Toni Morrison is not merely an important contemporary writer. She is a major figure in our national literature. In giving us Beloved, Morrison has exposed the darkest corners of the American experience and evidenced the courage to witness them as they are. After initially being relatively ignored, protests from her fellow authors led in 1987 to Beloved’s being awarded the Pulitzer Prize. In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.In its citation the Swedish Academy noted her to be an author “who, in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an essential aspect of American reality.” As evidence of its enduring significance, in 2006 Beloved was named in a poll of two hundred critics, writers and editors as “the single best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years.”

Beloved is not an easy book to read. However, once the reader accepts the passion which drove Toni Morrison to tell her story in this way, the journey can be extremely moving and thought provoking. It is the 1870’s in the aftermath of the wrenching dislocations of the Civil War. As the book opens, Sethe, the main character, in her late thirties, is living in Ohio with her daughter, Denver. Their house is avoided by the neighbors, as it believed to be haunted. The story unfolds to reveal the origin of the neighbors’ belief. We are introduced to Sethe as an ex-slave who has escaped with Denver to her mother-in-law’s home in the outskirts of Cincinnati in the aftermath of the Civil War. Their house is “haunted” by the baby daughter whom Sethe has killed to spare her from experiencing the horrors of slavery. The baby’s name is not revealed, however, we learn that in exchange for sex, Sethe has had a headstone carved for her daughter bearing the word “Beloved.” Paul D., who had been a fellow slave with Sethe on the horror-ridden Kentucky plantation ironically called “Sweet Home” appears at Sethe’s door. After years of yearning for her, Paul D becomes Sethe’s lover and seems to exorcise the baby’s “ghost.” This exorcism does not last, however. Arriving home from a day of revelry at a local carnival, Sethe, Denver and Paul discover a mysterious young woman asleep near the front door of their house. The young woman, who has assumed the name Beloved appears to be the embodied spirit of Sethe’s slain daughter. Morrison conceives a process she calls “rememory,” which facilitates persistent and haunting reliving of the traumatic infanticide scattered throughout the narrative.

While the details of the plot are compelling, to me the magic of this work lies in the artistry with which Morrison moves the plot back and forth in time providing us with glimpses of the past interspersed with present day events in a way that gradually reveals the brutal past that led to Sethe’s horrific deed and the resulting guilt and misery that differentially affected the lives of everyone involved. This artistry is further propelled by the omnipresent influence of the mythical Beloved who seems to me to unleash the dark side of each of the characters with whom she is involved. We are left with question, to what extent is memory destructive to life lived. Michiko Kakutani in her review of Beloved published in the September 2, 1987, edition of the New York Times brilliantly responds to this question as follows: The characters in Beloved are forced to realize that leaving the past behind might be a necessity, that redemption is to be found not in remembering, but in forgetting. For Sethe’s family her story “is not a story to pass on,” but for readers of this novel it is as magical as it is upsetting. This is a dazzling novel.” —Susan Barron