2 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
valuable, and in what ways is it destructive? For instance, when Paul D tells
Sethe of seeing Halle at a churn, smearing butter on his face because he had
witnessed Schoolteacher’s nephews taking Sethe’s breast milk, she thinks of
her brain, “No misery, no regret, no hateful picture too rotten to accept?...
her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry
for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next day.” Yet,
painful as memories may be, they are also, arguably, necessary to any person’s
sense of self, and the very presence of the girl Beloved suggests that the past
cannot be suppressed. An examination of the complexities of memory and of
the role of the past in the present would be aided by the articles by Deborah
Horvitz, “Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved,” and
Jan Furman, “Sethe’s Re-Memories: The Covert Return of What Is Best
Forgotten,” both in Barbara H. Solomon’s Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s
Beloved (1998); Caroline Rody and Ashraf H. A. Rushdy also address this
topic.- Toni Morrison has said that before writing Beloved she intentionally did not
research Margaret Garner’s life, that her imagination was fired by reading
two interviews with the historical person, and that she does not base her
writing on real-life people, preferring the pleasure of invention. Of Garner
she says, “Her real life was much more awful than it’s rendered in the novel,
but if I had known [then] all there was to know about her I never would have
written it” (Paris Review interview). Nevertheless, investigating the histori-
cal person may enrich one’s experience of the novel. Steven Weisenburger’s
Modern Medea: A Family Story of Slavery and Child-Murder from the Old
South (2008) is an account of the historical Garner and her family. Students
might also wish to compare how Beloved is inspired by the Garner story to
how Morrison treats the same material in the libretto for the opera Margaret
Garner. - Morrison has given several important lectures—her Nobel Prize address, “The
Dancing Mind,” and “The Future of Time” as the 1996 Jefferson lecturer—and
has written literary criticism, most notably Playing in the Dark. How do the
ideas in these texts illuminate the ideas and methods of Beloved?
RESOURCES
Primary Works
Carolyn Denard, ed., Toni Morrison: Conversations ( Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2008).
Collects interviews from the 1970s to the present. For the years that overlap with
the Danille Taylor-Guthrie volume, different interviews are provided.
Sheldon Hackney, “‘I Come from People Who Sang All the Time’: A Conversa-
tion with Toni Morrison,” Humanities, 17 (March–April 1996): 4–9, 48–50.
Interview on the occasion of Morrison being named the 1996 Jefferson Lecturer.
The discussion ranges over her family’s love of music and storytelling, the role of the