BELOVED BY TONI MORRISON

Beloved (1987) is a Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Toni Morrison. The novel, her fifth, is loosely based on the life and legal case of the slave Margaret Garner, about whom Morrison later wrote in the opera Margaret Garner (2005). The book's epigraph reads: "Sixty Million and more," by which Morrison refers to the estimated number of slaves who died in the slave trade.
In 1998 the novel was adapted into a film of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey.
A survey of writers and literary critics conducted by The New York Times found Beloved the best work of American fiction of the past 25 years; it garnered 15 of 125 votes, finishing ahead of Don DeLillo's Underworld (11 votes), Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian (8) and John Updike's Rabbit series (8). The results appeared in The New York Times Book Review on May 21, 2006.
Time Magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.

Plot summary

The book follows the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver as they try to rebuild their lives after having escaped from slavery. 124 Bluestone, the house they inhabit, is haunted; a revenant, which turns out to be the ghost of Sethe's murdered daughter, visits there with an alarming regularity. Because of this, Sethe's youngest daughter, Denver, has no friends and is extremely shy. Howard and Buglar, Sethe's sons, run away from home by the time they are thirteen because of the ghost's persistent torment. Shortly afterwards, Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband Halle, dies in her bed.
Paul D, one of the slaves from Sweet Home, the plantation where Baby Suggs, Sethe, Halle, he, and many other slaves had worked in and either been freed or run away from, arrives at 124. He tries to bring a sense of reality into the house. He also tries to make the family move forward in time and leave the past behind. In doing so, he forces out the ghost of Beloved. At first, he seems to be successful, because he leads the family to a carnival, out of the house for the first time in years. However, on their way back, they encounter a young woman sitting in front of the house. She has distinct features of a baby and calls herself Beloved. Denver recognizes right away that she must be a reincarnation of her sister Beloved. Paul D, suspicious of her, warns Sethe, but charmed by the young woman, Sethe ignores him. Paul D finds himself being gradually forced out of Sethe's home by a supernatural presence. When he is finally made to sleep in a shed outside, he is cornered by Beloved, who has put a spell on him for this purpose. She burrows into his mind and his heart, forcing him to have sex with her, while flooding his consciousness with horrific memories from his past. Paul D, overwhelmed with guilt after the incident, attempts to tell Sethe, but cannot and instead tells her he wants her pregnant. Sethe is humored and elated by his wishes, and Paul D finds the power to resist Beloved and her influence over him. However, when he tells his friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react negatively and fearfully. Stamp Paid then reveals to Paul D the reason for the community's rejection of Sethe. When Paul D asks Sethe about it, she tells him what happened all those years ago. After escaping from Sweet Home and making it to her mother-in-law's home where her children are waiting, Sethe is found by her master, schoolteacher, who attempts to reclaim Sethe and her children. In a heightened panic, Sethe grabs her children, runs into the tool shed and tries to kill them all, succeeding only with her oldest daughter. Sethe explains to Paul D her reasoning for doing it, stating she was "trying to put my babies where they would be safe." However, the revelation is too much for Paul D, who later leaves the house for good. Without Paul D, the sense of reality and moving time disappears.
Sethe comes to believe that the girl, Beloved, is the daughter Sethe murdered by slitting her throat with a handsaw when the child was only two years old, and whose tombstone reads only "Beloved". Upon this realization, Sethe begins to spend carelessly and spoil Beloved out of guilt. Beloved recognizes her mother's guilt and becomes angry and more demanding, throwing hellish tantrums when she doesn't get her way. Beloved's presence consumes Sethe's life to the point where she becomes depleted and even sacrifices her own need for eating, while Beloved grows bigger and bigger. In the climax of the novel Denver, the youngest daughter, reaches out and searches for help from the black community. People arrive at 124 to exorcize Beloved. However, while Sethe is confused and has a "rememory" of schoolteacher coming again, Beloved disappears.
At the outset, the reader is led to assume Beloved is a supernatural, incarnate form of Sethe's murdered daughter. Later, Stamp Paid reveals the story of "a girl locked up by a white man over by Deer Creek. Found him dead last summer and the girl gone. Maybe that's her". Both are supportable by the text. The possibility that Beloved is the murdered child is supported by the fact that she sings a song known only to Sethe and her children; elsewhere, she speaks of Sethe's earrings without having seen them.

Major themes

Mother-daughter relationships

The maternal bonds that connect Sethe to her children inhibit her own individuation and prevent the development of her self. Sethe develops a dangerous maternal passion that results in the murder of one daughter, her own "best self," and the estrangement of the surviving daughter from the black community, both in an attempt to salvage her "fantasy of the future," her children, from a life in slavery. However, Sethe fails to recognize her daughter Denver's need for interaction with this community in order to enter into womanhood. Denver finally succeeds at the end of the novel in establishing her own self and embarking on her individuation with the help of Beloved. Contrary to Denver, Sethe only reaches individuation after Beloved's exorcism, at which point Sethe can fully accept the first relationship that is completely "for her," her relationship with Paul D. This relationship relieves Sethe from the ensuing destruction of her self that resulted from the maternal bonds controlling her life. Beloved and Sethe are both very much emotionally impaired as a result of Sethe's previous enslavement. Slavery creates a situation where a mother is separated from her child, which has devastating consequences for both parties. Often, mothers do not know themselves to be anything except a mother, so when they are unable to provide maternal care for their children, or their children are taken away from them, they feel a lost sense of self. Similarly, when a child is separated from his or her mother, he or she loses the familial identity associated with mother-child relationships. Sethe was never able to see her mother's true face (because her smile was distorted from having spent too much time "with the bit") so she wasn't able to connect with her own mother, and therefore does not know how to connect to her own children, even though she longs to. Furthermore, the earliest need a child has is related to the mother: the baby needs milk from the mother. Sethe is traumatized by the experience of having her milk stolen because it means she cannot form the symbolic bond between herself and her daughter.

Psychological impact of slavery

Because of the painful nature of the experiences of slavery, most slaves repressed these memories in an attempt to leave behind a horrific past. This repression and dissociation from the past causes a fragmentation of the self and a loss of true identity. Sethe, Paul D. and Denver all experience this loss of self, which could only be remedied by the acceptance of the past and the memory of their original identities. In a way Beloved serves to open these characters up to their repressed memories, eventually causing the reintegration of their selves. Slavery splits a person into a fragmented figure. The identity, consisting of painful memories and unspeakable past, denied and kept at bay, becomes a 'self that is no self.' To heal and humanise, one must constitute it in a language, reorganize the painful events and retell the painful memories. As a result of suffering, the 'self', subject to a violent practice of making and unmaking, once acknowledged by an audience becomes real. Sethe, Paul D, and Baby Suggs who all fall short of such realization, are unable to 'remake' their 'selves' by trying to keep their pasts at bay. The 'self' is located in a word, defined by others. The power lies in the audience, or more precisely, in the word - once the word changes, so does the identity. All of the characters in Beloved face the challenge of an unmade 'self', composed of their 'rememories' and defined by perceptions and language. The barrier that keeps them from 'remaking' of the 'self' is the desire for an 'uncomplicated past' and the fear that remembering will lead them to 'a place they couldn't get back from'.[8]

Film adaptation

In 1998, the novel was made into a film directed by Jonathan Demme and produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey.

Legacy

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.
Beloved received the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, which is named for an editor of Publishers Weekly. In accepting the award on October 12, 1988, Morrison observed that "there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby" honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States. "There's no small bench by the road," she continued. "And because such a place doesn't exist (that I know of), the book had to." Inspired by her remarks, the Toni Morrison Society has now begun to install benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America. The New York Times reported July 28, 2008, that the first "bench by the road" was dedicated July 26 on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, which served as the point of entry for approximately 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States.