Paul D, a friend from her Sweet Home days, and the appearance of Beloved,
possibly the embodied ghost of her murdered child. Practically every item in
the novel has symbolic import, including the house number, 124—the 3, like
her third child, is missing—making it a complex and challenging read both
structurally and emotionally. Two-thirds of the way through the novel stream-
of-consciousness chapters are presented, alternately representing the voices of
Sethe, Denver (Sethe’s remaining daughter), Beloved, and the consciousness of
slaves being brought to America in wretched conditions on slave ships during
the Middle Passage.
Beloved gives voice to the traumatic experience of blacks during slavery,
long ignored in this country, at least at the level at which Morrison addresses it.
She articulated a horrific history through a combination of graphic depictions
of physical realities suffered by slaves, probing psychological explorations of the
enslaved and their enslavers, the use of the supernatural as an evocation of the
power of the past in present lives, and her distinctive, lyrical, poetic, complex
prose. Her belief in the power of language is perhaps best expressed in her Nobel
Prize acceptance speech: “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do
language. That may be the measure of our lives.”
Toni Morrison has attracted perhaps more criticism than any other living
author. The MLA bibliography lists more than 1,800 critical works, including
some 90 books, about her and her novels. Beloved alone is treated in more than
500 critical sources. The challenge for students is to find the most useful criti-
cism for their needs. The collections edited by William L. Andrews and Nellie Y.
McKay, Barbara H. Solomon, and Henry Louis Gates Jr. and K. A. Appiah are
good starting places that offer reliable essays and secondary bibliographies that
suggest further sources of interest.
TOPICS FOR DISCUSSION AND RESEARCH
- Students may ask, whose story is this? What happens to your understanding of
the novel when you shift answers to that question? What are the novel’s central
concerns if Sethe is put at the center? Beloved? Denver? Paul D? - Students might find it interesting to research the Middle Passage, the experi-
ence of Africans brought to America on slave ships, and then consider how
those experiences are depicted in Beloved. Why might Morrison have chosen
to deal with these episodes in American history in dense, stream-of-conscious-
ness prose? What are the connections between Sethe, Beloved, and Denver
and these unnamed victims? (Note that she dedicates the novel to “Sixty
Million and more.”) Charles Johnson’s novel Middle Passage (New York: Ath-
eneum, 1990), a National Book Award winner, and Black Imagination and the
Middle Passage, edited by Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Carl
Pedersen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), are excellent sources for
the historical material required to address this topic. - More than once in the novel Sethe talks about her “rememory.” Much criti-
cal attention has centered on this concept in Beloved. Students may find it
interesting to explore the meanings of the term. In what ways is rememory