The Eighties in America Beloved 103
With four novels already under her belt, Toni Morri-
son was recognized as an important novelist in the
mid-1980’s, butBeloved(1987) both confirmed and
extended her reputation. The Civil Rights move-
ment of the previous decades had begun to teach
white America the importance of looking seriously
at the lives of African Americans, and 1977’s widely
watched television miniseriesRootshad made Ameri-
cans look at slavery with fresh eyes. Thus, the nation
seemed ready for the lessons ofBelovedand for Mor-
rison’s portrayal of a group of slaves just after the
Civil War trying to establish new lives and a commu-
nity in Cincinnati.
The novel’s central character is the former slave
Sethe; its title character is a mysterious woman who
joins Sethe’s household and who may be the ghost of
the infant Sethe murdered in a desperate gesture to
keep the child from being taken back into slavery.
The power of the past to hold the present hostage
thus becomes a central theme of the novel. Just as
Sethe and her living daughter, Denver, are trapped
by Beloved, other characters are also burdened with
the events of their slave-lives, events that are bru-
tally portrayed in a number of graphic flashbacks.
Among its other themes, the novel suggests the
power of women to forge a family.Belovedis a com-
plex work, incorporating images linked to the whole
history of slavery while it tells the story of a small
community of slavery’s survivors.Beloved received
immediate critical praise and was nominated for
both the National Book Award and the National
Book Critics Circle Award in 1987. When it won nei-
ther prize, forty-eight African American writers were
moved to write a letter of protest toThe New York
Times. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in literature
for 1988, making Morrison the second African-
American woman to be so honored, but the contro-
versy left bad feelings in the literary community. In
1998,Belovedwas made into a film starring Oprah
Winfrey. While championed by some critics, the film
failed at the box office.Impact Belovedwas soon widely recognized, espe-
cially within an American academy that had begun
to embrace multiculturalism, as one of the most im-
portant American novels of the decade, if not the
century. The novel spoke to the core of American
identity in a new way, deepening the picture of slav-
ery in the minds of both black and white Americans:
Among its other themes, it invited readers to con-
sider why a loving mother would be willing to mur-
der her child rather than see bounty hunters carry
the child back to the plantation from which her
mother escaped. It also invited readers to consider
the power of memory, both for the characters and
for African Americans of later generations, for
whom slavery was as powerful a memory as it was for
Sethe.Further Reading
Eckstein, Lars. “A Love Supreme: Jazzthetic Strat-
egies in Toni Morrison’sBeloved.”African Ameri-
can Review40, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 271-284.
Franco, Dean. “What We Talk About When We Talk
AboutBeloved.”Modern Fiction Studies52, no. 2
(Summer 2006): 415-440.
“Novel Suggestions.”The Christian Centur y123, no.
12 (June 13, 2006): 7.
Weinstein, Philip M.What Else but Love? The Ordeal of
Race in Faulkner and Morrison. New York: Colum-
bia University Press, 1996.
Ann D. GarbettSee also African Americans; Feminism; Literature
in the United States; Multiculturalism in education;
Racial discrimination; Winfrey, Oprah.Toni Morrison.(Stephen Chernin/Reuters/Landov)