Beloved



Beloved

Introduction

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel is now regarded as one of the most important works of fiction of the late 20th century. The novel's plot is based loosely on the life of Margaret Garner, a woman who escaped from slavery with her children across the Ohio River and, when recaptured, killed her own daughter rather than allow her to be returned to slavery. Written in an experimental narrative style, Beloved explores the deep historical scars of slavery on American identity, motherhood, and the family; it also offers a promise of healing and a future beyond these traumas.

Discussion

There is perhaps no better justification for the challenging modernist methods of chronological dislocation, fragmentation, and blending of fantasy and realism than Toni Morrison's remarkable attempt to come to imaginative terms with the enormity of slavery and the American past in Beloved (Mobley, 1993).

Narrated in a series of flashbacks, assembled gradually from the limited perspective of its characters, Beloved opens in 1873, 18 years after the defining trauma in the life of Sethe, a former slave on a Kentucky farm called Sweet Home. Sethe lives in an isolated house outside Cincinnati with her 18-yearold daughter, Denver, and the ghost of Sethe's dead baby girl, named by the inscription on her tombstone, Beloved. The novel's setting during Reconstruction is symbolically appropriate for its search for wholeness, the effort to rebuild an identity, a family, and a community shattered by the enormous human waste and dehumanization of slavery.

The main characters of Beloved are Sethe and her daughter Denver, who are living in Ohio after escaping Sweet Home, the plantation owned by Schoolmaster where they were slaves. Their new home, set apart and unvisited by neighbors, is haunted by the memory and physical presence of the unnamed two-year-old child—called only "Beloved" on her grave marker—whom Sethe ...