 124 (a house on 124 Bluestone Rd., but referred to only as “124”) which is believed to be haunted because she killed her infant child there. Her two sons have fled because of the haunting, and she resides in the house with her daughter Denver. She is motherly and will do anything to protect her children from suffering the same abuses she experienced when she was enslaved. She is greatly influenced by her repression of the trauma she endured,; she lives with “a tree on her back”, scars from being whipped. Her character is resilient, yet defined by her traumatic past. She was 19 years old when Denver was born, making her birth year to be 1836.
- Beloved: The opaque understanding of Beloved is central to the novel. She is a young woman who mysteriously appears from a body of water near Sethe’s house, and is discovered soaking wet on the doorstep by Sethe, Paul D, and Denver, on their return from visiting the fair; they take her in. She is widely believed to be the murdered baby who haunted 124, as the haunting ends when she arrives, and in many ways she behaves like a child. As also mentioned, a young woman enslaved by a White man nearby had escaped, and Beloved recounts stories of past slaves, including Sethe’s mother. Morrison stated that the character Beloved is the daughter Sethe killed. The murdered baby was unnamed, so her name is derived from the engraving on Sethe’s murdered baby’s tombstone, which simply read “Beloved” because Sethe could not afford to engrave the word “Dearly” or anything else. Beloved becomes a catalyst to bring repressed trauma of the family to the surface, but also creates madness in the house and slowly depletes Sethe.
- Paul D: Paul D retains his slave name; most of the enslaved men at Sweet Home were named Paul. He also retains many painful memories from enslavement and being forced to live in a chain gang; he had been moving around continuously before arriving at 124. He has a “tobacco tin” for a heart, in which he contains his painful memories, until Beloved opens it. Years after their time together at Sweet Home, Paul D and Sethe reunite and begin a romantic relationship. He acts fatherly towards Denver and is the first to be suspicious of Beloved. Despite their long past, he fails to understand Sethe fully because of her motherhood and because of the many years that had passed since.
- Denver: Denver is Sethe’s only child who remains at House 124. Isolated from her community after Beloved’s killing, Denver forms a close bond with her mother. Upon Beloved’s arrival, Denver watches as her sister’s ghost begins to exhibit demonic activity. Although introduced as a childish character, Denver develops into a protective woman throughout the novel. In the final chapters, Denver fights not only for her personal independence, but also for her mother’s wellbeing, breaking the cycle of isolation at House 124. She is 18 years old at the beginning of the novel.
- Baby Suggs: Baby Suggs is Sethe’s mother-in-law. Her son Halle worked to buy her freedom, after which she travels to Cincinnati and establishes herself as a respected leader in the community, preaching for the Black people to love themselves because other people will not. This respect turns sour after she turns some food into a feast, earning their envy, as well as Sethe’s act of infanticide. Baby Suggs retires to her bed, where she thinks about pretty colors for the rest of her life. She dies at 70 in the beginning of the book, 8 years before the main events.
- Halle: Halle is the son of Baby Suggs, the husband of Sethe and father of her children. Sethe and he were married in Sweet Home, yet they got separated during her escape. He is only mentioned in flashbacks. Paul D was the last to see Halle, churning butter at Sweet Home. He is presumed to have gone mad after seeing residents of Sweet Home violating Sethe. He is hardworking and good, qualities that Paul D sees in Denver at the end of the book, but ones that Baby Suggs fears make him a target.
- Schoolteacher: Schoolteacher is the primary discipliner, violent, abusive, and cruel to the people he enslaved at Sweet Home, whom he views as animals. He comes for Sethe following her escape, but she kills her daughter and is arrested, instead.
- Amy Denver: Amy Denver is a young white girl who finds Sethe desperately trying to make her way to safety after her escape from Sweet Home, trying to get to Boston herself. Sethe is extremely pregnant at the time, and her feet are bleeding badly from the travel. Amy helps nurture her and deliver Sethe’s daughter on a small boat, and Sethe names the child Denver after her.
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- Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio, with Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, and her 18-year-old daughter, Denver, who live at 124 Bluestone Road. The site has been haunted for years by what they believe is the ghost of Sethe’s eldest daughter. Denver is shy, friendless, and housebound. Sethe’s sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away from home by the age of 13, which she believes was due to the ghost. Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe’s husband, Halle, died soon after the boys fled, eight years before the start of the novel.
- One day, Paul D, one of the enslaved men from Sweet Home, the plantation where Sethe, Halle, Baby Suggs, and several others were once enslaved, arrives at Sethe’s home. He forces out the spirit, receiving Denver’s contempt for driving away her only companion, but persuades them to leave the house together for the first time in years for a carnival. Upon returning home, they find a young woman sitting in front of the house who calls herself Beloved. Paul D is suspicious and warns Sethe, but she is charmed by the young woman and ignores him. Denver is eager to care for the sickly Beloved, whom she begins to believe is her older sister come back.
- Paul D begins to feel increasingly uncomfortable in the house and that he is being driven out. One night, Paul D is cornered by Beloved, who demands sex. While they have sex, his mind is filled with horrific memories from his past, including the sexual violence inflicted upon him and the other men in the chain gang he was part of. Paul D tries to tell Sethe about it, but cannot. Instead, he says that he wants her pregnant. Sethe is afraid to have to live for a baby. When Paul D tells friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react fearfully. One, Stamp Paid, reveals the reason for the community’s rejection of Sethe.
- Paul D confronts Sethe, who tells him that after escaping and joining her children at 124, four horsemen came to return her children and her to a life of slavery. Sethe, terrified of returning to Sweet Home and its vicious manager Schoolteacher, ran to the woodshed with her children to kill them, but only managed to kill her eldest daughter. Sethe says that she was “trying to put my babies where they would be safe”. Paul D leaves, telling her her love is “too thick”; she retorts that “thin love is no love”, adamant that she did the right thing.
- Sethe comes to believe that Beloved is the daughter she had killed, as “BELOVED” was all she could afford to have engraved on her tombstone. She is overjoyed, holding onto a hope that Halle and her sons will come back and they will all be a family together. Out of guilt, she begins to spend all of her time and money on Beloved to please her and try to explain her actions, and loses her job. Beloved becomes angry and demanding, throwing tantrums when she does not get her way. Beloved’s presence consumes Sethe’s life. She hardly eats, while Beloved grows bigger and bigger, eventually taking the form of a pregnant woman. Denver reveals her fear of Sethe, having known that she killed Beloved, but not having understood why, and that her brothers shared this fear and ran away due to it. Sethe and Beloved’s voices merge until indistinguishable, and Denver observes that Sethe becomes more like a child, while Beloved seems more like the mother.
- Denver reaches out to the Black community for help, from whom they had been isolated because of envy of Baby Suggs’ privilege and horror at Sethe killing her two-year-old daughter. Local women come to the house to exorcise Beloved. At the same time, their White landlord, Mr. Bodwin, arrives to offer a job to Denver, who had asked him for work. Not knowing this, Sethe attacks him with an ice pick, thinking he was Schoolteacher coming back for her daughter. The village women and Denver hold her back and Beloved disappears.
- Denver becomes a working member of the community, and Paul D returns to a bed-ridden Sethe, who, devastated at Beloved’s disappearance, remorsefully tells him that Beloved was her “best thing”. He replies that Sethe is her own “best thing”, leaving her questioning, “Me? Me?” As time goes on, those who knew Beloved gradually forget her until all traces of her are gone.
Plot:
