Beloved

What it’s about

Beloved, for which Toni Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction is hailed as her best work. It explores themes of love, loss, motherhood, and agency with elements of magical realism.

The book follows Sethe, formerly enslaved but escaped to Ohio with her children. She finds the past (not only the physical refinance of horrors from enslavement but the consequences of her own actions) inescapable as herself, her daughter, and her mother-in-law begin to be haunted by a spirit in the house they share.

As the novel progresses, we begin to see how past trauma can become embodied, haunting us not just in theory but in reality – and through generations. We learn how memory exists communally and the act of remembering, though painful, is a collective responsibility.

To me, the book ultimately meditates on how one chooses in a life where the decisions around you seem finite and immutable. Morrison is not only asking what people choose. She is asking what kinds of worlds make certain choices imaginable.

Key questions

• What does choice mean within an institution like chattel slavery?
• Can an act of violence also be an act of love?
• What is freedom if you are still tethered to the past?
• What does it mean to come of age inside someone else’s unresolved trauma?

Key learnings

• action and choice within an inhumane system does not equal freedom; Sethe has agency but it is constrained, with catastrophic results
• unshared memory festers, but memory without containment can devour the self.

What I liked

The questions it asks linger. Toni Morrison made trauma a character in the novel rather than allowing it to remain in the figurative or purely emotional realms. I like that it forces the reader to examine their relationship to morality. I found myself at once judgmental of Sethe, thinking how could one take the life of their own child, while also considering if it is any better to bring them into the world knowing what awaits them is toil and torture. Many times I considered the relationship enslaved peoples even had to love and loving – their children, their spouses, their parents – knowing how short lived they might be together. There are no definitive answers, there’s no resolution at the end with a nice bow on top.

The challenge. This was a challenging read, both in form and subject matter. Beloved forces you to bear witness to the lived experience of human suffering from several perspectives. It can be hard to sit with but I appreciated having to work for it.

What I didn’t like

I wish I could have gotten to know more about Denver, Sethe’s daughter. I suppose there is a reason we don’t get to know her better, one I wish I could ask.

Would I recommend it?

I think it is a necessary read for anyone who calls themselves a reader. I would consider it one of the classics.

Similar books and movies

While reading I kept drawing parallels between Beloved and Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo by Ntozake Shange. I think each book touches on similar themes from different angles. Both books discuss the relationship between mothers, daughters, and memory but the outcomes are wildly different, almost opposite.

In Beloved:

• the past is unprocessed, violent, and intrusive; it arrives without consent and it colonizes the present
• motherhood is defensive, urgent, shaped by terror and love is entangled with protection from violation
• memory is involuntary; it repeats, distorts, overwhelms; it demands recognition but resists integration

In Sassafras, Cypress & Indigo:

• the past is transmitted, held, and metabolized; it’s part of a lineage of knowledge; it supports rather than overtakes
• motherhood is generative, instructive, expansive and love includes transmission of knowledge, craft, identity
• memory is intentional and it’s encoded in practices (weaving, cooking, music, spirituality) so it can be used