beloved things essay

(92) 336 3216666

[email protected]

Read below our complete notes on the novel “Beloved” by Toni Morrison. Our notes cover Beloved summary, themes, characters, and analysis.

Introduction

Chloe Anthony Wofford, aka Toni Morrison (1931-2019), was an African American writer and a Nobel laureate. Her first novel was The Bluest Eye, which was published in 1970. She worked as a teacher as well as a fiction editor at a famous publishing house. Before writing this novel, she left her job there and sensed a feeling of freedom, which she wanted to express in her novel, and thus it came in the form of Beloved .

Beloved was an attempt to make the world feel what freedom meant for black people back then when there was slavery, and now when still there is segregation, though not explicit. It was written in Albany, NY, and published in 1987. It is a portrayal of slave women who were  treated as birth-giving machines and produced as many slaves as they could. There were no families, and whites used them like animals. It is the reenacting of the “civilized” life of white slave owners.

She started working on this novel in the early 1980s but gave it full-time attention when she left her job. The inspiration behind the story was a newspaper clipping regarding a slave woman’s story of escape in 1856. This story inspired Toni to write the novel. Her name was Margaret Garner, and she was born a slave. She escaped with her husband and children because she didn’t want her children to live life like them in chains. 

They escaped to Cincinnati and secured a place in a safe house. They were chased by their master (slave owner) and tried to capture them. She slit her two-year-old daughter’s throat and wounded her other children. She was captured later. This was an audacious attempt to rebel against slavery.

It tells of the conditions of black women in American society and the Fugitive Slave Act, which gave slave owners the right to chase slaves. It gave them the right to get back their fugitive slaves who had fled from south to north. Thus slaves were reclaimed this way, and new horrible stories of cruelties were created. Women were raped, men and children were starved, and civilized American society prospered. 

If American history is studied, the secret behind its prosperity is innocent people’s blood, whether it is that of native Americans or black slaves. And still, it continues, though tools and forms of exploitation have changed.

Toni wrote this story as a tribute to those whose blood has been shed, but nobody remembers them. It is a work of fiction and an assurance to black people that their miseries can never be forgotten. Some critics have criticized it for its dedication, which is ‘Sixty million and more,’ and they think it as a comparison between Jews killed in Holocaust and African Americans who perished in slavery. But a simple which is worthy of being asked that weren’t African Americans humans or Jews something more human?

Beloved earned much fame and won several prizes; one of them is the Pulitzer Prize. It is considered one of the best novels written after the second world war. It was a unique attempt to write about black women and their rights. Toni was given the Nobel Prize in 1993 for her black women’s writings. She taught at different universities and died in 2019.

Beloved Summary

This novel is divided into three parts, and inside these sections, there is no clear division based on title or chapter number, rather page break divides the chapters.

A child’s soul haunts 124 Bluestone Road; her throat was slit by her own mother. It is Cincinnati, and Sethe lives with her ten years old daughter, Denver, here. She is a former slave, and her sons have fled. On the tombstone of the child, ‘Beloved’ is engraved. For this engraving, she didn’t have money and had to fulfill the physical desires of the engraver.

She comes to wash her feet at a pump in a chamomile field. This evokes in her mind memories of her days in slavery and fellow slaves. Paul D, a fellow slave at ‘Sweet Home,’ a plantation, arrives there and meets her after 18 years. She tells Paul of the cruelties of their supervisor then, and he embraces her at the retelling of the horrible past.

Paul D had always desired her and wanted her to be his wife. He is happy at his luck to find her. They grow intimate in a little while, and Paul fulfills his physical desires from her. After that, they feel shy, and she mildly regrets having him allowed to do this. She thinks that all men are the same and try to reach their ends through any possible means. He has revived some bad memories back in her life that she wanted to forget. Then she remembers her husband and his mother. Her mother in law, Baby Suggs, had six husbands. From them, she had eight children, but all were taken away except Halle, her husband.

Denver remembers the time when she came back home, and a ghost was there to welcome her. This leads to the recollection of the story of her birth, which was told to her. Her mother worked on the plantation and got pregnant with her. She fled and was found by a good woman named Amy Denver, half dead. She rescued her and helped her deliver the child who was named Denver.

She then remembers the story told about the pink tombstone and red blood of the child, which her mother related to the ghost. Sethe remembers Mrs. Garner’s brother-in-law, who came there after her husband’s death and did oversee them.  Paul D stays there and asks if Denver has any problem, but Sethe tells her that she lives a charmed life and would be fine.

Denver asks Paul D about his stay that how much time he will spend with them. Sethe reprimands her over this question and asks her never to ask it again. Paul asks her if she asks this question from every man who comes there to stay, which angers Sethe. He asks her not to love her daughter that much because she is a former slave. Then they go to the carnival together, holding each other’s hands. Sethe thinks this as a good sign. Denver is happy with the attention she receives. This instance is a single instance of their normal family life.

A woman arrives at 124 and stays there for a night. When Sethe, Denver, and Paul arrive, she stands up and asks them for water. Sethe, at the sight of her, feels the need to water as she had felt when she was delivering Denver. They take the woman home, and she sleeps for four days. She only asks for water and is ill. When asked about her name, she tells them it is ‘Beloved.’

Denver stays with her day and night and takes care of her. Paul thinks there is something strange with her and she is pretending to be ill. He and Denver have seen her lift chair with one hand. Her appearance seems funny to Paul.

Beloved is attracted to Sethe, and she asks her about her diamonds. She remembers the diamonds that Mrs. Garner gave her at her marriage. She feels amazed because she wants to tell Beloved a story that she had decided to keep a secret. Then she tells her about her mother, who was hanged and the fact that she was her mother’s only child and named after her father. Denver is not interested because there is nothing about her in this story. A strange question that is raised in Sethe’s mind is that how  Beloved came to know about that story.

Paul D questions Beloved incessantly about how she came here and who she is, which she is unable to tell. He wonders how Sethe and Denver have come to accept her this way. Beloved likes to ask questions, but she doesn’t want to be questioned. Paul D wants her to be taken out of this place and be kept somewhere else. Then Denver comes to her rescue and takes her away to her room.

Sethe and Paul discuss her husband, Halle, who has left her. Paul tells her that he was aggravated by the incident that took place in the barn, and this made him leave the barn forever. She tells him that he should have come to her rescue, which Paul responds by saying that he couldn’t. The last time Paul saw him, he had his face buttered, and he was in a miserable state.

Beloved and Denver dance in Denver’s room, Denver asks her about the place from where she came. She tells her that it was a dark and closed place in which there were many people, some of them were dead. She tells her that she came there to see Sethe. Then Denver asks her to stay there, and she agrees.

Then she asks Denver to tell her about the story of her delivery, and she relates of her birth in the boat and Amy Denver, who helped Sethe deliver her. She also tells her that she was almost dead at the time of delivery, but it was Amy who revived her and saved her from death.

Sethe wants to make a decision about Beloved, Paul D, and Denver. She misses her mother-in-law, who was so helpful in such situations and gave valuable advice. She takes Beloved and Denver with her and goes to the rock near the river where Baby Suggs used to sit. She remembers her soothing hands and how she welcomed everybody to her home. She remembers her own arrival there. She decides to keep Beloved there and spend her life there, but she feels that somebody is strangling her. Denver tells her that it can’t be Baby Suggs’ because her hands were soothing.

Sethe decides to live her life with Paul D, and this upsets Beloved. She leaves for river clearing Denver chases her there. She blames her for strangling Sethe, and she denies it. She decides to stay careful if Beloved tries to kill her mother. When Sethe looks at them, they look like two sisters.

This chapter is a flashback to the time when Paul D was held by his white masters. He was sold by his former master to a new one who was innovative in his cruelties. He used to bind all workers with a chain and made them sleep in wooden boxes. These boxes were sunk in a deep ditch. After raining for several days, they were able to free themselves and reached a Cherokee village. There they were freed of their chains and asked about the way to the north. They told him to walk in the direction of the flowering trees, and thus walking on this blossom track, he was able to reach 124.

Paul D has left 124 gradually, and he sleeps in the storeroom. Beloved visits him and asks him to have intimate physical relations with her, which he refuses. He tells her that the only person he loves is Sethe. He is sure that Beloved can’t harm him, but it is happening, and he is unaware of it. He, at last, fulfills her wishes and accedes to her demand, and at that, the lid of tobacco tin opens. While making love, he repeatedly says, ‘red heart, red heart.’

Denver feels dissatisfied with the attention she receives from Beloved. When she pays attention to her, she feels it as a lovely experience. Sethe asks Beloved questions regarding her past, which she is unable to answer. She assumes that she was a white man’s slave who exploited her, and now she has erased her bad memories. Denver believes that she is the ghost of her sister, who died long ago.

One day she and Beloved go to the cold room to fetch cider jug, and there in the darkness, Beloved disappears. She looks for her, but she is nowhere, suddenly she appears in front of her. She tells her not to go anywhere because she can’t bear this loss after numerous others.

Paul D thinks about his past when he was one of the ‘men’ who Mr. Garner listened to, but with the arrival of another supervisor, he made them believe that they were not humans. He again thinks if he is a man because he is entranced by Beloved, and he, without any resistance, has sex with her. He considers telling this all to Sethe, and he leaves for her restaurant. When he arrives there, he decides not to tell her.

He then asks her to have his child; she responds that the two girls at home are enough. She thinks that she has got her dead daughter back in the form of a beloved.

Paul D and Sethe go upstairs to bed. Beloved asks Denver to make Paul go away. Denver thinks that if this happened, her mother would be mad at Beloved. Beloved’s tooth comes out as she is pulling it and feels if her body will fall apart. She always has a fear that her body will fall apart into pieces. When Denver tells her why she didn’t weep, she starts weeping. Denver holds her in her arms, and she is assured that she would be fine.

In this chapter, there is a flashback to Sethe’s coming at 124. Baby Suggs delayed the celebration of her coming because she didn’t want to be an immature celebration and lost soon. This was a great celebration, and ninety people were fed. There is also a remembrance of how Baby Suggs herself came there.

She was a slave and freed after paying when she broke her leg. Her slave name was Jenny Whitlow, she changed it after her husband’s name, which was Suggs, and he used to call her baby, so she chose the name ‘Baby Suggs.’ Her son Halle made efforts to free her and to pay for this, he worked hard and ultimately was able to do so. She, after her liberty, tried to find her children but lost this cause.

The flashback continues. At 124 sheriff, Sethe’s master, his nephew, and a slave catcher arrive. At their arrival, they see a man and an older woman near the shed. They enter there and find a woman who has killed her own child and is trying to kill another baby by hitting its head against the wall. This kid is saved in time. The sheriff comes to take hold of the kids, but Baby Suggs interrupts and saves them. Then she replaces the dead child with the living one and takes the dead child to another room.

The sheriff calls for a wagon and takes Sethe in it; she proudly steps out of the house and enters the wagon. Denver is in her arms, and she firmly holds her.

Paul D has a newspaper in his hand and looks at the picture of a woman and tells Stamp Paid that it is not Sethe. Stamp knows the story, but he doesn’t tell him what has happened. Instead, he reads him the story from the newspaper. He knows what the incidents that took place in the shed were. He wonders if this all has happened.

Paul D takes that clipping with him and shows it to Sethe. She, instead of laughing, tells him all that had happened. She tells him that she has not shared all the details with anybody, not even Baby Suggs. She tells him how elated she felt at securing her children from that place. The idea of making them free made her ecstatic. She didn’t want them to go back to plantations. He tells her that her love is thick, and she responds by saying that the love that is thin is not love.

He tells her that the path she chose was not right while she defends her decision by saying that she has two feet, not four. Paul leaves without saying goodbye.

Paul D is coming towards 124; he hears loud sounds coming off the house. He feels responsible for Sethe because he is the one who saved her child. He has come to this place just once and not ever after that. Sethe now firmly believes that her dead daughter is back because she hears the sound of the song that she herself made for her children. Stamp thinks about why she killed her own child and after a lot of thinking comes to the conclusion that white had forced her to do so.

Sethe has decided to live peacefully with her children. She remembers the escape plan Halle had made, but only she was able to escape with her children but later recaptured. Stamp believes that 124 is occupied by dead slaves, and he knocks the door, but no one comes, and thus he leaves.

Now, when she has started believing that Beloved has come back to her. She thinks about how to tell her about the reason behind her killing. She thinks of life at Sweet Home, where she was abused, and she told Mrs. Garner. This led to the schoolteacher’s outrage, and she fled with her children. She looked for Halle, but he was nowhere, and she couldn’t see him ever after that.

Later, when they came back to recapture her, she killed her child because she didn’t want them to be abused in slavery by their masters. She recalls the time she wanted to die and be laid with her daughter in the grave, but then she remembered her children. She decided to live for them. Now she is serene because Beloved has come back.

In this chapter, Denver confesses that she had swallowed the blood of her sister with her mother’s milk. She remembers the time when she started growing intimate with the ghost. She reminds of the reasons that made her mother kill Beloved. She wants to tell Beloved to be careful of her mother and stay away from her.

She doesn’t feel easy with Paul D and wants him to leave. She wants to reunite with her father, and if her mother leaves with Paul, she would be fine. She wants a happy family, which would be she, Beloved, and her father.

Beloved talks like babies and tells of the same experiences as Sethe. She relates the hard times when they were shackled and men with no skin given them food. The place was extremely unhealthy. She sees a woman with the same face as her. She wants to separate her from herself, which Beloved doesn’t want to. She then sees this woman in 124, and the face is Sethe’s. She and Sethe can be together.

Beloved continues in the stream of consciousness, and Sethe, along with other people, went into the sea. Denver, Sethe and Beloved talk with each other. Sethe promises not to leave her again, Beloved tells her of her coming from the other side while Denver warns her not to be close with Sethe.

Paul D is sitting in front of the church and remembers the time of his slavery. He thinks of the difference between Mr. Garner and the schoolteacher and finds none. To both, they were slaves. He again doubts his manhood and thinks of Sixo and Halle as men. He remembers how they tried to escape, and Sixo was burnt tied to a tree. He was laughing because one fugitive slave woman had his child in her womb. He at that time thought about Sethe, who, with her children, had left, and he was sad because he couldn’t see her again.

Stamp Paid and Paul talk, they discuss how Stamp changed his name to this and helped fugitive slaves in their freedom. Paul expresses his doubts regarding the presence of the killed girl in 124. Stamp asks him if he is sure this is the girl who was killed. He also asks him if it is the reason he left 124.

XVI, XVII, XVIII

The situation worsens at 124, Sethe has become insane at the sight of Denver’s employer. She thinks he is the schoolteacher and tries to kill him, but he is saved. Paul D returns and finds Sethe alone at home and feels the same sentiments for her what Sixo had felt for Thirty-Mile Woman. He asks her to stand with him and make tomorrow together because they share their yesterday. Beloved is gone, and there is no trace left of her, nor do the people want to remind of that bad memory. They think of it as a story that shouldn’t be passed on.

Beloved by Toni Morrison Characters Analysis

Sethe is the protagonist of the novel. She is an escaped slave and is a proud, noblewoman. Her ideal role in this novel is that of a mother; she tries to do anything possible for her children. She has lived a miserable life herself, but she doesn’t want her children to live life like this and, for this purpose, escapes the plantation.

She kills her daughter because she thinks its better to kill her than to hand her to the slave owners. She, like her mother-in-law, is a character that is a representation of the true human spirit. Society thinks unfair of her, but she doesn’t care about it. Instead of accepting help from others,  she prefers to earn her livelihood by working herself, and that shows her desire not to hurt her ego.

She is not hurt by physical and sexual abuse, but the schoolteacher’s verbal abuse hurts her. She doesn’t want encounters with her past but still is entrapped in it. She is a strong woman, accepts her past, and moves to the future, trying to lead a new life with Paul D.

Beloved is Sethe’s murdered daughter. She was two years old when her mother escaped saving her children from slavery. She was caught by her master, and to save her daughter; she killed her. She comes to their life years later in the form of a ghost. She is disguised as an eighteen-year-old girl and tries to occupy the home. 

She attempts to drive her mother’s lover out of her home but fails, and instead, she is driven out. Her character is mysterious in the novel. There are chances that she has been kept enslaved by a white man to fulfill his sexual needs, and now she is an ordinary woman.

There are some chances that she is a ghost because, at her sight, Sethe loses control over her urination. Another instance of it is the knowledge that she has regarding Sethe’s past life. There is a sign of scar near her chin, and it may be the sign of a wound that had been there when Sethe killed her daughter. Some scholars muse that it is the ghost of Sethe’s dead mother.

Whoever may be, she but it is clear that she is an allegorical figure, and she represents enslaved black women. She vanishes at the end of the story, but she is nowhere gone. She is forgotten by people, but the novel preserves her. She is a past that is both painful and destructive. She revives the repressed memories and gives people a chance to tell the stories they didn’t want to remember.

She is the most intelligent girl and a dynamic character. She is an introspective and sensitive person who stays in her closet and thinks about the matters in her life. She is a charmed child and thought to have contacts with supernatural beings. She is eighteen years old and still doesn’t want to get out of her home and wants to live life in seclusion. She is the most affected in the events of the novel.

She has been told that her mother has killed her elder child and spends life in fear that she may be killed too. She wants her father back in her life and doesn’t like Paul D’s coming into their life. She is a teenager who is in search of her identity. She craves attention because,  in contrast to normal children, there is a lot that is missing in her life. She evolves throughout the novel and becomes independent. She is the one who comes out of home and asks the community for help to drive out Beloved.

She finds a job for herself and then opts to go to college. She faces odds in the form of negligence from her mother and malevolence of Beloved.

Paul D is Sethe’s fellow slave at Sweet Home. He is, and his other friends are candidates to be Sethe’s husband, but she chooses Halle. After this decision, they still fantasize about marrying her. He has suffered physical and emotional brutality. He has buried emotions in his heart and never expresses them. He has been through his hardest times and believes that one shouldn’t attach himself to anything too much.

He tried to escape from his master like Sethe and others but failed and was captured. He was sold to a new owner, and he tried to kill the master. He was kept in chains, but he tried to escape and was fortunate in this attempt. He then wandered at different places and didn’t try to settle at any place. He was in love and wanted to marry her and ended up in 124. He came to her house, and they came to a relationship, but he was disliked by Beloved and Denver. He left Sethe’s house.

He came to know how Sethe had killed her daughter and started to hate her for it. He then reconciled himself with this incident and came back to her intending to spend life with her.

Baby Suggs was Halle’s mother and a former slave. She has died before the start of the novel. She spent her life with different husbands, and each child had a different father. Her last child was Halle, and he was the only child she was able to raise. She had become crippled when he was growing up. He bought her freedom, and she set up a matriarchy.  She was a generous person.  She had a prominent role in her society and helped those in need. She was the one who gave Sethe and Denver shelter and tried to be their support.

For people of Cincinnati, her personality is an emotional and spiritual inspiration. Her health starts to fail after Sethe’s killing of her young child. She is the inspiration behind Denver’s coming out of the house when due to Beloved, the condition has worsened. She has been the head of black people’s gatherings in the past. This is the reason people help Denver when she comes and asks them for it.

He is a figure of salvation and has saved many people from slavery. He is welcomed at every home in the town. He saves Denver and Sethe’s life. His life is changed by a sacrifice during enslavement, and he vows to help people in need. He feels angry about the society’s neglect of Denver and Sethe and questions their responsibilities.

Schoolteacher

He takes charge of the plantation after the death of Mr. Garner and is a cruel man. Like the rest of slave owners, he doesn’t consider slaves as human beings. He brings rigid rules and punishments at the plantation for the slaves. Shortly, he is an evil incarnate.

Halle is Baby Suggs’ son and Sethe’s husband. He is a kind, sincere, and generous person. He understands the reality of slave owners and isn’t in any misconception regarding it. He goes mad at Sethe’s abuse by the schoolteacher’s nephews.

She is a woman of mixed races. She has blonde hair, and she hates it. Though she is alienated in society, she still understands her responsibilities and helps those in need. She is doubtful of what Denver tells her, but still, she arranges to send food to Sethe’s household.

She is also a former slave. She was abused by her owner and his son. She believes that bad memories should be forgotten. She leads the people when there is an attempt made to get out Beloved of 124.

Mr. and Mrs. Garner

They were the owners of Sweet House and the plantations where Sethe and her fellows worked. They are apparently benevolent to their slaves but are after all slave owners. They strategically manipulate the slaves and use them for their purpose, thus keeping them away from thinking about rebellion.

Mr. and Mrs. Bodwin

These are siblings and white abolitionists. They are the ones who bring Denver and Sethe freedom. These characters are somewhat contradictory, but they are far better than the rest of the white people. They believe that all human beings are holy regardless of their color.

She is a young, compassionate white girl. She is an indentured servant and helps Sethe deliver Denver. She is an idealistic and talkative girl. She helps Sethe when she is ill. Denver is named after her by her mother as a tribute to her services.

Paul A, Paul F, Sixo

Pauls are Paul D’s brothers, and they work on the same farm with him. Sixo is their fellow slave who dies with Paul A in an attempt to escape from the plantation.

Beloved by Toni Morrison Themes

Slavery erases all the human feelings of a person, and the same is the case with love. Paul D knows this fact and believes that while being in love and being a slave at the same time is risky. The same happens with Sethe, who tries to give her children maternal love and, as a result, loses her daughter. 

She earns guilt as an additional supplement. There is a clear line drawn between love and slavery. Love and freedom are defined in this novel as the ability to choose things which is impossible in slavery. In slavery, one doesn’t even have the choice about oneself, then how can he/she chose other things.

Guilt is an undeniable reality that accompanies a wrong. In Beloved, Sethe is haunted by the guilt and becomes incarnate in the form of Beloved. She remembers the wrong she has committed to her daughter and tries to reassure her that she did it out of love. She tries to take care of her and pays much attention to her neglecting Denver. This is done to atone for the crime she has committed. For this purpose, she even forgets herself and tries to please Beloved. She gets rid of this guilt, ultimately when Beloved is driven out of her house.

Loss of Identity in Slavery

Slavery brings physical, emotional, and spiritual destruction. The memories of slavery and the miserable days are not forgettable even after their freedom. Slaves lose identity as human beings, and the only thing they know about themselves is being a slave. There are multiple examples in this novel which show the self-alienation of different characters. Paul D hears screams and is not sure whether these exist in real. Slaves were considered animals by their owners and traded as a commodity.

The majority of the characters in this novel are in doubt whether they are human beings in real or not. There are feelings of mental and physical disintegration in slaves, and all these contribute to the loss of identity.

Past Vs. Present

If people have some past memories, there is a constant fight going on between their past and present. In this novel, Sethe tries to bury her past. She tries to get rid of the memory of her daughter’s murder but isn’t able to do so; her ghost haunts her. Paul D’s arrival adds to the misery, and she remembers all the things that happened on the plantation and incidents that took place after that.

Paul D has buried his memories in his heart, though they come back and haunt him, he is able to show no emotional reaction to them. Beloved comes and revives the buried memories in Sethe’s mind and ruins her mental stability. She starts raving and is recovered only when Beloved is driven out of the house.

Supernatural

There are a lot of supernatural elements in this novel. For instance, there are ghosts, charms, risen babies, and this shows the expression of the past in the present. These are the past memories and incidents which express themselves in present dominating the conscious. Human beings often accept these delusions as supernatural elements. In this novel majority of the characters believe in the supernatural and, in some cases, have experienced the supernatural. This shows their bad memories from the past.

Importance of Community Solidarity

The importance of the individual in his survival is of prime importance, but society’s role can’t be neglected. Individuals need support from society before taking any step. This is shown in Beloved when Sethe comes to Cincinnati. The fugitive and freed slaves are supported and provided by the community at Cincinnati, and an example of it is the residence provided to Sethe at 124. Another instance of it is Beloved’s arrival at 124; she occupies the house. The residents are not able to live their life normally, and then again, society comes to help Sethe and her daughter to get rid of Beloved.

The community’s role is important; it becomes necessary in societies like that of former slaves. They don’t have families or blood relations; rather, their community plays this role, and they share good and bad times together.

The Powers and Limits of Language

Language is manipulated by those in power, and it is shown in this novel. The slaves try to use language in the same way if it could change their fate. They change their names to get rid of their memories. They try to forget their bad days by renaming things. Once the schoolteacher tells the slaves that they are the definers and they interpret or redefine things. He tells the slaves that they have to obey and not to argue. This shows the abuse of rhetoric by the powerful.

In normal cases, home is a term which signifies comfort and security. In the case of this novel, the concept is the opposite. The former slaves have led a life in which all the terms have changed their meanings, and home is an inclusion. Before their freedom, they had no homes, and their residences were uncomfortable places, which instead of rest were a source of jeopardy.

Now after freedom, all the memories of that life haunt them, and when they are given a comfortable life, they don’t fit with it. This novel term ‘Sweet Home’ is used for one place, and it is the farm owner’s residence. This shows the ironic existence of such a place and the inability of the former slaves to adjust to it.

To the general public, slavery means evil, and the slave owners evil incarnate. In Beloved, the author has attempted to find its denotations and connotations in a different way. She has explored the good and bad aspects as well as the grey areas. She has shown slave owners in the evilest form. 

There is also a portrayal of slaves in dark aspects when Sethe kills her own daughter. There are also some slave owners shown who consider slaves human beings. The issue of slavery is thoroughly discussed in this novel, and it is the reader’s choice to make an opinion regarding it.

Beloved by Toni Morrison Literary Analysis

Beloved is a masterpiece of African-American literature, and it encapsulates the experiences of slaves in a relatively short time and space. It expertly tells of what miseries the slaves had to face, and this is shown through artistic use of the imagery. Figurative language is employed successfully to let the reader imagine and place him/herself in place of a slave. 

It gives an exquisite experience of the “great” American civilization. It puts forward the ironies of the society, which presents itself as the protector and champion of human rights. Above all, Beloved is an immortal human experience that is understandable and can be felt in any period of time.

It is a work of Gothic fiction that relates a family drama and coming of age of some characters. Denver is the most evident example. It can also be credited as historical fiction because it tells the story of millions of slaves and people’s history of the United States.

The tone of the novel is elegiac, mourning the miseries in the lives of African Americans. It can be inferred from Sethe’s talks and thinking as well from the dedication which dedicates it to sixty million and more. It is an obvious reference to those who suffered.

There is also hope in the tone, telling of the good days, as Paul D thinks that he will have happy days with Sethe. There is a lot of love and an indication not to look back, and that makes it optimistic, asking the reader to make life beautiful.

Setting of the Novel

Spatially this novel is set in a small country house, and there are references to different places in Kentucky and Ohio. 124 Bluestone is not just a house; it is a small world that tries to depict all the experiences of slave life. Temporally this novel is set in the pre-civil war era. There are references to Sweet House, which is situated in Ohio, Fugitive Act of 1851, and many other references that clarify its setting.

Point of View

The author doesn’t stick to a single narrative style and uses more than one. She switches between many styles, and that happens before informing the reader. Often the switching is so subtle that the reader doesn’t understand it and is stuck in one place. Third-person omniscient and third-person limited are used in a major part of the novel. There are also traces of universal omniscient and first-person narrators.

Significance of the Title

The title plays an important role in creating drama in this novel. The reader is confused about who is beloved and of whom. There are numerous people who can be called beloved in this novel, and it can be inferred that humanity is beloved. This is evident from the dedication which doesn’t dedicate it to specific people. It’s for all, though it figuratively refers to African Americans.

Significance of the Ending

In the end, we see that everything has changed. Sethe and Paul D dedicate themselves to each other and decide to start a new life. Denver gets a job and will enter a college while Beloved is driven out. The story doesn’t end here. Beloved has gone, but her story isn’t easy to forget, she will be remembered. The Past will be used to move the present.

Epigraph and Dedication

The epigraph and dedication make the message universal, and it is a ray of hope for all those bearing hardships. The epigraph is taken from the Bible, and the dedication is to sixty million and more, which makes it ambiguous but clear for humanity.

Writing Style

Toni Morrison, like the rest of modernist novelists, writes in a complicated way. She writes with all her senses, and that ofttimes makes the novel hard to understand. Her metaphors are laden with meanings, and an example of it is ‘rusted tin box of tobacco’ for the heart, which conveys the compact message. She is an impressionist writer and employs the same tool here in this novel.

More From Toni Morrison

• The Bluest Eye

Short Stories

• How it works
• Latest orders
• Our writers

Beloved Essay Topics List for School and College Students

Toni Morrison wrote the novel “Beloved” in 1987. This famous novel has won the author Pulitzer and Nobel prizes. The novel is based on actual events and tells the story of an African-American slave, named Sethe, who killed her daughter to save her from slavery. And Sethe lives with her sorrow and torments alone. This novel is not about humility, and tells about a fantastic desire to live in freedom. The author writes about slaves and the owners who treat them as beasts, about hard and crippled destinies, fears, and memories hidden in a tin can.

Toni Morrison, in her novel “Beloved,” has shown that you can always survive, no matter how dark your life is , and how it’s essential to believe that the light will come and make your life better. On this positive note, we want to share with you some interesting “Beloved” topics below – you can use them for your own writing or to order research papers for sale.

“Beloved” Essay Topics: Compare and Contrast

• Compare and contrast Sethe in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and the mother of Moses in the Book of Exodus in the context of motherhood.
• Compare and contrast Morrison’s “Beloved” and Wilson’s “Fences.” What are the similarities between Sethe and Troy?
•  Compare and contrast “‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore” by John Ford and “Beloved” by Toni Morrison.
• Compare and contrast “Beloved” By Toni Morrison and “Oedipus the King” by Sophocles.
• Compare and contrast The Song of Solomon and “Beloved.”
• Compare and contrast “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” by Mark Twain and “Beloved.” Analyze a similar specific conflict or theme and use outside sources to back up your opinion.
• Compare and contrast “Beloved” and Ralph Ellison’s “Invisible Man.” What are similar ideas?
• Compare and contrast “Beloved” and “The Bluest Eye,” both by Toni Morrison.
• Compare and contrast Octavia Butler’s “Kindred” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” in the context of informing African-American women.
• Compare and contrast Rita Dove’s “Thomas and Beulah” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved.”
• Compare and contrast the movie “Sophie’s Choice” and the novel “Beloved” by Toni Morrison.
• Compare and contrast “Their Eyes Are Watching God” and “Beloved” in the context of identity.
• Compare and contrast Morrison’s “Beloved” and Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” in the context of slavery and freedom.

“Beloved” Toni Morrison Topics – Analytical

• Analyze “Beloved” from an ethics perspective. Consider the views of utilitarianism, Kant’s moral philosophy, and ethics of care.
• Analyze the theme of slavery in “Beloved” and accompany your arguments with evidence from the book and articles.
• Analyze the main symbols in “Beloved.” How does the author use symbols in the novel? Provide examples from the text to explain what the particular symbol represents.
• Analyze Morison’s “Beloved” from the areas of criticism relating to psychoanalysis. How does it help to portray characters?
• Analyze the Beloved character. Explain how this character is seen from the perspective of other characters. Can we call the Beloved character as Sethe’s alter ego?
• Analyze the novel “Beloved” from the perspective of a critical lens (historical, gender, archetypal, etc.).
• Analyze the concept of memory and reflections from the perspective of the main characters from “Beloved” (Sethe, Paul D., Denver, etc.).
• Analyze the movie “Beloved” (1998) and define its historical significance or controversies.
• Analyze the character of Paul D. How does the author use this character to discuss ideas about masculinity and manhood?
• Analyze one of the death scenes from “Beloved” and define its significance in the story.
• Analyze the concept of identity of African-American men and women and how this idea relates to the overall story.
• Analyze the trauma of slavery and awful incidents in “Beloved.”
• Analyze the ideas of the supernatural and rape in the novel “Beloved.”
• Analyze the existing information about slavery and abolitionists and explain how this information helps to understand the novel “Beloved.”
• Analyze the novel “Beloved” in relation to the Emancipation Proclamation.
• Analyze the novel “Beloved” from the perspective of a broader context (genre, literary movements, historical events, etc.).

Interesting Topics in “Beloved”

• Explore the impact of memory and trauma on the main characters in “Beloved.”
• Contextualize one of the main themes of “Beloved” across time and the history of America.
• Did one character from “Beloved” change throughout the work? How?
• Explain the importance of the novel “Beloved.” What changed as a result of its publication?
• Explain the word “rememory” in regard to the novel “Beloved.” How does this term relate to Sethe? Provide examples from the text.
• Pick one of the characters from “Beloved” and explain how his or her relationship to the past contributes to the meaning of the story.
• What insults and indignities do the main characters from “Beloved” experience? Why are these minor indignities and cruelties important to the novel?
• Explain what the author tries to convey in the novel “Beloved.”
• Choose the most memorable scenes in the novel “Beloved” and analyze them. Explain your choice.
• Explore the themes of love and trauma in the novel “Beloved.” Use articles in psychology and other additional sources.
• Explain the role of the past in “Beloved.” How does it contribute to the overall meaning of the story?
• Describe the role of community in Morrison’s “Beloved.”
• Explore the color red and its significance in the novel “Beloved.”
• Explore the meaning of naming in the context of freedom and love. Does the absence of a name mean power and dominance?
• Explore one of the speculative elements in “Beloved” (fantastic elements, hyperbole, horror, etc.).
• Explain the symbol of Paul D.’s tobacco box. Why do you think the author has chosen this symbol?
• Describe the significance of “Beloved” in black history. Explain the impact of the novel in relation to the history and struggle against racism.

Essay Topics “Beloved” Toni Morrison: Literary Devices

• Who tells the story in “Beloved”? How does it influence the overall perception of the book?
• Explore how the characterization Toni Morrison correlates with the overall theme of “Beloved.”
• Describe and analyze Toni Morison’s style in “Beloved.” Does it differ from other stories written by this author? Use text evidence to back up your opinion.
• Why does the author use an unnamed character? Explain your point.
• Explain why “Beloved” should be considered a literary text. Has the quality and quantity of literary texts changed in the digital age?
• Explain the meaning of the title. How does it relate to the main themes in “Beloved”?
• How does Toni Morrison use colors in the novel “Beloved”? How does it influence the story?
• Analyze how the author uses storytelling as a means of remembering and resolving Sethe’s deadlock.
• Explore the theme of haunting in “Beloved.” What does it represent in the novel? Why does Morrison create the story of 124 Bluestone Road?
• How does the author use the struggle of secondary characters (Baby Snugs, Paul D., etc.) and relate it to the overall story?

“Beloved” Paper Topics on Women and Feminism

• How is Sethe haunted by the past? How does it influence relationships with children?
• How has the author depicted womanhood in the novel “Beloved”?
• What aspects of black feminism are used in “Beloved”? Explore the issues of racism and sexism of women in their racial community.
• Explore the history of Margaret Garner and compare her to the main character Sethe.
• Explore the theme of motherhood in “Beloved.” Describe the feelings of Sethe toward her own mother. What has shaped her own relation to her children?
• Explain whether Sethe was right to kill her child. Analyze her motives, experience, and fears.
• Describe how African-American women are portrayed in “Beloved.” How does it relate to the history and experiences of African-American women in history? Compare their portrayal to real life.
• Explore the images of women in “Beloved” and to what extent women were denied freedom.
• Analyze the mental, physical, and emotional states of African-American women in “Beloved.”
• Analyze the movie “Beloved.” Choose a scene related to womanhood and explain how the camera work, lighting, and costumes create a certain mood.

Thank You for Reading!

We hope that our list of “Beloved” topics will be helpful for you, and that it will inspire you to write an astonishing paper. We know that writing a book analysis may be tough, as you need to use analytical skills to analyze the plot, structure, language, and more.

If writing an essay or research paper is a struggle for you, stop torturing yourself – request write my essay online assistance ! With writing help from our expert writers, you can get custom-written papers of great quality. All you need to do is leave buy essay for cheap on our website, and we will take care of your assignments – we are here 24/7 for you.

Related posts

My biggest respect, Bulls! These Beloved essay topics were really cool

Been looking for a good Beloved essay topics – and here they are, very profound content

Glad to have come by this amazing service, thank you, guys. And do you ever write essays from scratch?

We always deliver original content, creating papers de novo!

The greatest Beloved essay topics I have ever come across. The service employs true professionals.

EssayBulls has been of huge help to me — here I found the information I had been looking for.

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment.

Captcha* 86 − = 83

Toni Morrison

Ask litcharts ai: the answer to your questions.

Through the memories and experiences of a wide variety of characters, Beloved presents unflinchingly the unthinkable cruelty of slavery. In particular, the novel explores how slavery dehumanizes slaves, treating them alternately as property and as animals. To a slave-owner like Schoolteacher , African-American slaves are less than human: he thinks of them only in terms of how much money they are worth, and talks of “mating” them as if they are animals . Paul D’s …

At its core, Beloved is a novel about a mother and her children, centered around the relationship between Sethe and the unnamed daughter she kills, as well as the strange re-birth of that daughter in the form of Beloved . When Sethe miraculously escapes Sweet Home, it is only because of the determination she has to reach her children, nurse her baby, and deliver Denver safely. Similarly, Halle works extra time in order to buy…

Storytelling, Memory, and the Past

The past does not simply go away in Beloved , but continues to exert influence in the present in a number of ways. The most obvious example of this is the ghost of Sethe’s dead daughter. Though literally buried, the baby continues to be present in 124 as a kind of ghost or poltergeist. But beyond this instance of the supernatural, Sethe teaches Denver that “Some things just stay,” and that nothing ever really dies…

As the practice of slavery breaks up family units, Beloved provides numerous examples of slaves and ex-slaves creating and relying upon strong communities beyond the immediate family. Baby Suggs ’ congregation that gathers in the woods illustrates this, as neighboring African-Americans come together as a community. They come together again toward the end of the novel, as different families provide food for Sethe and Denver when they are in need and a large group of…

Beloved is split into three major sections, and each of these sections begins not with any description of a character, but with a short sentence describing Sethe’s house: “124 was spiteful.” Then, “124 was loud.” And finally, “124 was quiet.” As 124 is haunted, it seems to have a mind of its own and is almost a character of the novel in its own right. The house is extremely important to Baby Suggs and Sethe…

by Toni Morrison

• Beloved Summary

In 1873, Sethe and her daughter Denver live in 124, a house in a rural area close to Cincinatti. They are ostracized from the community for Sethe's past and her pride. Eighteen years have passed since she escaped from slavery at a farm called Sweet Home. Sweet Home was run by a cruel man known as schoolteacher, who allowed his nephews to brutalize Sethe while he took notes for his scientific studies of blacks. Sethe fled, although she was pregnant, delivering the child along the way with help from a white woman named Amy. Sethe's husband, who was supposed to accompany her, disappeared. After her escape to Cincinatti with her four children, Sethe enjoyed only twenty-eight days of freedom before she was tracked down by her old master. Rather than allow her children to be returned to slavery, she attempted to kill all of them, succeeding only in killing the baby girl. Rejected then by her master, who saw she was no longer fit to serve, Sethe was also saved from hanging and was released to raise her remaining three children at 124. The ghost of the dead baby began to haunt the house. The two sons, Howard and Buglar , left after having particularly frightening encounters with the ghost. The grandmother, Baby Suggs , died a broken woman. Baby Suggs had been a great positive force in Cincinatti's black community, regarded by many as an inspiring holy woman. After what happened to Sethe, she gave up her preaching and retired to bed, asking only for scraps of color. Years after her death, Denver and Sethe continue to live in the house alone. Sethe works as a cook, and Denver spends her days alone. Denver is terribly lonely but is also afraid to leave the yard‹even though she is eighteen years old.

In 1873, two visitors come to 124. The first is Paul D , a man who was a slave with Sethe back at Sweet Home. Paul D, like Sethe, is haunted by the pain of the past. He witnessed and suffered unspeakable atrocities before the end of the Civil War brought him his freedom, and he has survived by not allowing himself to have strong feelings for anything or anyone. He has particularly dark memories of time spent in a prison for blacks, where he worked in a chain gang by day and was kept in a box in the ground at night.

The second visitor is a girl named Beloved . It gradually becomes clear that she is the ghost of the dead baby come back to life, at the age that the baby would have been had it lived. Awkward, unable to speak like an adult, and dressed in strange clothes, Beloved seems vulnerable at first but proves to be powerful and malicious. Her purposes initially seem benign and are never fully understood, but by the end of the novel her presence is deeply destructive for the living people of 124.

Paul D becomes Sethe's lover, staying for a time despite friction between him and the two young girls. Beloved despises him, and she tries to divide Sethe from Paul D. Paul D eventually leaves when he learns that Sethe murdered her own child. Sethe, on discovering Beloved's identity, believes she has been given a second chance. She tries to make amends for the past, but the girl's needs are devouring. The ghost does not forgive Sethe for her actions. Beloved settles into the house like a parasite, growing ever stronger as Sethe grows weaker. Sethe's sanity begins to unravel, and Beloved only grows more demanding. Denver is forced to go to the community for help.

A group of women, led by Ella , a former agent of the Underground Railroad, go to 124 to exorcise Beloved's ghost. The ghost is forced to leave, but Sethe's spirit has been nearly broken. Paul D returns to her, vowing to help Sethe heal herself. Denver, Paul D, and Sethe will build a new life, one in which they learn to deal with their painful past while focusing on the future.

Beloved is a haunting and dark novel, full of gothic elements and acts of terrible violence. The ghost represents the power of the legacy of slavery, which continues to trouble Sethe eighteen years after she won her freedom. Beloved is the spirit of the dead baby returned but she is also an embodiment of all suffering under slavery; her memory extends back to the slave ships that first carried blacks to the Americas. The question of the rightness of Sethe's terrible act is a difficult one‹moreover, it is a question that the novel does not attempt to answer in a definitive way. Morrison is more concerned that we understand why Sethe did what she did, as well as the ways that her decision has haunted her ever since. The novel effectively conveys the brutality and dehumanization that occurred under slavery, putting Sethe's act in context without necessarily condemning it or excusing it.

The structure is fragmentary, closely tied to the consciousness of each character and weaving suddenly between past and future. More time is spent describing past events than the action of the current moment, reinforcing the idea of the past lingering and shaping life in the present. The novel is often repetitive, telling the same stories of the past again and again, giving more information with each repetition. All of the characters of the novel, former slaves and the children of former slaves, suffer a troubled relationship to their own past. Their relationships to their past often make it impossible for them to live for the present or plan for the future, and slavery has often damaged the ways that they experience love and think about their own worth as human beings.

Beloved Questions and Answers

The Question and Answer section for Beloved is a great resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

In Beloved, why did Paul D get sent to prison?

After Paul D attempted to escape from Sweet Home, he was sold to a man he soon attempted to kill. As a result, Paul D was sent to a prison in Georgia.

Why is Denver so jealous of Sethe?

Denver is jealous because she considers Beloved her possession. She is jealous because Beloved gives more attention to Sethe than she does to her (Denver).

Why is Sethe angry about her memories of Sweet Home?

Sethe's memories of Sweet Home include all of the men she has loved, but more importantly, her years as a slave.

Study Guide for Beloved

Beloved study guide contains a biography of Toni Morrison, literature essays, quiz questions, major themes, characters, and a full summary and analysis.

• About Beloved
• Character List

Essays for Beloved

Beloved literature essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of Beloved.

• Sethe, a Slave to Her Past
• Inscribing Beloved: The Importance of Writing in Morrison's Novel
• The Objects Connoting Beloved's Initial Appearance
• Beloved the Enigma
• Interpretive Possibilities in Beloved

Lesson Plan for Beloved

• About the Author
• Study Objectives
• Common Core Standards
• Introduction to Beloved
• Relationship to Other Books
• Bringing in Technology
• Notes to the Teacher
• Related Links
• Beloved Bibliography

Wikipedia Entries for Beloved

• Introduction
• Plot summary
• Major themes
• Major characters

Introduction of Beloved

Beloved was written by an African American feminine icon, Toni Morrison, and published in 1987. It took the literary world of the African American community in the United States by storm. Set in the time of the Civil War, Beloved has surpassed the actual life depiction of Margaret Garner, an escapee of slavery. When she was captured, she kills her child for fear that the child might be taken into slavery though she crossed the borders to the free state of Ohio. The depiction of that true story created ripples in the American literary circles and the novel won her Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, making Toni a household name.  

Summary of Beloved

The story of the novel revolves around Sethe, a slave woman, who starts living in Ohio in the state of Cincinnati on 124. It happens in 1873 when both mother and daughter escape from slavery following the Civil War. The story, then, moves to this haunted house, Sethe’s daughter, Denver, her two sons, who have run away when quite young for which Sethe thinks because of the ghost in the house, and Baby Suggs, her mother-in-law, who lives with her but later dies after her sons flee.

The story unfolds in a manner of switching from the past to the present with a series of flashbacks . Sethe meets Paul D on 124 which takes her back to the days she has worked in Sweet Plantation for Mr. & Mrs. Garner along with Halle, Paul D, Paul A, Sixo, and Paul F. These men lust over Sethe but never make a move on her. Sethe chooses to marry Halle and she gets pregnant. Meanwhile, the owner of the Plantation dies leaving the responsibility to be taken over by Mrs. Garners’ Brother-in-law and his nephews. The Brother-in-law known as the school teacher among the slaves was very sadistic and racist. One day, he whips Sethe in spite of knowing she was pregnant. Sethe complains to Mrs. Garner.

Knowing this school teacher and the nephews surround her in the barn and steal her breast milk. All along this was watched by Halle who was hiding in the loft above her but doesn’t come out to save his wife since he feared losing his life. Later, in the story Paul D states that he sees Halle rubs his face with churned butter and acting like a crazy person. Later, Baby Suggs and Sethe escape from there to Ohio along with her other children. While traveling in the boat with Amy and Denver, they help her deliver the baby which is why she names her daughter after one of the girls. Sethe gets help from Stamp Paid.

Later, the school teacher comes to Sethe’s to take her and the children to work in the farm. In order, to escape the shackles of slavery and the cruelty of racism for her and her children, she tries to kill her children and herself later. So, she kills one of her daughters whose name is never mentioned in the story. When she was taken to prison, the white abolitionists-Bodwins help her release her to release from prison. The family lives in isolation after the community shuns them.

While at Sweet Plantation Sixo is killed by a school teacher and Paul D sold to Brandywine slave owner and later sent to a chain gang experiencing torture and humiliation along with other slaves because he tried to kill the owner. Luckily, rainstorms in the region helped them escape and Paul reaches Cincinnati on 124. Paul D tries to convince Sethe stating that he is the perfect man for her and continues to stay in 124 in spite of the haunted house situation. Paul D dismisses his superstitious thoughts and returns to the family to help them forget their horrible past.

However, he could not remove Denver, the revenant, from the house as when all of the return, they find her sitting on the floor and showing herself as Sethe’s daughter, Beloved. Despite his warnings, Sethe does not leave Beloved and feels charmed, while Paul D, feels highly discomfort in her presence and starts sleeping at different places. Despite this, Beloved corners him and has sex with him when he thinks about his horrible past of slavery. Soon he tells Sethe about it, but she feels gladdened over this relation, though, Paul D, does not accept it and repels her influence on him.

He also does not face any acceptance on work and gets information from Stamp Paid that the community shuns them on account of Beloved. However, he leaves after he comes to know about this event, though, Sethe, does not leave the ghost, seeing in it her dead daughter, Beloved. Spoiling the ghost of Beloved through time and money, Sethe soon loses her job yet she is unable to meet her demands and tolerate her ever-increasing tantrums. Finally, Beloved takes a toll on her, making her a skeleton and herself heavy as a pregnant woman.

Finally, Denver, her other daughter, musters up the courage and seeks assistance from her community and former teacher Lady Jones, at which some women come to help them get rid of the ghost. Meanwhile, Mr. Bodwin, too, arrives to offer them a place for work, but instead, Sethe attacks assuming it was the school teacher, while Beloved disappears from the scene forever. Denver, then, takes the lead and becomes a worker, while Paul D returns finding Sethe on the bed and making her feel that she is the best woman for him.

Major Themes in Beloved

• Slavery and Dehumanization: The long-lasting effects of slavery and its dehumanizing impacts on the African American community is an important theme of this novel. Sethe’s final escape toward Ohio shows that despite having fled slavery, she stays emotionally in it. Paul D, too, flees to become a good human being and when all of them meet at the same house, they become hostage to Beloved, who proves that they will take time to come into their proper senses. Also, constant beatings, bad treatment such as the thrashing of the Schoolteacher’s nephews, and animal images to show this mistreatment are the influences of this dehumanization.
• Naming: The theme of naming is significant in Beloved in that it shows the white sense of superiority that does not let this ethnic race come down to see that the African American people like Pauls, Baby Suggs, and Sethe are also humans and Christians too. The naming of Paul as different alphabets show this mentality of eliminating the true identity of an individual. Not only were they named in this way, but also they were sold and purchased on bills such as in the case of Baby Suggs’ mother, Whitlow.
• Role of Mother: The role of the mother in an African American structure is significant in that a mother becomes a protective figure for anyone who comes to her. Baby Suggs assumes this role when she sees that she has lost almost all of her children. However, Sethe replaces after taking care of her and assumes this role to take care of the children whoever comes to her despite the fact that she has tried to kill them and even killed Beloved out of love that her children should not be damned into slavery again.
• Slavery: The main theme of slavery reverberates in almost every part and every character of Beloved . Sethe, Baby Suggs, Paul D, and all other characters have had to face the worst on account of their being from the African American race. For example, the Schoolteacher, who owns Sweet Home, treats them brutally like animals and they are traded like livestock. That is why Paul D considers Sweet Home just another name of a center of exploitation instead of sweetness.
• Identity: Individual identity and its elimination or erasure is another significant theme in that different characters from the African American community lose their individuality when they are exchanged for money or otherwise. Pauls are named as B, C, and D while other kids and adults are named as if they are not human beings or worse than animals. The treatment of the School teacher is quite opposite to his title, showing an entirely new way of identifying the African Americans. That is why Stamp Paid is of the view that it is slavery that has twisted and turned their identities.
• Masculinity: Masculinity is a thematic strand, and it runs parallel to femininity that does not and cannot exist in the absence of masculinity. The life of Sethe seems incomplete without Paul after Halle and the same goes for Paul D that he cannot exist or live without the active presence of Sethe.
• Past: Past exists in the present in Beloved in that Sethe is settled at 124, yet the scars of past slavery stay afresh in her mind, constantly haunting her into seeing the ghost of her dead daughter as if she is living with her. Despite her balanced personality, Denver, too, seems to have the impacts of the scars of past slavery. That is why she nudges Sethe to narrate her stories of Amy and others.
• Home: The theme of the home appears in Beloved in that almost all the African American characters vie to have a home of their own. When Sethe arrives at 124, she does not seem to reconcile to the idea that she has her own home, the reason that she attacks the white man in the end.
• Freedom: Although somewhat implicit, the idea of freedom for the African American community constantly comes to the fore when Sethe flees and then Paul D, follows. Even living at 124, it seems that the main obsession of the other characters such as Baby Suggs and even Denver is freedom; freedom from financial pressure, and freedom from social constraints.

Major Characters in Beloved

• Sethe: The protagonist of Beloved, Sethe is the representative of the African American community and a sign of the hateful slavery that existed. Although she shows generous-heartedness by keeping everyone at 142, yet her own problem of the dead daughter and the new revenant compounds her dilemmas . She has reached this stage after having been sold to many hands and finally marrying Halle Suggs, though, she has had to take care of his mother later in life. Her passion to save her children from slavery is so strong that she reaches Ohio by hook or crook. Yet, her desire to keep the family together fails, for she could not keep her sons at home and that Baby Suggs also leaves her to her eternal abode. Finally, she stays contented with Denver, her other daughter, and Paul D.
• Baby Suggs: Baby Suggs is Halle’s mother and Sethe’s mother-in-law. She appears when Halle buys her freedom, though, she remains passive. Finally, she becomes a sacred woman in the community at 124 when Sethe takes her to Cincinnati so that she could lead her life in peace and comfort. Baby Suggs becomes so weak that she thinks it better to withdraw from day-to-day activities and while staying at 124.
• Denver: Sethe’s second daughter and the future breadwinner, Denver gets her name from Amy Denver, the white lady, who helps Sethe during her delivery. Her insistence on Amy’s story is perhaps an indicator of her attachment to her benefactor. To kill her loneliness, she stays with Sethe all the time and starts working by the end when going becomes tough in the household.
• Beloved: Beloved appeared in the novel as two persons. The first one is the daughter of Sethe to whom she kills when Sweet Home’s owner and the police find her and try to forcibly take her back. The second is the ghost of Beloved who starts living with them at 124 and leaves only when Sethe is almost eaten up, making Beloved very fat. Although Beloved dies in childhood, yet the revenant becomes very touchy and temperamental and finally disappears from the scene.
• School teacher: The role of the School teacher is very important in Beloved in that he wields power over the slaves at Sweet Home. His sadism, sometimes, surpasses his biological knowledge of slave taming. His cruelty against Sethe and other slaves reminds them of the scars they receive at Sweet Home.
• Paul D: Paul D has lived at Sweet Home as a slave with other Pauls and Halle. He, like others, suffers at the hands of School teacher and later appears at 124 to live with Sethe including the ghost of Beloved. When Sethe finally faces mental dilemmas, he again appears to support her, though, he himself is engaged in repelling his bitter memories with his tobacco tin.
• Mr. Garner: Mr. Garner is significant in the storyline on account of his pride in his treatment of slaves. His free handling of the slaves earns him some praise, though, he stays hypocritical in his attitude and actions.
• Sixo: Markedly different from others due to paint color, Sixo seems well-versed in his masters’ language, the reason that he rebels wherever he goes. He is presented in the story as a gentle spirit.
• Amy Denver: Her character in the novel defies all predictions about her being a white lady and still helping the slaves. Her generosity and free spirit win the hearts of the African American community in that Sethe names her daughter after her for whom she helps Sethe during the birth.
• Stamp Paid: Stamp Paid, formerly called Joshua, faces very cruel slavery when his wife gets sexually abused despite his payment of debts. He appears as a problem solver even at 124 when he serves the community.

Writing Style of Beloved

Tony Morrison adopted a very unusual style in this novel, starting it by breaking the usual structure that is a non-linear story. The story starts en medias res and takes the readers to different characters who either tell their tales or a third person omniscient narrator starts telling the story. Most parts of the storyline are in the present tense in flashbacks, while some are in the past tense with the juxtaposition of the past with the present. The sentence structure, however, is quite simple, to the point, and direct, using both formal as well as informal diction .

Analysis of Literary Devices in Beloved

• Action: The main action of the novel comprises Sethe and Baby Suggs ordeal under slavery, their freedom, and the life of their kids. However, the rising action occurs when Sethe kills Beloved for fear that she may be taken back to be a slaver. The falling action , however, occurs when Beloved, the revenant, disappears from the home at 124.
• Allegory : Beloved is presented as an allegorical figure as she represents the past that keeps on haunting Sethe and other people living in 124.
• Anadiplosis : Beloved shows the use of anaphora in the below example, i. Harder, harder, the fingers moved slowly around toward her windpipe, making little circles on the way (One) The sentence shows the repetitious use of “harder, harder” at the beginning of the sentence.
• Antagonist : Beloved shows a system demonstrating itself as an antagonist . For example, slavery has been shown as an antagonist of Sethe that it does not let her free its shackles and enjoy a free life.
• Allusion : There are various examples of allusions given in the novel. i. I will call them my people, Which were not my people; And her beloved, Which was not beloved. (Romans 9:25) ii. Maybe he should have left it alone ; maybe Sethe would have gotten around to telling him herself; maybe he was not the high minded Soldier of Christ he thought he was, but an ordinary, plain meddler who had interrupted something going along just fine for the sake of truth and forewarning. (One) iii. When the horsemen came—schoolteacher, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff—the house on Bluestone Road was so quiet they thought they were too late. (Two) These three allusions are related to religion and Christianity; the first one is a direct quote, the second alludes to Christ and the third alludes to four horsemen in the Bible in Apocalypse.
• Conflict : The are two types of conflicts in the novel . The first one is the external conflict that is going on in the African American community led by Sethe and the institution of slavery. The second one is going on in the mind of Sethe about the freedom of her children and slavery.
• Characters: Beloved presents both static as well as dynamic characters . The young girl, Denver, and her mother, Sethe, are the two dynamic characters as they constantly change themselves according to the circumstances. However, all other characters, like all Pauls, Baby Suggs, Stamp Paid, and other white characters are static characters as they do not change during the course of the novel.
• Climax : The climax occurs by the end of the first part where Sethe kills her daughter due to the fear that she might have to live life in slavery like her.
• Foreshadowing : The novel shows the following examples of foreshadowing , i. 124 was spitefull. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. (One) ii. Out of site of of Mister’s sight, away, praise His name, from the smiling boss of roosters, Paul D began to tremble. Not all at once and not so anyone could tell. (One) iii. 124 was quiet. Denver, who thought she knew all about silence , was surprised to learn hunger could do that: quiet you down and wear you out. (One) These quotes from Beloved foreshadow the coming events.
• Imagery : Imagery is used to make readers perceive things involving their five senses. For example, i. And the wrought-iron maze he had explored in the kitchen like a gold miner pawing through pay dirt was, in fact, a revolting clump of scars. Not a tree, as she said. Maybe shaped like one, but nothing like any tree he knew because trees were inviting; things you could trust and be near; talk to if you wanted to as he frequently did since way back when he took the midday meal in the fields of Sweet Home. (One) ii. The crickets were screaming on Thursday and the sky, stripped of blue, was white hot at eleven in the morning. (One) iii. Slow, what-if thoughts that cut deep but struck nothing solid a man could hold on to. So he held his wrists. Passing by that woman’s life, getting in it, and letting it get in him had set him up for this fall. These passages from Beloved shows different images of sounds, colors, and movements.
• Metaphor : Beloved shows good use of various metaphors , for example, i. “Whitegirl. That’s what she called it. I’ve never seen it and never will. But that’s what she said it looked like. A chokecherry tree.” (One) ii. “White people believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle” (Second). iii. “It was some time before he could put Alfred, Georgia, Sixo, schoolteacher, Halle, his brothers, Sethe, Mister, the taste of iron, the sight of butter, the smell of hickory, notebook paper, one by one, into the tobacco tin lodged in his chest” (Second). The first is the metaphor of a tree, the second of the jungle , and the third of tobacco tin.
• Mood : The novel shows various moods in the beginning but it turns out quite suspenseful and ominous in tone . However, by the end, it becomes somewhat tragic and ironic.
• Motif : Most important motifs of the novel are tobacco tin, jungle, black color, and 124.
• Narrator : The novel, Beloved , is unique in that it presents different narrators and does not stick to a single narrative ; at times it is narrated in the third person point of view and at other times, it is in the first-person point of view.
• Protagonist : Sethe is the protagonist of the novel. The novel starts with her house at 124 and moves back and forth in flashbacks to tell the story of her life and the story of her children.
• Repetition : The novel shows the use of repetition in the poem given in the novel as the example given below, “You forgot to smile I loved you You hurt me You came back to me You left me I waited for you You are mine You are mine You are mine (One)” Although it is a type of poem, it shows various repetitions among which “You left me” and “You are mine” significant.
• Rhetorical Questions : The novel shows good use of rhetorical questions at several places. For examples, i. ‘I took one journey and I paid for the ticket, but let me tell you something, Paul D Garner: it cost too much! Do you hear me? It cost too much. Now sit down and eat with us or leave us be.”. (One) ii. Trust things and remember things because the last of the Sweet Home men was there to catch her if she sank? (One) iii. Unless carefree, motherlove was a killer. What did he want her pregnant for? To hold on to her? have a sign that he passed this way? (One) This example shows the use of rhetorical questions posed but different characters not to elicit answers but to stress upon the underlined idea.
• Setting : The setting of the novel is Cincinnati in Ohio during the Civil War.
• Simile : The novel shows good use of various similes as the examples given below, i. The picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerves in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard. (One) ii. Looking, in fact acting, like a girl instead of the quiet, queenly woman Denver had known all her life. (One) iii. And when the top of her dress was around her hips and he saw the sculpture her back had become, like the decorative work of an ironsmith too passionate for display (One). iv. She smelled like bark in the day and leaves at night , for Denver would not sleep in her old room after her brothers ran away. (One). These are similes as the use of the word “like” shows the comparison between different things.

Related posts:

• Beloved Themes
• Beloved Characters
• Beloved Quotes

Post navigation

77 pages • 2 hours read

A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-4

Chapters 5-8

Chapters 9-12

Chapters 13-16

Chapters 17-19

Chapters 20-24

Chapters 25-28

Character Analysis

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Sethe is the protagonist of the novel. Her traumatic past comes back to haunt her at house 124. She grows up as an enslaved woman, separated from a mother who “threw away” all her children but Sethe, because Sethe was the only one fathered by a Black man in an act of consensual sex. Her mother gives Sethe her birth father’s male name, but this story is relayed to her by another enslaved woman, as her mother is killed before she has the chance to explain. Years later, Sethe repeats her mother’s tragic actions against her own children. After running away from Sweet Home where she was enslaved, Sethe lives in hiding at her mother-in-law Grandma Baby Suggs’s house with her four children. When her former master finds her, she tries to kill her children and herself, succeeding in killing only her oldest daughter. While the horror of her actions prevents her from being brought back into slavery, it also results in her ostracization from the rest of the Black community, the eventual death of Grandma Baby Suggs, the departure of her two sons, and the haunting of 124 by her dead daughter’s spirit.

Don't Miss Out!

Access Study Guide Now

Related Titles

By Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison

God Help The Child

Love: A Novel

Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination

Song of Solomon

The Bluest Eye

The Origin of Others

Featured Collections

African American Literature

View Collection

American Literature

Audio Study Guides

Banned Books Week

Black History Month Reads

Daughters & Sons

Existentialism

Magical Realism

Nobel Laureates in Literature

Pulitzer Prize Fiction Awardees &...

Home — Essay Samples — Literature — Beloved — The Real Meaning of ‘beloved’

The Real Meaning of ‘beloved’

• Categories: Beloved Character

About this sample

Words: 2859 |

Pages: 6.5 |

15 min read

Published: Jun 29, 2018

Words: 2859 | Pages: 6.5 | 15 min read

Bibliography

• CHRISTIAN KIM, Heerak. Toni Morrison’s Beloved as African-American Scripture & Other Articles on History and Canon. Philadelphia: The Hermit Kingdom Press, 2006.
• ERICKSON, Daniel. Ghosts, Metaphor and History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
• FOSTER SEGAL, Carolyn. “Morrison’s Beloved”. In Explicator Volume 51 , 59-61 . London: Taylor and Francis, 1992.
• GALLANT ECKARD, Paula. Maternal Body and Violence in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason and Lee Smith . Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
• KRUMHOLZ, Lisa. “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved ”. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook , edited by William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay, 107-126. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999.
• MARKS, Kathleen. Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination . Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002.
• MORRISON, Toni. Beloved . London: Vintage Classics, 2007. Kindle Edition.
• Toni Morrison, Beloved (London: Vintage Classics, 2007), 60, Kindle Edition.
• Paula Gallant Eckard, Maternal Body and Violence in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee Smith (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 69.
• Gallant Eckard, Maternal Body and Violence , 69.
• Kathleen Marks, Toni Morrison’s Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002), 50.
• Linda Krumholz, “The Ghosts of Slavery: Historical Recovery in Toni Morrison’s Beloved ”, in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Casebook , ed. William L. Andrews and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 115.
• Daniel Erickson, Ghosts, Metaphor and History in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 83.
• Krumholz, “The Ghosts of Slavery”, 115.
• Carolyn Foster Segal, “Morrison’s Beloved”, in Explicator Volume 51 (London: Taylor and Francis, 1992), 59.
• Heerak Christian Kim, Toni Morrison’s Beloved as African-American Scripture & Other Articles on History and Canon (Philadelphia: The Hermit Kingdom Press, 2006), 28.
• Christian Kim, Toni Morrison’s Beloved as African-American Scripture , 27.

Cite this Essay

Let us write you an essay from scratch

• 450+ experts on 30 subjects ready to help
• Custom essay delivered in as few as 3 hours

Get high-quality help

Verified writer

• Expert in: Literature

+ 120 experts online

By clicking “Check Writers’ Offers”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy . We’ll occasionally send you promo and account related email

No need to pay just yet!

Related Essays

3 pages / 1330 words

2 pages / 1005 words

2.5 pages / 1364 words

2 pages / 887 words

Remember! This is just a sample.

You can get your custom paper by one of our expert writers.

121 writers online

Still can’t find what you need?

Browse our vast selection of original essay samples, each expertly formatted and styled

Related Essays on Beloved

Toni Morrison's novel, 'Beloved,' is a masterpiece of American literature that employs rich and intricate symbolism to convey its themes and messages. In this essay, we will delve into the significance of color in the novel, [...]

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved is a powerful exploration of the impact of slavery on individuals and communities. The character Sethe undergoes a profound transformation throughout the novel, as she grapples with the trauma of [...]

In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, the character of Sethe can be seen as a hero, although her actions may not fit the traditional image of a hero. Sethe's journey throughout the novel is one of survival, redemption, and [...]

In Toni Morrison's critically acclaimed novel Beloved, the character Denver undergoes a profound loss of innocence as she navigates the horrors of slavery and its aftermath. Through Morrison's skillful storytelling, Denver's [...]

Trauma is a ghost, and memories can be haunting. Each has the ability to drive a person to madness, or to inspire a certain enlightened strength in him. The capacity of someone to act with resilience, despite the severity of his [...]

That Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' is stylistically diverse cannot be doubted: Morrison's novel appears straightforward at first glance, opening with blank verse in a standard prose narration, but over the course of the story the [...]

Related Topics

By clicking “Send”, you agree to our Terms of service and Privacy statement . We will occasionally send you account related emails.

Where do you want us to send this sample?

By clicking “Continue”, you agree to our terms of service and privacy policy.

Be careful. This essay is not unique

This essay was donated by a student and is likely to have been used and submitted before

Download this Sample

Free samples may contain mistakes and not unique parts

Sorry, we could not paraphrase this essay. Our professional writers can rewrite it and get you a unique paper.

Please check your inbox.

We can write you a custom essay that will follow your exact instructions and meet the deadlines. Let's fix your grades together!

Get Your Personalized Essay in 3 Hours or Less!

We use cookies to personalyze your web-site experience. By continuing we’ll assume you board with our cookie policy .

• Instructions Followed To The Letter
• Deadlines Met At Every Stage
• Unique And Plagiarism Free

• Benefits to Participating Communities
• Participating School Districts
• Evaluations and Results
• Recognition Accorded
• National Advisory Committee
• Establishing New Institutes
• Topical Index of Curriculum Units
• View Topical Index of Curriculum Units
• Search Curricular Resources
• View Volumes of Curriculum Units from National Seminars
• Find Curriculum Units Written in Seminars Led by Yale Faculty
• Find Curriculum Units Written by Teachers in National Seminars
• Browse Curriculum Units Developed in Teachers Institutes
• On Common Ground
• Reports and Evaluations
• Articles and Essays
• Documentation
• Video Programs

Have a suggestion to improve this page?

To leave a general comment about our Web site, please click here

Share this page with your network.

Beloved: A Case Study in Storytelling Analysis

"It was not a story to pass on." Beloved

Introduction

I originally encountered the novel Beloved about a month before I was to teach it to an International Baccalaureate English 12 class eight years ago. When I read it for the first time, I was instantly struck by the power of the narrative, the complexity of Morrison's style, and absolute fear that I did not understand the novel well enough to teach it. I understood the basic plot ideas: murdered child returns in the flesh to haunt mother and family while they, the living, are attempting to walk a fine line between past, present, and future that will allow them to move forward. However, I needed help in understanding what the subtleties of Morrison's language, symbols, and narrative structure signified and how best to illuminate that for my students. Despite several fevered searches of both internet and library, I struggled to find appropriate strategies and activities for an upper-level high school classroom. This novel has invited many scholarly interpretations; there are also no shortage of summaries aimed at students, like Sparknotes—the bane of every teacher who attempts to encourage students to wrestle with a text independently. However, for a high school teacher working through the many different elements and attempting to convey those elements to my students, I felt the resources available were lacking. I put forth a brave face and a humble attitude and we slogged through the novel as neophytes together, united in our lack of understanding. Since then, I have read and taught this novel several times, increasing my comfort level as the facilitator and providing students with a deeper understanding of its many facets.

Great literature should always include an engaging plot and an innovative approach to literary elements; Beloved offers both, and upon every reading of the novel, I find something new that I did not see previously. I am also certain to tell my students this nugget of wisdom, many of whom would rather pull out their own teeth than reread a text. There are so many different lenses that one can use to interpret and critique the novel, which is one small part of its brilliance. There is no question why Morrison won the 1988 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction for Beloved , followed by a Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. It sparks a passionate level of interest for me as both a reader and a teacher, and I know that my students sense my excitement when we delve into the text together. While students don't always love the novel with the same near-fanaticism that I have, (almost) all of them come to respect and appreciate the novel for its literary value. Approaching the novel from the vantage point of storytelling encouraged me to bring a fresh eye to the text and to reevaluate my understanding of the story it ultimately tells the reader and the ways in which it does so.

Curricular Context and Rationale

For the last two decades, this novel has consistently been one of the most frequently taught on college campuses. As a teacher for both the Advanced Placement (AP) or International Baccalaureate (IB) programs, I know that practically all of these students are college-bound and are voluntarily enrolling in an academically challenging and rigorous course that will prepare them for higher education. Additionally, both programs require that students move beyond comprehension and be able to interpret and analyze rhetorical and thematic elements of writing, also valued skills at the university level. Beloved provides ample opportunity for this; it is an appropriate challenge because of the sophisticated writing style, symbolism, and motifs. When students are given parameters for understanding a difficult text like Beloved , it can lead to stimulating classroom discussion and the application of significant analysis. I usually approach this novel in second semester for two reasons: it builds up to this novel's difficulty through other works in first semester and because students find this novel incredibly useful as an exemplary text for their exams, which occur in May.

AP English Literature and Composition is traditionally taught in the twelfth grade and is designed for students to think critically about literature and develop analytical skills equivalent to an undergraduate literature course. The students are generally high-achieving, goal-oriented students who are accustomed to being successful at school. The College Board must approve the syllabus of the course, and students are expected to take the AP exam in May; a successful score is one that will gain college credit, typically a 4 or 5 (on a 5 point scale). The exam incorporates a multiple choice section with several fiction-based passages and questions that I have categorized as comprehension, interpretation, analysis, and technical or literary vocabulary. Students also write three essays in two hours; two essays are based on previously unseen literary passages chosen by the College Board, and the third essay is an open-ended question that they will answer and support based on a text read during that year. This is where Beloved 's usefulness truly becomes evident, because it is a text that can be applied in so many different ways.

The International Baccalaureate Diploma Program takes place during eleventh and twelfth grades. It is a rigorous curriculum that takes a more holistic approach to education; in addition to core academic classes, IB students are required to take Theory of Knowledge, a course designed to evaluate learning processes and illustrate connections amongst disciplines. IB students must also complete an Extended Essay of four thousand words and community service hours in the categories of creativity, action, and service (CAS). In English A1 HL (IB-speak for 12 th grade literature, read in English), students are required to examine multiple genres of literature from different cultures, and each work is studied in-depth for a number of weeks. Choosing particularly rich texts that can be critiqued from a variety of stances is an important requisite factor for being placed on the syllabus. In May, IB students take an essay-based exam and received a score of 0-7; when combined with their other IB scores, they may receive an IB diploma or certificates for completed courses.

By the end of a four-week unit for a class that meets every other day for ninety minutes, students will have read the novel in its entirety, discussed their evolving understanding of the plot and character development, established an understanding of the non-linear chronology of events, analyzed the significance of storytelling in its multiple meanings, and showcased their ability to critically analyze the novel from various points of view.

My goal as an educator, and particularly as an English teacher, is for students to learn to think critically and to apply those analytical skills throughout their lives. Often students think that all we do in class is read and discuss novels, and they don't see the benefits that the critical thinking and analysis skills they have learned and applied in my class can have in multiple areas of their academic lives and beyond. I know I have been successful, however, when a student tells me that she never thought of something in that way before, or that he brought up our reading or discussion in another class or at home. That shows that the boundaries of the physical classroom have been broken, which is exactly what I want. Beloved is the type of novel that encourages this boundary-breaking; I have eavesdropped on students in the hallway arguing over the morality of Sethe's decision and I have been told from other teachers that the students frequently tie in the reading to their other coursework—sometimes to that teacher's chagrin because of a perceived slight to their own classwork, or ignorance about the novel itself. I, however, am delighted that students are making connections.

By the end of this unit, students will have a different concept of the word 'storytelling.' Using the word in a high school setting is tricky because it is associated with much younger children: as in, "story hour" or "tell me a story." There's also a cultural connotation that to "tell stories" is to be lying, and that only leads to trouble and punishment. In the context of this novel, however, storytelling takes on multiple levels of significance that relate to but also diverge from standard associations with the word. In any literary work, there is a narrator telling a story to the reader. In this novel, that is accomplished by an omniscient third person perspective, but there are important moments when the novel's narration is entrusted to its characters—not only through dialogue, but also from a first person point of view. There are also the stories that the characters tell each other—personal stories of physical and psychological trauma that raise the question, what stories should be told, and who decides when, how, or why they are told?

The very idea of storytelling is rooted in the historical and cultural reality of the novel in two ways, and this will be explored in the curriculum unit. First, the oral tradition of storytelling, a key component of sharing and maintaining African and African-American history and identity at the time of the novel's setting, is a key element in the relationships that exist among the characters. This is further complicated by the idea of oral versus written storytelling, when a newspaper clipping shown to an illiterate man becomes a revelatory and symbolic plot device. Second, the central conflict of the novel is based on a historically true event, which circles back to and questions the idea that storytelling must be fictitious. Punishment in the novel comes from historical truth—the institution of slavery is the root of all pain and each character has suffered from it in some way. Even though the novel is a work of fiction, the emotions that are characterized are realistic. Storytelling is a way of processing and making real that pain and punishment; it also encourages an emotional reaction from the reader. All of these different elements of storytelling will be outlined in the discussion below.

In this unit, students will recognize and analyze the different writing styles and narrative techniques that comprise the storytelling structure of Beloved . The novel is considered a cornerstone of postmodernism because of the way that it fuses so many styles that have come before, including stream of consciousness, magical realism, flashback, and the bildungsroman. Evaluating setting and chronology are important when considering the structure as it relates to and impacts storytelling. The novel shifts in both place and time with minimal cues, creating a beautiful fluidity to the narrative but also potential frustration, as it can be easy to lose the when and where of the plot.

To meet these objectives, reading and discussing the novel should take some time, which is why four weeks for the unit is strongly recommended. I have made the mistake of expecting students to move too quickly through the text, and they end up frustrated and confused. This is especially true for high school students encountering the text for the first time, for whom this may well be the most complex piece of literature they have ever read. By breaking the novel into purposeful sections and working through it as a class, the students are allowed time to process the text, to discuss it with their peers, and to approach and work through its most powerful moments together (my chunking suggestions are in the Strategies and Activities section below).

Background Information

There are many resources available for a standard biography of Toni Morrison, so this short section will focus on the pertinent parts of her background that specifically inform the creation of this novel. As the focus of this curriculum unit is the theme of storytelling, that idea will also serve as the central touchstone biographically.

Toni Morrison, a pen name, was born as Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio; the year of her birth is an important fact because "Morrison was twenty-three years old when the 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education was handed down; she was thirty-seven...when the Civil Rights Act was passed. Thus, the activism, violence, and radical changes of the civil rights era formed the backdrop of almost her entire young adulthood." 1 This history could not fail to inform her writing and, indeed, her novels grapple with many different aspects of the African American experience, even those that she did not personally live through, like the Middle Passage and slavery in Beloved . One critic claims that "Morrison's most revolutionary—and most defining—act has been to write for black readers about black people...[S]he has credited the complexity and originality of African American life by working within its intricate and rich system of meaning, language, and art." 2 She achieves this through the representation of dialect, symbols, and a sense of authenticity in her fiction.

Morrison's grandparents were sharecroppers in Alabama; they became part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North when they moved first to Kentucky, and then settled in Ohio. They brought with them not only their personal experiences, but also the oral tradition of storytelling or "the black vernacular tradition," which was passed down to their children and grandchildren. 3 Morrison has repeatedly highlighted the importance of these stories, most recently in an April 2012 article: "At night her parents told R-rated ghost stories, like one about a murdered wife who returned home holding her own severed head. The following evening, the kids had to retell the tales with variations: Maybe it was snowing, or there was blood dripping from the head." 4 This immediately brings to mind the passage in Beloved of the childish but disturbing stories that Sethe's children tell each other about their own mother, from Denver's point of view: "[S]he remembered...the pleasure they had sitting clustered on the white stairs—she between the knees of Howard or Buglar—while they made up die-witch! stories with proven ways of killing [Sethe] dead." 5 This presents an interesting contrast of familial comfort, found in the physical closeness of the siblings and the unity resulting from the storytelling, and the unsettling plotline of murdering their mother. At this point in the novel, the reader is unaware why making up stories of Sethe's death would bring "pleasure" to the children, although there is an interesting connection to the idea of "proven ways of killing her dead." The children are aware they live with the ghost of their murdered sister, so death itself is not an end but simply a different kind of existence. The specific phrasing calls to mind the idea of ending a person in both body and spirit—when they "kill" Sethe in these stories, she cannot return to haunt them.

Morrison was in a unique position to marry the oral tradition of stories with the canon of Western literature because of her family's decision to move north in order to provide her with better access to education and, historically speaking, the increase in available avenues for black writers as the twentieth century progressed. "[F]rom a very early age, she had a deep connection to the Western literary tradition even while she maintained her grounding in the black vernacular tradition." 6 She went on to graduate from both Howard and Cornell and says she became a writer when "I realized there was a book that I wanted very much to read that really hadn't been written." 7 This is a powerful statement in context of the novel Beloved because I am not aware of a work that approaches its handling of morality, trauma, and the dangers of memory in such an eloquent and literary manner, while still being accessible to students.

In the quarter-century since the publication of Beloved , the novel has developed its own story to tell. While the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1988, it was not without controversy. The novel failed to win the National Book Award for that year, prompting a large group of renowned, self-identified "black writers" to publish a protest in the New York Times Book Review . This group, including such figures as Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "here assert ourselves against such oversight and harmful whimsy" and claim that "the legitimate need for our own critical voice in relation to our own literature...no longer be denied." 8 In 2006, a group of writers and critics polled by the New York Times voted that Beloved was the best work of literature of the last twenty-five years. 9

Finally, the novel has a story to tell as a banned or challenged text and a teacher should be aware of that history before assigning it in the classroom. The same year that Morrison's novel was voted to be the best work of fiction, it was also on the top of the American Library Association's list of most challenged books for "complaints [of] offensive language, sexual content, [and] unsuited to age group." 10 Having taught the novel, I know from experience that there are sections that must be handled cautiously. Prior to any classroom discussion of a delicate passage—for example, the references to human-bestial intercourse in the first chapter—I remind my students that the novel contains adult themes that require us to be sophisticated, mature readers, and that our language and tone must reflect that. 11

Analysis of Storytelling

There are myriad ways to critique, analyze, and interpret this novel, and there is no shortage of academic resources to look at for inspiration. My goal here is to provide high school literature teachers with a departure point for analyzing the novel based on the concept of storytelling, and the following analysis will be broken into "Structure and Culture" and "Narrative Truth, Historical Truth." The categories are neither superficial nor definitive; rather, they provide me with broad parameters in order to guide my students through the novel.

I have structured these sections in a way that will allow teachers to see how the novel can be interpreted in the classroom. Creating day-by-day lesson plans is not the most effective introduction to this analysis because, as is evident upon reading this unit, teachers will benefit most from having all of these elements in mind when beginning the novel with students.

Structure and Culture

Oral Tradition

There is a beautiful complexity to the novel that is revealed each and every time it is read, but it can certainly be intimidating to a reader of any age. In addition to the specific literary techniques that Morrison weaves throughout are the overarching styles of writing that coalesce and make it such an engaging and challenging read. The modes of storytelling must be examined so that students can comprehend, break apart, and interpret the text in a meaningful way. This is not a novel that can be read just for plot or character or structure because of the way that the elements have been woven together. I will not divorce the author from a text, thus the cultural perspective of African Americans necessarily informs the structure. For example, one notices the use of parallel structure and repetition almost immediately; the first sentence of each of the three parts of the novel are "124 was spiteful," "124 was loud," and "124 was quiet." 12 However, when one recognizes that Morrison embeds the black vernacular tradition into the structure, we see how it contributes strongly to the story that the novel tells and the way that it is revealed. "The vernacular is a complex oral discourse characterized by such tropes as call and response and signifying (a means of repetition and revision)." 13 In literary terms, we tend to call this repetition or parallelism, but specifically naming it within the African American tradition brings with it the cultural weight and significance that it deserves.

The character of Baby Suggs exemplifies the oral traditions of African Americans. Several of the terms used above, like call and response and signifying, along with witnessing, are directly connected to religious practices. We discover in chapter 9 that after she was purchased from slavery by her son Halle, "she became an unchurched preacher...uncalled, unrobed, unanointed". 14 After Paul D tells Sethe that Halle lost his mind after seeing her violated, Sethe aches for the support that Baby Suggs would have provided and she hears the voice of Baby Suggs saying, "Lay em down, Sethe. Sword and shield. Down. Down. Both of em down. Down by the riverside. Sword and shield. Don't study war no more. Lay all that mess down. Sword and shield." 15 There are several techniques at work in this passage and it is a worthwhile exercise to have students identify them and examine how they work together. First, the characterization of Baby Suggs is as a soothing source of comfort for Sethe, placing Baby Suggs in the mold of a mother figure. The use of dialect reveals class and status, but it also makes her seem approachable and human. This passage serves to connect the techniques of parallelism and repetition to the culturally-rooted terms of witnessing and signifying (defined in the paragraph above). Even though Baby Suggs' comments are just for Sethe, they could easily be used in one of her sermons—the "sword and shield" has biblical connotations—that she delivers in the Clearing to other escaped and former slaves and their children. The imagery, repetition, and structure also create a melodic flow that seems to envelope Sethe and the reader, similar to repeating a mantra or prayer can induce a calming effect.

The story begins in medias res , but it quickly establishes the main characters and setting within the first paragraph. Reading this passage aloud is an excellent way of introducing the novel and allowing students the time to process the text and ask questions (not that they will all be answered). Some examples of useful analysis that can be performed on the first paragraph begin with the first sentence: "124 was spiteful." The house has already achieved its own significance by virtue of opening the novel and being personified, and "spiteful" is a loaded word worthy of a brief discussion of connotation and association. The second sentence, a fragment really, "Full of a baby's venom," contrasts that idea of personification. It opens with an angry house and follows with the image of a dangerous, bestial baby, purportedly the most innocent of all creatures.

I would also ask students to think carefully about the specific number of the house. This is a good time to point out that nothing in the novel is accidental, so why the sequence 124? They will typically point out that the number three is missing, which is a powerful symbol as one continues to read—Beloved, the murdered daughter, being the third of Sethe's children. When asked what the sum of 1+2+4 is, they quickly and proudly shout out "Seven!" The follow-up is, what does the number seven symbolize, particularly in a biblical sense? Some students will point out that God created the world in seven days, which means the number seven is symbolic of completion. This then prompts the final question of, how can the sequence be symbolically complete when it is so clearly missing a component? Revisiting this question at the end of the novel, students recognize that the family is complete without Beloved; she does not belong. Additionally, the numbers may come to symbolize the three characters that can make a new family—Sethe, Denver, and Paul D—by the end of the novel.

Flashback and Time Shifts

That the novel will shift quickly in time is established in the fifth sentence, "The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time there were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was it for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard)." While the third sentence states the present time as 1873, the reader is quickly alerted that events of the past will frequently collide with the present. (One of the most useful activities in the classroom is to have students create a chronological timeline of events; this is elaborated in the "Activities" section.) The teacher can point out cues to the students that a time shift is going to occur in order to give them confidence. A strong example for this is found in the extract: "'No more powerful than the way I loved her,' Sethe answered and there it was again. The welcoming cool of unchiseled headstones...". 16 Through the phrasing, "and there it was again," a careful reader will recognize that as a cue that we are entering a flashback, and those verbal signs are important in identifying moments of time shift.

Flashback has its own narrative significance in the novel, clearly demonstrating the power of the past on the present. "[T]he leveling out of different time frames enable[s] the novel to mimic and reflect the process of memory: the actual act of remembering as well as the incorporation of told memories into the oral tradition." 17 This connection does not just provide background for the novel's events, but is a powerful reminder that past events create memories and memory can be dangerous. Sethe admits that "she worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe," indicating a tenuous relationship between remembering, forgetting, and deliberate memory suppression. 18 The danger of forgetting is exemplified for Sethe on the following page as she describes a moment of walking home: "Nothing else would be in her mind...and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too." 19 This is one of my favorite passages to examine and analyze with a class because there is so much power in the use of figurative language, repetition, and allusion, which connects to the characterization of Sethe and the theme of memory.

Breaking down these early passages in the classroom is an important and valid use of time because it shows the students the depth of analysis that is possible while also giving them the benefit of working through it together, even when following a teacher's modeling. It is critical that students understand the importance of flashback as more than just a literary device, but a stylistic element that informs the structure, characterization, and meaning of the novel as a whole.

Magical Realism

In addition to the subtle flashback, the fifth sentence of the novel also sets up one of the key writing styles, magical realism. "Magic realist novels and stories have, typically, a strong narrative drive, in which the recognizably realistic merges with the unexpected and the inexplicable and in which elements of dreams, fairy story, or mythology combine with the everyday, often in a mosaic or kaleidoscopic pattern of refraction and recurrence." 20 It becomes clear in the fifth sentence from the text that while the house is the vessel for supernatural occurrences, the creator of the disturbances is the venomous baby, as displayed through the disconcerting image of the "two tiny hand prints...in the cake." This style is reinforced on the following page when "Sethe and Denver decided to end the persecution by calling forth the ghost that tried them so. Perhaps a conversation, they thought, an exchange of views or something would help. So they held hands and said, 'Come on. Come on. You may as well just come on.' The sideboard took a step forward but nothing else did." 21 In this passage, the two characters make a conscious decision to communicate with the spirit that they believe is causing "the outrageous behavior of that place," and it is treated matter-of-factly, without any special introduction. "When Morrison recreates these elements in her art, she purposely departs from consensus reality, not to foreground the supernatural as a unique expression of the black community, but as a way to signify the difference between culturally imposed ways of seeing. Morrison's assumption in her writing, her consensus reality, is very different...because the supernatural does exist [and] presumes a truth that is unassailable." 22 Morrison is not asking the reader to suspend his disbelief; trust in supernatural occurrences is a cultural truth in the African American community and she will not explain or apologize for it.

It can sometimes be a challenge for students to treat magical realism in the commonplace manner that the author intends; teenagers, not surprisingly, are prone to dramatic interpretations. However, because Morrison has embedded the supernatural from the very first sentence and makes it a common, if complicated, part of the characters' lives, the students are much more likely to develop a way of seeing the supernatural in the way it is meant to be treated. The definition quoted above names "recurrence" as an important element of this style as a way of normalizing it. This is specifically reinforced in this passage in a subtle way, but one that demonstrates Morrison's craft as a writer.

At the beginning of chapter 8, Denver is basking in the joy that Beloved is exuding. Beloved seems to be delighted to have a physical body and performing with it: "Beloved put her fists on her hips and commenced to skip on bare feet. Denver laughed. 'Now you. Come on,' said Beloved. 'You may as well just come on.'" 23 The spoken language here doesn't quite fit, but nor does it stick out as being particularly wrong. The reader has noticed Beloved's language skills developing and the first two fragments seem appropriate, but the last sentence is a developed thought that seems more advanced. In class, I would ask the students about Beloved's use of language here and then point them back to the beginning of chapter 1 and give them the open-ended direction of finding the connection to this extract. Thankfully, the passage appears on the second page, so it doesn't take long for them to find Sethe's original invitation to the ghost form of Beloved (referenced in the paragraph above). The next question is obviously, what does this mean about Beloved and her consciousness? Students then realize that when Beloved's presence in 124 was spiritual, not physical, this proves that she could hear the family and her form of participation was through making objects move or presenting herself as "a pool of red and undulating light." 24 It also demonstrates how purposeful Beloved's physical presence is. She does not feel the need to present herself tangibly until Paul D arrives, creates a sense of intimacy with Sethe, fights back against "the screaming house," and gets "rid of the only other company [Denver] had." 25

Stream of Consciousness

The technique of entering a character's unfiltered thoughts and following wherever s/he may lead is one of the cornerstones of Modernist and postmodernist literature. My students have already encountered A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce and are usually adept at identifying stream of consciousness passages in Beloved . There are short examples of this throughout the text but the most significant and difficult are the chapters that are from the points of view of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved respectively, and then the chapter that is the marriage of all three voices. One of my favorite aspects of the novel is the way that Morrison prepares the reader for what will happen next, and this is achieved in the final sentence of the nineteenth chapter: "Mixed in with the voices surrounding the house, recognizable but undecipherable to Stamp Paid, were the thoughts of the women of 124, unspeakable thoughts, unspoken." 26 At this moment the reader may not exactly know what the next few chapters will hold, but the first line of chapter twenty, "Beloved, she my daughter," does not come as a surprise, and clearly defines Sethe as the speaker. The following chapter belongs to Denver as established through its opening sentence, "Beloved is my sister," a parallel to Sethe's. Students usually do not struggle with these two chapters, but it is chapters 22 that tends to need thorough class discussion and analysis.

The first sentence of chapter 22 provides some comfort—it creates a parallel to Sethe and Denver and ends in traditional punctuation—but, alas, it is the only such sentence in the chapter. I will now take this opportunity to freely admit that given the chance, I would ask Toni Morrison to explain every word in this chapter. Short of that, however, I begin by reminding students that this is the strongest example of stream of consciousness in the novel for multiple reasons. First, Beloved still speaks like a child; we have seen many examples of this through the text. Children tend to describe things as literally as possible and she wrestles with her lack of language: "how can I say things that are pictures". 27 Second, we know that Beloved has a divided consciousness. She is here physically, but having come from the other side, part of her self is still connected to the non-physical world. Beloved laments, "there is no one to want me to say me my name I wait on the bridge because she is under it there is night and there is day". 28 Understandably, the "she" that Beloved wants so desperately is Sethe, and this is confirmed through the imagery of Sethe's earrings that she dangled for the baby and that Beloved asks her about in chapter six: "Tell me your diamonds." 29

One strategy to increase student confidence in their understanding of the chapter is to ask them to find examples of imagery that they recognize and to establish its context in the stream of consciousness narrative. There are several examples of repetitive imagery from within the chapter, but none is as dominant as "a hot thing," repeated ten times in five pages. It is always its own complete thought, an image connected to but separate from what is around it. Considering Beloved's lack of vocabulary, "a hot thing" strikes me as something dangerous, requiring caution. It seems, though, that the most common reference surrounding "a hot thing" is Sethe—Beloved's mother, a source of love. For example: "her face is my own and I want to be there in the place where her face is and to be looking at it too a hot thing"; "she wants her earrings she wants her round basket I want her face a hot thing"; and perhaps most conclusively, "Sethe's is the face that left me Sethe sees me see her and I see the smile her smiling face is the place for me it is the face I lost she is my face smiling at me doing it at last a hot thing now we can join a hot thing". 30 Students want a definitive answer: "What is the hot thing??" I have been accosted at my door, in the hallway, and even while getting out of my car after assigning this chapter.

One of the best methods I have found for dealing with this difficult passage is structured small group discussion. Offering students some comprehension-based questions, like the imagery that they recognized from earlier in the novel, gives them a boost of confidence. In regards to "a hot thing," I tell them that my teacher's edition of Beloved just has all of these notes in the margins, and none of them define what "a hot thing" is (the notes, of course, being my own annotations). I admit to having my own theory, but I would like to hear theirs before revealing my own. Despite the lack of a concrete answer, this makes students more comfortable in their own suppositions about the chapter. When they assign meaning to "a hot thing," they must defend their response based on textual support and interpretation, and I have heard some interesting theories. At the end of class, if no one has landed on it, I share my own thoughts: that "a hot thing" is the emotion or relationship that exists between Beloved and Sethe. It is rooted in love, a "hot," powerful, passionate sensation, but it is also tainted with Beloved's anger that Sethe abandoned her. There is a sense of desperation, longing, and control in the image itself and in its repetition.

Bildungsroman

Beloved may seem the obvious choice as the character for whom the novel is a bildungsroman, or coming-of-age novel, but it is actually Denver who rapidly matures and becomes an adult in the year that the text covers (in present tense, spring 1873 to spring 1874). It is a worthwhile activity to have students trace specific moments that showcase Denver's maturation throughout the novel, and what follows is an example of guiding them.

Morrison does not hide the fact that Denver is practically a woman in the first chapter; we know that it has been eighteen years since Paul D saw Sethe and, he says to Denver, "Last time I saw your mama, you were pushing out the front of her dress," a reference to Sethe's pregnancy. 31 It is, however, remarks like Sethe's response that lead the reader to forget Denver's age: "Still is, provided she can get in it." The students I teach are seventeen to eighteen years old, about to enter the world of independence; they cannot imagine either themselves or a peer wanting to crawl into a parent's lap or re-enter the womb. Denver is consistently characterized as being exceptionally childish, even from the first moment she arrives: "the girl who walked down...was round and brown with the face of an alert doll." 32 She is also quite jealous of the relationship between Paul D and Sethe, particularly because it creates an intimacy of which she is not a part. Students tend to perceive this as an immature, childish need for attention. Additionally, there is her emotional and seemingly unprovoked outburst that begins with an impudent retort and ends with her "shaking now and sobbing so she could not speak," and lashing out at her mother: "It's not the house! It's us! And it's you!" 33 The idea of fighting with a parent is much more realistic to students, but the way in which Denver handles her emotions seems to infantilize her. Sethe's treatment of Denver encourages the reader's interpretation of Denver's immaturity, as well: "Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing." 34 Denver is the only child of four that Sethe has left, so it makes sense that she wants her to stay a child so that she will not leave like her brothers.

The moment Denver begins to mature hinges on the arrival of the physical Beloved. Denver has been desperate for a companion, especially since Paul D has taken her mother's attention. Once the family takes in this stranger, "Denver tended her, watched her sound sleep, listened to her labored breathing and, out of love and a breakneck possessiveness that charged her, hid like a personal blemish Beloved's incontinence." 35 Denver realizes long before Sethe exactly who Beloved is. Once Denver has set boundaries with her mother—"Leave us alone, Ma'am. I'm taking care of her"—Sethe casually wonders where their dog Here Boy is. "'He won't be back,' said Denver. 'How you know?' 'I just know.'" 36 The dog has refused to enter the house since the description in the first chapter when Beloved's spirit "picked up Here Boy and slammed him into wall hard enough to break two of his legs and dislocate his eye". 37 Denver's mysterious declaration is a good moment to ask students what she knows, and many animal lovers hold a serious grudge against the ghost for harming the dog and quickly remember that painful description in chapter 1. This moment is a strong indication that Denver knows Beloved's true identity and that she is beginning to act her age. Despite the fact that Beloved is technically older than she is (twenty to her eighteen), she senses that Beloved is developmentally the age she was at her death. This allows Denver to care for and protect Beloved, though still in an immature, possessive way.

Denver's final test of maturity comes in part three of the novel. Once Sethe realizes that Beloved is her child returned to her, "the two of them cut Denver out of the games." 38 Sethe is consumed with pleasing Beloved and Beloved refuses to be pleased. The relationship between them becomes dangerous and Denver realizes that "[s]he would have to leave the yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go ask somebody for help." 39 Asking students why the language in this quotation is so powerful is a good strategy for understanding Denver's characterization and maturity. 124 has been her world because it has been her insulation from the judgment of others about her family, but for the first time, she is not concerned with herself. She is worried about her mother and her sister and is willing to put her own desire, to stay in the confines of the world she knows, aside so that she can save them all. Denver leaves the house and goes to the one person she knows outside of 124: her former teacher, Lady Jones. Denver admits she is seeking work because her mother is ill. "'Oh, baby,' said Mrs. Jones. 'Oh, baby.' She did not know it then, but it was the word 'baby,' said softly and with such kindness, that inaugurated her life in the world as a woman." 40 Students usually recognize the significance of this moment and I like to ask about the juxtaposition of word choice and impact. Why does the word "baby" make Denver a woman? Is it simply for irony's sake? Rather than the word itself, it is the tone of sympathy that accompanies it that leads Denver to maturity.

Denver's childish loneliness and possessiveness are swept away in this moment, and she realizes that she does not have to be alone in this struggle. The welcoming and support of the women in her community, by way of Mrs. Jones, are what allows her to achieve womanhood. She displays her maturity for Paul D once Beloved is gone. In a conversation about who or what Beloved really was, she proclaims "I have my own" opinion, and Paul D acknowledges that Denver can no longer be treated like a child. It is her final words to him, however, that have the strongest impact: "Paul D, you don't have to stay 'way, but be careful how you talk to my ma'am, hear?" 41 Denver clearly establishes that she is responsible for her mother, reversing the care relationship that has been the basis of the novel. She lets Paul D know that he is welcome as long as he is cautious, making Sethe the child that needs comfort. That Denver is now capable of unselfishly caring for another is strong evidence that her journey into womanhood is complete.

Narrative Truth, Historical Truth

Storytelling is supposed to be fictional, creative, and fantastical. Morrison begins her Nobel Prize lecture with the following: "Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge. I hope you will understand, then, why I begin these remarks with the opening phrase of what must be the oldest sentence in the world, and the earliest one we remember from childhood: "Once upon a time...". 42 Those last four words are the cue that we are about to enter a world of fantasy, simultaneously connected to and removed from reality. There must be, however, some form of personal or universal truth to give a story its power and credibility. The characters and world of 124 Bluestone Road are entirely fictional but are rooted in multiple types of historical truth that command the reader to engage and wrestle with the repercussions of the stories that have been told to and about them, and which they tell to each other and to the reader.

Slavery and its horrors have been well-documented, even prior to its legal end in the United States a century and a half ago. There are firsthand accounts from Frederick Douglass and Linda Brent (AKA Harriet Jacobs) that speak to the violence and fear that slaves experienced even while seeking to find ways to free themselves from their bondage. Slavery has been reimagined in a variety of fictional works throughout the twentieth century; The Known World by Edward P. Jones is a recent addition to the canon that adds a unique perspective—the little-acknowledged fact that some blacks owned slaves. Part of the powerful narrative truth in Beloved stems from the historical truth of slavery, and in particular, the memory of and psychological trauma inflicted by slavery. I should acknowledge my teaching context: I am from and teach in the South (North Carolina). Despite the long separation of years and generations, there continues to be a different treatment of the history of slavery in states that fought against the Federal Army in the Civil War. I believe this to be true based on conversations with colleagues who were raised in Massachusetts or Indiana. Some students that I teach acknowledge coming from families that owned slaves. Even now, this is delicate territory.

I have found one of the novel's strengths to be the focus on the psychological, rather than physical, scars left on the characters. A strong example to use with students that iterates the dominance of the psychological over the physical is in the first chapter as Sethe explains to Paul D what she means when she says, "I got a tree on my back." 43 This off-hand remark intrigues Paul D, but for Sethe, the real story is what came prior to the whipping that produced the tree-like scar. Sethe tells him that she was still nursing her third child while pregnant with the fourth and that "those boys came in there and took my milk. Held me down and took it." This is a physical desecration on par with rape—to be restrained and suckled like an animal—but for Sethe, it violates her ability to be a mother to her child and that is what continues to haunt her. She tells her mistress what happened and while the white owner's "eyes rolled out tears, [t]hem boys found out I told em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back and when it closed it made a tree." As Paul D hears the story, he cannot believe that a pregnant woman was whipped: "They used cowhide on you? They beat you and you was pregnant?" Sethe repeats, "And they took my milk!" Many students will react similarly to Paul D; they will not fail to recognize the physical and even emotional toll that this event has on Sethe, but a teacher's guidance through the psychological territory will help them understand the heavy maternal burden that she continues to carry.

Perhaps the most significant historical reality in the novel is not addressed until the sixteenth chapter, in which the reader finally learns how Sethe's two year old child was killed. The background of the murder is now one of the more famous historical connections in modern literature. As Morrison writes in the foreword to Beloved , "A newspaper clipping in The Black Book (one of the books I had published back when I had a job) summarized the story of Margaret Garner, a young mother who, having escaped slavery, was arrested for killing one of her children (and trying to kill the others) rather than let them be returned to the owner's plantation." 44 While Margaret Garner's story was sensationalized and well-known at the time, it was forgotten over the years. When I first read the novel, I had no idea of the historical reality or the parallels that Morrison built into the narrative.

It is of particular interest from a writer's perspective that, in the foreword, Morrison goes on to say, "The historical Margaret Garner is fascinating, but, to a novelist, confining...So I would invent her thoughts, plumb them for a subtext that was historically true in essence, but not strictly factual." Morrison, however, embeds several historical truths from Margaret Garner's story in the novel that lend a tone of gravity. Sethe and Denver do not reveal last names, but Paul D introduces himself as "Paul D Garner," after the masters at Sweet Home. 45 In Levi Coffin's autobiography, published in 1876, the man hailed as the "President of the Underground Railroad" wrote that "no case...attracted more attention and aroused deeper interest and sympathy that the case of Margaret Garner." 46 He goes on to give details about the escape, including the fact that the slaves were "living in Kentucky, several miles back from the [Ohio R]iver" and that they planned to escape to a free state, which would be Ohio. Sweet Home is in Kentucky and Sethe gives birth to Denver on the banks of the Ohio River before being ferried across by Stamp Paid, where she is reunited with her three other children, who are already with Baby Suggs. Once "the fugitives were surrounded by pursuers, Margaret Garner, seeing that their hopes of freedom were in vain, seized a butcher knife that lay on the table, and with one stroke cut the throat of her little daughter, whom she probably loved the best." 47 There is no exact parallel of language in Morrison's novel, but when the slavecatchers enter the woodshed, Sethe is "holding a blood-soaked child to her chest" so "her head wouldn't fall off." 48 At the end of the novel when Beloved has disappeared again and Sethe has taken to her bed, much like Baby Suggs, she says, "[Beloved] was my best thing." 49

These are all powerful connections that students are fully capable of perceiving, and it truly deepens the significance of the novel. The historical truth is so strongly intertwined with the narrative truth that the impact is compounded, not in any way lessened, because it is a work of fiction. After students have read this chapter, they come into class, expecting an immediate discussion. Many of them have clearly formed judgments about the justice of Sethe's decision. As students walk through the door, I hand them the passage from Reminiscences with directions to read the selection and write a response to two questions prior to discussion: Paragraph 1) What similarities are present between Margaret and Sethe? Does reading this change your opinion of Sethe at all?

Paragraph 2) How do you personally deal with the situation in ch. 16, morally and/or ethically. (Philosophically, 'morality' speaks to the character, actions, and/or values of an individual; 'ethics' is the set of standards that governs a particular group.) The discussion that follows is more serious and grounded in the text, which respects the historical reality of the situation (see the Appendix for the text from Reminiscences ).

Strategies and Activities

The reading pace of the novel is, I believe, critical to guiding students and keeping them engaged. I generally expect my students to read at least 25 pages a night, but a text this dense requires a bit more time. There are important moments that students need to read about prior to one class period and there are others that necessitate a bit of time and space between them. My chapter-chunking suggestions for a class that meets every other day are as follows: 1; 2-3; 4-7; 8-9; 10-12; 13-15; 16-18; 19; 20-23; 24-25; 26-28.

Teachers have developed many different methods for checking that students have read and tried to understand the text. While many upper-level teachers check text annotations, I ask students to create a reader's journal. For the journal, students must pull a designated number of quotations from the chapters assigned and respond to them. The quotations that they choose should illuminate some significant element: plot development, symbol, characterization, motif/theme, writing technique/style, etc. They are reminded that their responses are NOT a summary or paraphrase but an explication of meaning. Below is the example that I give to my students:

• QUOTE: "The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stocking awry on the path where she had flung them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too." (7)
• RESPONSE: The string of clauses at the beginning of this long sentence reinforces the idea that anything can trigger a painful flashback to the plantation where Sethe was a slave; the length of the sentence also shows how her present life is inextricably linked to her past. The repetition of the word "rolling" seems to emphasize how unstoppable a force memory is—like a bulldozer. There's also obvious irony in the name "Sweet Home;" while it was beautiful, just the memory of the sight causes her pain and invokes an allusion to hell. While most people think of "home sweet home" as a tired but accurate cliché, this is obviously an example of harsh discrepancy between naming and reality, an important theme. I wonder what other elements in the novel are not what they seem?

I have tried to embed analytical modeling in the previous pages as a primary strategy of working through the text. In addition, however, small group work can be extremely effective in working through multiple chapters, improving comprehension, and encouraging students to think independently about interpretation and analysis.

Below are questions that students address in small groups regarding chapter one. The questions are a mix of comprehension and interpretation, and students must provide evidence for all of their answers, which requires them to interact closely with the text.

• Who took the iron from Sethe's eyes? How is that character associated with the tree on her back?
• What makes Sethe choose Halle over the other Sweet Home men?
• What does the passage on p. 14 add to Sethe's characterization? From whose perspective is it?
• What does the audience learn about the ghost in this chapter, and what is each person's relationship to the ghost (Sethe, Denver, Paul D)?
• How does Denver feel when meeting Paul D? What makes her feel this way? Interpret the following: "Denver burst in from the keeping room, terror in her eyes, a vague smile on her lips" (21).

In order to have students thinking about the structure and literary qualities of the novel from the beginning, I also assign each small group a writing style and a theme, motif, or symbol to trace within the chapter. The students must provide two examples of each, think about its significance, and present it to the class. The pairings I have are: nature and flashback; iron and stream of consciousness; bestiality and repetition; home and Gothic Romanticism; memory and magical realism (bildungsroman isn't evident yet).

Another useful activity that requires students to think critically is to have them create their own questions. This works best when you can divide the class in half and then put each half into small groups of 3-4. Side A will create questions for chapters 11-12 and side B will create questions for chapters 13-14. Once they have crafted their questions, they must switch and answer the questions created by the other half. This also cleverly serves to have students review a large section of text because they must think carefully during both parts of the activity. In order to ensure the students are creating quality questions, I assess the questions and not the answers, though they count for participation. Also, I have found that giving the students question stems/verbs based on Howard Bloom's taxonomy of higher order thinking skills leads them to create stronger questions. Students must create five questions; two may be comprehension (knowledge or comprehension in Bloom's language) and three should be interpretation or analysis (analysis, synthesis, or evaluation).

Finally, one of the most useful activities is the timeline. This is best done after chapter 18, at the end of part I. I made some changes for my own classes, but the original idea comes from Teachit, a copyright-protected website originally created for British teachers, but which has many valuable resources for the literature classroom. I strongly encourage teachers to visit the website (www.teachit.co.uk) and evaluate the materials for themselves.

Beloved is a novel that has been and will continue to be a central piece of literature in the literature classroom for so many reasons. This curriculum unit is just a small window into some of its elements; there were many times during the writing when I thought I could not possibly do justice to the complexity of the text in the time and space allowed. However, the theme of storytelling has allowed me to center the focus on ways in which the incredibly powerful story gets revealed to the audience. While I was aware of the importance of the African American experience in the novel, examining it as storytelling has only magnified that significance—especially since I researched the particular modes of African American storytelling that inform the text. I now have a renewed respect and passion for this novel, and see myself teaching and learning it for a long time to come. My goal here is to provide teachers with a pathway into analysis that doesn't come from a summary-based perspective, and I hope that is useful.

Appendix: Margaret Garner Activity

Read the following historical account on which Sethe is based and respond on a separate sheet of paper to the following questions; it should be about a page.

Paragraph 1: What similarities are present between Margaret and Sethe? Does reading this change your opinion of Sethe at all?

Paragraph 2: How do you personally deal with the situation in ch. 16, morally and/or ethically. (Philosophically, 'morality' speaks to the character, actions, and/or values of an individual; 'ethics' is the set of standards that governs a particular group.)

The Story of Margaret Garner from Levi Coffin's Reminiscences

Levi Coffin was born in Guilford County, North Carolina, in 1798; he moved to Cincinnati, Ohio, as a young man. He was a Quaker and abolitionist, and is called "the President of the Underground Railroad" for his efforts to save thousands from the institution of slavery. He wrote his autobiography in 1876 and died in 1877.

Perhaps no case that came under my notice, while engaged in aiding fugitive slaves, attracted more attention and aroused deeper interest and sympathy than the case of Margaret Garner, the slave mother who killed her child rather than see it taken back to slavery. This happened in the latter part of January, 1856. The Ohio River was frozen over at the time, and the opportunity thus offered for escaping to a free State was embraced by a number of slaves living in Kentucky, several miles back from the river. A party of seventeen, belonging to different masters in the same neighborhood, made arrangements to escape together. There was snow on the ground and the roads were smooth, so the plan of going to the river on a sled naturally suggested itself. The time fixed for their flight was Sabbath night, and having managed to get a large sled and two good horses, belonging to one of their masters, the party of seventeen crowded into the sled and started on their hazardous journey in the latter part of the night. They drove the horses at full speed, and at daylight reached the River below Covington, opposite Wester Row. They left the sled and horses here, and as quickly as possible crossed the river on foot. It was now broad daylight, and people were beginning to pass about the streets and the fugitives divided their company that they might not attract so much notice.

An old slave named Simon and his wife Mary, together with their son Robert and his wife Margaret Garner and four children, made their way to the house of a colored man named Kite, who had formerly lived in their neighborhood and had been purchased from slavery by his father, Joe Kite. They had to make several inquiries in order to find Kite's house, which was below Mill Creek, in the lower part of the city. This afterward led to their discovery; they had been seen by a number of persons on their way to Kite's, and were easily traced by pursuers. The other nine fugitives were more fortunate. They made their way up town and found friends who conducted them to safe hiding places, where they remained until night. They were put on the Underground Railroad, and went safely through to Canada....

In a few minutes...[Kite's] house was surrounded by pursuers—the masters of the fugitives, with officers and a posse of men. The door and windows were barred, and those inside refused to give admittance. The fugitives were determined to fight, and to die, rather than to be taken back to slavery. Margaret, the mother of the four children, declared that she would kill herself and her children before she would return to bondage. The slave men were armed and fought bravely. The window was first battered down with a stick of wood, and one of the deputy marshals attempted to enter, but a pistol shot from within made a flesh wound on his arm and caused him to abandon the attempt. The pursuers then battered down the door with some timber and rushed in. The husband of Margaret fired several shots, and wounded one of the officers, but was soon overpowered and dragged out of the house. At this moment, Margaret Garner, seeing that their hopes of freedom were in vain, seized a butcher knife that lay on the table, and with one stroke cut the throat of her little daughter, whom she probably loved the best. She then attempted to take the life of the other children and to kill herself, but she was overpowered and hampered before she could complete her desperate work. The whole party was then arrested and lodged in jail.

The trial lasted two weeks, drawing crowds to the courtroom every day....The counsel for the defense brought witnesses to prove that the fugitives had been permitted to visit the city at various times previously. It was claimed that Margaret Garner had been brought here by her owners a number of years before, to act as nurse girl, and according to the law which liberated slaves who were brought into free States by the consent of their masters, she had been free from that time, and her children, all of whom had been born since then—following the condition of the mother—were likewise free.

The Commissioner decided that a voluntary return to slavery, after a visit to a free State, reattached the conditions of slavery, and that the fugitives were legally slaves at the time of their escape....

But in spite of touching appeals, of eloquent pleadings, the Commissioner remanded the fugitives back to slavery. He said that it was not a question of feeling to be decided by the chance current of his sympathies; the law of Kentucky and the United States made it a question of property.

After being remanded to her owner, William Garrison's newspaper The Liberator reported that she and her youngest child were sold and were traveling by riverboat to Arkansas when their boat collided with another. Both Garner and her child were thrown overboard; the child drowned, and Garner expressed pleasure that her child died. She was sold again and moved to New Orleans, where she died of typhoid fever in 1858.

Bibliography

Allen, Robert, Maya Angelou, et al. "Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison."The New York Times, January 24, 1988. Http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/home/15084. html (accessed July 13, 2012).

Atkinson, Yvonne. "'I Been Worried Sick About You Too, Macon': Toni Morrison, the South, and the Oral Tradition." Critical Insights: Toni Morrison . Ed. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere. Salem Press, 2010.

Bowers, Susan R. "A Context for Understanding Morrison's Work." Critical Insights: Toni Morrison . Ed. Solomon O. Iyasere and Marla W. Iyasere. Salem Press, 2010.

Coffin, Levi.Reminiscences of Levi Coffin, the reputed president of the Underground Railroad: being a brief history of the labors of a lifetime in behalf of the slave, with the stories of numerous fugitives, who gained their freedom through his instrumentality. Cincinnati,1880.Slavery and Anti-Slavery.Gale.Yale University Library.17 July 2012. 557-567.

Denard, Carolyn C. "Beyond the Bitterness of History: Teaching Beloved ." InApproaches to teaching the novels of Toni Morrison. Ed. Nellie Y. McKay and Kathryn Earle. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1997. 40-47.

Drabble, Margaret, ed. "Magic Realism."The Oxford Companion to English Literature. 6th ed. London: Oxford UP, 2000. 629-30.

Heinze, Denise.The Dilemma of "Double-Consciousness": Toni Morrison's Novels. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1993.

Holland, Sharon P. and Michael Awkward. "Marginality and Community in Beloved ." InApproaches to teaching the novels of Toni Morrison. Ed. Nellie Y. McKay and Kathryn Earle. New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1997. 48-55.

Kachka, Boris. "Who Is the Author of Toni Morrison?."New York Magazine, April 29, 2012. Http://nymag.com/news/features/toni-morrison-2012-5/ (accessed July 13, 2012).

Metcalf, Stephen. "Why Is Beloved Beloved?." Slate Magazine , May 18, 2006. Http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_dilettante/2006/05/why_is_beloved_beloved.html (accessed July 13, 2012).

Morrison, Toni. Beloved . New York: Vintage International, 2004.

——. Lecture and Speech of Acceptance, Upon the Award of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Delivered in Stockholm on the Seventh of December, Nineteen Hundred and Ninety Three . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1995.

——."10 Questions for Toni Morrison." Time . May 7, 2008. Http://www.time.com/time/ magazine/ article/0,9171,1738507,00.html (accessed July 13, 2012).

"Most Challenged Books Include 'Beloved' and 'The Chocolate War'." Washington Post , March 24, 2008. Http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/23/ AR2008032301503.html (accessed July 13, 2012).

Raynaud, Claudine." Beloved or the shifting shapes of memory."The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison.Ed. Justine Tally.Cambridge University Press,2007.43-58.

Reinhardt, Mark.Who Speaks for Margaret Garner?. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Rothstein, Mervyn. "Toni Morrison, In Her New Novel, Defends Women." The New York Times , August 26, 1987. Http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/01/11/home/ 14013.html (accessed July 13, 2012).

Implementing District Standards

My district—and state, for that matter—has just transitioned to the Common Core State Standards, which represents a nationwide effort to provide high quality and engaging classroom practices for all students. The English Language Arts Common Core is delineated in five key standards, or strands: reading, writing, speaking and listening, language, and media and technology. The Common Core represents a shift in expectations, because all students are to meet the rigorous standards as outlined in 2012-2013.

This unit meets the criteria for a strong Common Core unit in several ways. For example, according to expectations from the Reading strand, students should "read closely to determine what the text says explicitly and to make logical inferences from it; cite specific textual evidence when writing or speaking to support conclusions drawn from the text." This is an essential part of this curriculum unit because students must be able not only to comprehend the plot of the text, but to engage in class discussions with both small and large groups, which will be based on providing textual support for their opinions and explaining their interpretations and conclusions. Students will also "assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and style of a text," which is another foundational element of this unit, especially due to the theme of storytelling which shapes the interpretation and analysis of the novel.

This unit was also designed for an Advanced Placement class, which must also adhere to rigorous nationwide standards. AP classes are designed to provide a college-level course experience in a high school setting; students are introduced to demanding critical thinking and interpretation skills and are expected to apply them to their literature study. An AP English Literature and Composition course includes expectations like "students reflect on the social and historical values it reflects and embodies. Careful attention to both textual detail and historical context provides a foundation for interpretation." As stated, this unit will include biographical, social, and cultural background so that students will understand and appreciate the context that plays an important role in the novel. The College Board also notes that "the approach to analyzing and interpreting the material involves students in learning how to make careful observations of textual detail, establish connections among their observations, and draw from those connections a series of inferences leading to an interpretive conclusion about the meaning and value of a piece of writing." This is a necessary component of the unit because students are expected to note details that occur throughout the text, creating a cumulative interpretation that must be open to change as the novel progresses.

• Bowers, "A Context for Understanding Morrison's Work," 5.
• Kachka, "Who Is the Author of Toni Morrison?", 4.
• Morrison, Beloved , 23.
• Morrison, "10 Questions for Toni Morrison."
• Allen, "Black Writers in Praise of Toni Morrison."
• Metcalf, "Why Is Beloved Beloved?"
• "Most Challenged Books Include 'Beloved' and 'The Chocolate War'".
• Morrison, Beloved , 12-13.
• Ibid., 3; 199; 281.
• Morrison, Beloved , 102.
• Ibid., 101.
• Raynaud, " Beloved or the shifting shapes of memory," 44.
• Morrison, Beloved , 6.
• Ibid., 6-7.
• Drabble, "Magical Realism," 629.
• Morrison, Beloved , 4.
• Heinze, The Dilemma of "Double-Consciousness ", 159-160.
• Morrison, Beloved , 87.
• Ibid., 235.
• Ibid., 248.
• Ibid., 251.
• Ibid., 248; 250; 252.
• Ibid., 282.
• Ibid., 286.
• Ibid., 292.
• Ibid., 314.
• Morrison, Lecture and Speech of Acceptance .
• Morrison, Beloved , 18-20.
• Ibid., xvii.
• Coffin, Reminiscences , 557.
• Ibid., 559-560.
• Morrison, Beloved , 175; 177.
• Ibid., 321.

Comments (0)

Be the first person to comment

Toni Morrison

• Literature Notes
• Book Summary
• About Beloved
• Character List
• Summary and Analysis
• Part 1: Chapter 1
• Part 1: Chapter 2
• Part 1: Chapter 3
• Part 1: Chapter 4
• Part 1: Chapter 5
• Part 1: Chapter 6
• Part 1: Chapter 7
• Part 1: Chapter 8
• Part 1: Chapter 9
• Part 1: Chapter 10
• Part 1: Chapter 11
• Part 1: Chapter 12
• Part 1: Chapters 13-14
• Part 1: Chapter 15
• Part 1: Chapter 16
• Part 1: Chapters 17-18
• Part 2: Chapter 19
• Part 2: Chapters 20-21
• Part 2: Chapters 22-23
• Part 2: Chapter 24
• Part 2: Chapter 25
• Part 3: Chapter 26
• Part 3: Chapter 27
• Part 3: Chapter 28
• Character Analysis
• schoolteacher
• Character Map
• Toni Morrison Biography
• Critical Essays
• Beloved and Its Forerunners
• Form in Beloved
• Settings of Beloved
• Themes in Beloved
• Motifs in Beloved
• Style of Beloved
• Women in Beloved
• A Note on Slavery
• Beloved, the Film
• Full Glossary for Beloved
• Essay Questions
• Practice Projects
• Cite this Literature Note

Character Analysis Beloved

Some debate exists over the identity of Beloved. While some critics claim that she is the spirit of Sethe's murdered daughter, others argue that she is a human woman who is mentally unstable. The most common interpretation of the Beloved character, however, is that she is the spirit of Sethe's dead child and, as Denver notes, "something more." That something more is a collective spirit of all the unnamed slaves who were torn from their homes in Africa and brought to America in the cramped and unsanitary holds of slave ships. You can find evidence for this interpretation in Beloved's stream of consciousness narrative in Chapter 22. In this chapter, Beloved remembers crouching in a hot place where people are crowded together and dying of thirst.

Because Sethe's mother came from Africa, the experience that Beloved remembers is also Sethe's mother's experience. In a sense, Beloved is not only Sethe's daughter but her mother as well. Because Beloved is supernatural and represents the spirit of multiple people, Morrison doesn't develop her character as an individual. Beloved acts as a force rather than as a person, compelling Sethe, Denver, and Paul D to behave in certain ways. Beloved defines herself through Sethe's experiences and actions, and in the beginning, she acts as a somewhat positive force, helping Sethe face the past by repeatedly asking her to tell stories about her life. In the end, however, Beloved's need becomes overwhelming and her attachment to Sethe becomes destructive.

Notice that Morrison dedicates the book to "sixty Million and more," an estimated number of people who died in slavery. Beloved represents Sethe's unnamed child but also the unnamed masses that died and were forgotten. With this book, Morrison states that they are beloved as well.

Previous Sethe

Next Denver

The Issue of American Freedom in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” Essay

Various voices have contributed to the issue of American freedom and the accompanying hardships. One of such voices is Patrick Henry who uttered this famous phrase over two hundred years ago, “give me liberty or give me death” (Heerak 45). Since then, this phrase has been used in various forms of struggles including the struggle of African Americans against the American slave trade.

America is synonymous with leading the way in the fight for various forms of freedom. This is probably the reason why America is referred to as “the land of the free”. Freedom in America is held in high esteem. The journey to this freedom has also been preserved through various forms of art in the course of the country’s history. This art includes various forms of literature such as poems, short stories, and novels.

For many groups of Americans, the road to freedom has been characterized by treacherous tribulations. This is true for the African Americans who fought hard to earn their freedom from slavery. Various authors have highlighted elements of slavery and freedom through various books. Toni Morrison adds her voice to the issue of enslavement and freedom using her book “Beloved”.

Her book chronicles the events surrounding a group of slaves living in Cincinnati, Ohio after they attain freedom from enslavement in Kentucky. Morrison has often said that this book is a dedication to the over sixty million Africans who died during the slave trade even without having to experience enslavement (Taylor 143). It is clear that the author seeks to make this book a tribute to the slavery experience.

This is evident from the novel’s ending where the author gives a disclaimer against the story disappearing like the experiences of the slaves who perished during slavery. “Beloved” is a postmodern novel that is able to uncover aspects of freedom and slavery that seem to have been lost in the course of history. This paper will analyze freedom and enslavement as presented by Morrison in “Beloved”.

“Beloved” was written in 1987 many years after slavery had been abolished. This enables the author to cover the journey from enslavement to freedom authoritatively. The main protagonist in the story is a former slave Sethe, who is living with her daughter Denver in her mother-in-law’s haunted house in Cincinnati. In this story, various characters describe what freedom means to them.

In the beginning of the story, Baby Suggs talks about her choice not to love her children. She attributes this choice to the fact that men and women are “moved around like checkers” (Morrison 27). She explains this lack of freedom by detailing her separation from her first and second children. However, her persistence paid off when her third child, Halle was not taken away and was able to buy her freedom.

She also says that by the time Halle bought her freedom, she had already given up and this freedom “did not mean a thing” (Morrison 28). Baby Suggs shows how the value of freedom diminished with each year of enslavement. By the time she acquires the freedom she has longed for her whole life, it has already lost its meaning.

Morrison is of the view that many people are quick to acknowledge freedom from slavery but they are also quick to forget the actual victims of slavery. In Baby Suggs case, freedom has come a bit late for her because the damage is already done. She has lost all contact with two of her children and not even her freedom can help her find them.

The main protagonist, on the other hand, talks about her freedom and the liberties it accorded her. Sethe tells Paul D that the love for her children was only triggered by the freedom from slavery. She says that once she was able to get to Cincinnati from Kentucky she was able to love her children more. When Sethe talks about this love, she says, “I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they weren’t mine to love” (Morrison 190).

When explaining this love further she says that once she arrived in Cincinnati she was at liberty to love anyone she wanted to love. This exchange explains what lack of freedom meant for the enslaved African American women. The fact that Sethe has the ability to love surprises Paul D to the extent that he does not understand how she could kill her child and blame it on love.

According to Sethe, the fact that the freedom she had just acquired was about to be taken away, was what drove her to commit infanticide. The fact that Sethe had come to a place where she could love anything and anyone that she wanted, represented true freedom.

Morrison illustrates the overwhelming nature of this freedom through Sethe’s actions. For Sethe, it is either she gets freedom or death. Her experiences as a slave were enough motivation for her to commit infanticide and probably suicide. While many Americans causally talk about freedom, very few would make the choice Sethe made.

All of Morrison’s characters in “Beloved” have no secrets. The author explores even the innermost thoughts of the book’s characters. This enables the readers to understand the characters in “Beloved” fully. This total comprehension of characters translates into total comprehension of the issues of freedom and enslavement.

The readers are able to learn the unspoken truths about slavery. Historians define these truths as the questions or things the fugitives and slaves did not ask or say. For instance, the author reveals Sethe’s inner struggle with the past in her bid to have a “livable life” (Morrison 73). By presenting her characters in an open manner, the author is able to dig deeper into the issues of enslavement and freedom.

The book portrays slaves as if they are prey to be caught by their masters, the law, and the enforcers. The third person narrator reveals that the white slave owners view Sethe and her lot as prey to be hunted. This inhumane treatment of slaves was the hallmark of slavery. Armed with the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, the Sheriff, the slave-catcher, Schoolteacher, and his nephew arrive to reclaim ownership of Sethe and her two children.

The author compares their actions to those of hunters. Their thoughts and their inhumane considerations are revealed while they sneak up on Sethe. According to the narrator while a dead snake or bear had value, “a dead nigger could not be skinned for profit and was not worth his own dead weight in coin” (Morrison 148). M

oreover, the inhumane treatment that Sethe received at Sweet Home was so overwhelming that the likelihood of going back there almost renders her insane. She is convinced that by killing her children, she is setting them free from such inhumane conditions. This high price of freedom is only made possible by the existing conditions. Morrison devotes this book to more than sixty million people who died as a result of slavery (Taylor 144).

Sethe’s daughter, Beloved can be included in this category because she never experienced slavery but died because of it. Historians have recorded stories of slaves who jumped overboard on the way to their enslavement destinations. According to Morrison, these people are easily forgotten although they were part of the pursuit of freedom.

Morrison also explores the issue of partial or nominal freedom from slavery. The author details Sethe’s life beginning from 1873 ten years after slavery had been abolished. This is around the time she reunites with Paul D at her residence in 124 Bluestone Road. Although Sethe is legally free, she is still bound by other factors such as the baby ghost that resides in her house. She is also the subject of isolation from the rest of her community.

The author is trying to illustrate African Americans’ lack of freedom from the ‘ghosts’ that were borne from slavery. As a member of Sethe’s past, Paul D expects to find only freedom at Sethe’s household. His first activity is to admonish the baby ghost in the hope of setting Sethe free but the ghost still returns in a new form.

This is the nature of freedom; even when one expects to attain freedom from something, ghosts from one’s past can still compromise this freedom. This was a real concern for most African Americans in their quest for various forms of freedom after slavery.

The author of “Beloved” is able to highlight the issues of freedom and enslavement in this prolific novel. The book explores various aspects of freedom and its price during and after the slavery era. The book is a dedication to “the beloved” or the over sixty million people who lost their lives to slavery even without having to experience enslavement. The author is also able to weave together the issues of slavery and freedom.

Works Cited

Heerak, Christian. Toni Morrison’s Beloved as African-American Scripture & Other Articles on History and Canon. New Jersey, NJ: Hermit Kingdom Press, 2006.Print.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved, New York, NY: Everyman’s Library, 2006. Print.

Taylor, Danille. Conversations with Toni Morrison, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. Print.

• Chicago (A-D)
• Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2020, March 12). The Issue of American Freedom in Toni Morrison's “Beloved”. https://ivypanda.com/essays/toni-morrisons-beloved/

"The Issue of American Freedom in Toni Morrison's “Beloved”." IvyPanda , 12 Mar. 2020, ivypanda.com/essays/toni-morrisons-beloved/.

IvyPanda . (2020) 'The Issue of American Freedom in Toni Morrison's “Beloved”'. 12 March.

IvyPanda . 2020. "The Issue of American Freedom in Toni Morrison's “Beloved”." March 12, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/toni-morrisons-beloved/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Issue of American Freedom in Toni Morrison's “Beloved”." March 12, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/toni-morrisons-beloved/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Issue of American Freedom in Toni Morrison's “Beloved”." March 12, 2020. https://ivypanda.com/essays/toni-morrisons-beloved/.

• The Different Responses of Characters From “Beloved” by Morrison
• Sethe’s Slavery in “Beloved” by Toni Morrison
• Beloved by Toni Morrison: History of Slavery and Racial Segregation in America
• "Sula" and "Beloved" by Toni Morrison
• Binary Constructions and Their Effects on Beloved by Tony Morrison
• “Beloved“ a Novel by Toni Morrison: Analysis
• Paul D's Conflict in "Beloved" by Tony Morrison
• Beloved: Demme's Film vs Morrison's Novel
• How Migration Affects Identity
• “Song of Solomon” by Toni Morrison Book Analysis
• "The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks" by R.Skloot
• Dinner Guest: Me by Langston Hughes
• Fable's Moral Lesson on the Complaining
• Analysis of Slavery in American History in “Beloved“ by Tony Morrison
• "How to Write a War Story" by Tim O’Brien

Advertisement

More from the Review

Subscribe to our Newsletter

Best of The New York Review, plus books, events, and other items of interest

• The New York Review of Books: recent articles and content from nybooks.com
• The Reader's Catalog and NYR Shop: gifts for readers and NYR merchandise offers
• New York Review Books: news and offers about the books we publish
• I consent to having NYR add my email to their mailing list.
• Hidden Form Source

April 18, 2024

Current Issue

Stifled Rage

April 18, 2024 issue

Louisa May Alcott; illustration by Maya Chessman

Submit a letter:

Email us [email protected]

A Strange Life: Selected Essays of Louisa May Alcott

“I write for myself and strangers,” Gertrude Stein once announced. So, too, Louisa May Alcott, who wrote for herself as well as the strangers who have been reading Little Women since 1868, when it first appeared. For more than a century and a half, Little Women has inspired playwrights, composers, filmmakers, scholars, novelists, and of course countless young girls. Jane Smiley salutes those young girls—she was one of them—in her warmly appreciative preface to A Strange Life , Liz Rosenberg’s slim new collection of Alcott’s essays.

When she first encountered Little Women , Smiley realized that a book about girls was actually famous and that every library had it. Later it even seemed that the book had to be about Alcott’s own life. And since many others have felt the same way—with good reason—it’s not surprising that new biographies come down the pike every few years, intent on changing the negative view of Alcott best expressed by Henry James, who belittled her as “the Thackeray, the Trollope, of the nursery and the school-room.”

Martha Saxton’s feminist Louisa May: A Modern Biography (1977) and, more recently, biographies by Harriet Reisen, Susan Cheever, and Eve LaPlante, and by scholars such as John Matteson, have demonstrated that Alcott was much more than the author of what she self-deprecatingly called “moral pap for the young.” Rather, as a woman of imagination with considerable stylistic range, Alcott composed gothic tales, short stories, satires, fantasies, adult novels, poetry, memoirs, and essays in which she wrote of female independence and its costs in a restrictive domestic circle. She was also a prolific letter writer who converted into a tart prose style much of her anguish—and anger—at the circumstances in which she found herself, as a woman, as a dutiful daughter, as a second-class citizen, and, ironically, as a best-selling author who worked hard to maintain her popularity.

Rosenberg, the author of Scribbles, Sorrows, and Russet Leather Boots: The Life of Louisa May Alcott (2021), aimed at young readers, is thus not the first person to suggest that Alcott, and in particular her nonfiction, are worthy of serious attention. There’s also Elaine Showalter’s excellent selection of Alcott’s prose in Alternative Alcott (1988); there’s the Portable Louisa May Alcott (2000), edited by Elizabeth Lennox Keyser, and The Sketches of Louisa May Alcott (2001), collected by the Alcott specialist Gregory Eiselein, not to mention the superb selection of her nonfiction in one of the Alcott volumes published by the Library of America.

In A Strange Life , Rosenberg wisely includes Alcott’s best-known prose works—the excellent, slightly fictionalized memoir “Transcendental Wild Oats” and the exceptional (abridged) Hospital Sketches —and sets them alongside excerpts from her semiautobiographical nonfiction to show that her prose, as she explains in her introduction, “canters along; she covers great distances in the fewest words; there is no dilly-dallying.” Maybe so; what’s also true is that Alcott can write with unmistakable acerbity.

Rosenberg provides some biographical information on Alcott as well but unfortunately doesn’t explain why she chose certain pieces and not others, or why she arranged them in the order she did. Presumably the essay “Happy Women” (1868), her penultimate selection, is meant to present Alcott at her feminist best. True, it was written as a buck-me-up advice column for the unmarried woman, counseling her not to fear becoming an “old maid” since “the loss of liberty, happiness, and self respect is poorly repaid by the barren honor of being called ‘Mrs.’” In stock terms, Alcott advises, “Be true to yourselves; cherish whatever talent you possess, and in using it faithfully for the good of others, you will most assuredly find happiness for yourself.” But pieces that Rosenberg didn’t include, such as “Unofficial Incidents Overlooked by the Reporters” (1875), Alcott’s account of the centennial celebration in Concord, Massachusetts, have far more bite:

We had no place in the procession, but such women as wished to hear the oration were directed to meet in the Town Hall at half-past nine, and wait there until certain persons, detailed for the service, should come to lead them to the tent, where a limited number of seats had been reserved for the weaker vessels.

Rosenberg also reprints short excerpts from Alcott’s travel book, Shawl-Straps : An Account of a Trip to Europe (1872), but these selections—from the essays “Women of Brittany,” “The Flood in Rome,” and “Visit from a King”—are flat and predictable. And while she includes Alcott’s autobiographical sketch “My Boys,” a forgettable group of portraits intended mainly for young people and originally published in Aunt Jo’s Scrap-Bag (1872), Rosenberg fails to note that this was the first in a series of six Scrap-Bag books ( Shawl-Straps being the first), and that in them Alcott cleverly assumed the voice of Jo March Bhaer, from the best-selling Little Women —presumably to make money.

Despite the thinness of these sketches, they could be enriched if the reader knew the books from which they’re taken or more of the circumstances under which they were written. For Alcott worked obsessively to become a successful writer and, not coincidentally, her impoverished family’s breadwinner. Her father, Amos Bronson Alcott, was eccentric and impecunious—and lovable, as long as you weren’t related to him. A self-taught Connecticut peddler turned educator, Bronson for a time ran the progressive Temple School in Boston. But after he published Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836–1837), in which he included allusions to sex and birth, scandalized Bostonians withdrew their children from the school, forcing it to close. His next venture was short-lived; he admitted a Black child to a new school and even his die-hard supporters bolted.

Then in 1843, when Louisa was ten, Bronson marched his family off to the town of Harvard, Massachusetts, about fourteen miles from Concord, where the Alcotts had been living. At a farm inappropriately dubbed Fruitlands, Bronson believed that they and a small band of cohorts could create a new Garden of Eden by living off the fruit of the land. “Insane, well-meaning egotists,” the antislavery writer Lydia Maria Child called them.

At Fruitlands, Abigail May Alcott, Louisa’s mother, was tasked with the cleaning, the washing of clothes, and the cooking, though there was little of that since utopia mandated a diet of mostly raw vegetables. (Rosenberg calls Bronson “a prescient and intelligent vegetarian pre-hippie.”) She was miserable, and the children almost starved. The model for the beloved Marmee, the mother of the brood in Little Women , Abigail was the youngest child in a family of prominent Boston Brahmin liberals; her brother was the passionate Unitarian abolitionist and women’s rights advocate Samuel Joseph May. She studied French, Latin, and chemistry privately in Duxbury, Massachusetts, and later helped form the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society. In 1830 she married the self-involved Bronson, who confessed in his journal, “I love her because she loves me.” In Little Women , Marmee understandably declares, “I am angry nearly every day of my life.”

In “Transcendental Wild Oats” (1873), Alcott changes the names of the Fruitlanders and, Rosenberg argues, “alternates broad comedy with tragedy.” As she puts it, “Alcott never lingers on the psychological devastation” that she likely experienced but rather

focuses on the characters around her and records the homely details of daily life (“unleavened bread, porridge, and water for breakfast; bread, vegetables, and water for dinner; bread, fruit, and water for supper”), leaving little room for disbelief.

Yet Alcott’s details are telling. Her irony is unmistakable, and her voice devastating in its affectlessness. As she observes, these “modern pilgrims,” most notably her father, possessed “the firm belief that plenteous orchards were soon to be evoked from their inner consciousness.” Once in their prospective Eden, she acidly continues, “no teapot profaned that sacred stove, no gory steak cried aloud for vengeance from her chaste gridiron; and only a brave woman’s taste, time, and temper were sacrificed on that domestic altar.” Fortunately the sojourn in paradise lasted only seven months.

The Alcotts eventually resettled in Concord, where Louisa grew up near Emerson, Thoreau, and later Hawthorne. But since “money is never plentiful in a philosopher’s house,” as she later recollected, the family temporarily moved to a basement apartment in Boston. After her mother formed what was basically a female employment agency, Louisa volunteered to take a position as a lady’s live-in companion in Dedham, Massachusetts. It turned out to be a degrading experience that she partly fictionalized in the essay “How I Went Out to Service” (1874), with which Rosenberg opens her volume, claiming it’s yet another example of Alcott’s ability to “strike the intersecting point between tragedy and comedy.” It’s a fine essay but not particularly comic: it’s a chilly story of exploitation and sexual harassment despite the moralizing conclusion about how the experience taught her many lessons.

Doubtless it did, but it also seems that Alcott wrote more for strangers than herself, often muzzling the intensity of her response to those who underestimated, harassed, or took advantage of her. She had begun to sell stories to help support her family, and though she’d already published two in the prestigious Atlantic Monthly , she also tried her hand at teaching again, despite her hatred of it. The publisher of The Atlantic , James Fields, loaned her forty dollars to help outfit her classroom, but when she came to him with another story—according to Rosenberg, “How I Went Out to Service”—he told her bluntly, “Stick to your teaching.” Rosenberg omits what happened later: after the success of Little Women , Alcott paid back the loan, telling Fields she’d found that writing paid far better than teaching, so she’d stick to her pen. “He laughed,” she said, “& owned that he made a mistake.”

She never forgot the insult. Like Marmee, who said she was angry nearly every day of her life, Alcott added, “I have learned not to show it.” Instead she found ways to stifle her rage, distancing herself from her feelings and retreating into the safety of platitudes, which often deaden her prose. For instance, at the conclusion of “How I Went Out to Service,” she tacks on a lesson about “making a companion, not a servant, of those whose aid I need, and helping to gild their honest wages with the sympathy and justice which can sweeten the humblest and lighten the hardest task.” It’s not clear if she’s counseling the reader or herself.

That’s far less true, though, in Hospital Sketches (1863), Alcott’s first successful book, in which she combined her recollections with material from the letters she wrote home while serving as an army nurse at the Union Hotel Hospital in Washington, D.C. Having “corked up” her tears, she nonetheless writes with feeling about “the barren honors” that these soldiers, cut to pieces at Fredericksburg, had won. She washed their bodies with brown soap, dressed their wounds, sang them lullabies, mopped their brows, and scribbled letters to the mothers and sweethearts of the nameless men, some without arms or legs, who lay in excruciating pain in the hotel’s ballroom. Such “seeming carelessness of the value of life, the sanctity of death” astonished Alcott, who wanted to believe that none of them had been sacrificed in vain.

She lasted only six weeks before she fell ill with typhoid pneumonia and had to be taken home to Concord by her father. The physicians who treated her shaved her hair and dosed her with calomel, a mercury compound that ultimately ruined her health. Alcott, encouraged by a friend to publish her experience, wrote of the desperate conditions that had made her, like many others, so sick: the fetid water and poor ventilation and scant or inedible food. And she wrote not just of the clammy foreheads and agonized deaths, and the insouciance of doctors who made a young woman tell a desperate man that he was dying, but also of the inescapable racism even of her fellow nurses:

I expected to have to defend myself from accusations of prejudice against color; but was surprised to find things just the other way, and daily shocked some neighbor by treating the blacks as I did the whites. The men would swear at the “darkies,” would put two g s into negro, and scoff at the idea of any good coming from such trash. The nurses were willing to be served by the colored people, but seldom thanked them, never praised, and scarcely recognized them in the street.

When she voluntarily touched a small Black child, she was labeled a fanatic. Alcott then offers a typical homily:

Though a hospital is a rough school, its lessons are both stern and salutary; and the humblest of pupils there, in proportion to his faithfulness, learns a deeper faith in God and in himself.

These homilies, like her detachment, may have been a marketing strategy, since she worried always about hanging on to her audience. Yet she did still write for herself after all. “Darkness made visible,” as she called it, was what she also sought, anticipating, in her way, what the witty Emily Dickinson surmised: “Success in Circuit lies.”

The Corruption Playbook

Ufologists, Unite!

Human Resources

Subscribe to our Newsletters

More by Brenda Wineapple

In the poetry of Jones Very, whom his contemporaries considered “eccentric” and “mad” and who often believed the Holy Spirit was speaking through him, the self is detached from everything by an intoxicated egoism.

February 8, 2024 issue

Susanna Moore writes of the past with quiet insight, through the eyes of women who frequently move from a form of innocence to some collision with history.

May 25, 2023 issue

November 12, 2022

Brenda Wineapple is a Fellow at the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library. Her book about the 1925 Scopes trial , Keeping the Faith: God, Democracy, and the Trial That Riveted a Nation , will be published in August. (April 2024)

At Lady Ottoline’s

July 17, 2003 issue

Short Review

November 20, 1980 issue

Short Reviews

January 27, 1972 issue

Garrick Gaieties

February 20, 1964 issue

Philip Roth (1933–2018)

Though two generations separated us, I felt that he spoke directly to me or, in some mystical, incoherent sense, spoke from somewhere inside my brain.

June 28, 2018 issue

Thoughts on Autobiography from an Abandoned Autobiography

Not only have I failed to make my young self as interesting as the strangers I have written about, but I have withheld my affection.

April 29, 2010 issue

April 14, 1977 issue

Good Camper

September 11, 1969 issue

Subscribe and save 50%!

Get immediate access to the current issue and over 25,000 articles from the archives, plus the NYR App.

Already a subscriber? Sign in

• Search Please fill out this field.
• Newsletters
• Sweepstakes

The Outsiders review: S.E. Hinton's beloved novel transforms into glittering Broadway musical

Brody Grant and Sky Lakota-Lynch star as Ponyboy Curtis and Johnny Cade, two Greaser kids who find themselves flung headfirst down a dangerous path.

Emlyn Travis is a news writer at  Entertainment Weekly  with over five years of experience covering the latest in entertainment. A proud Kingston University alum, Emlyn has written about music, fandom, film, television, and awards for multiple outlets including MTV News,  Teen Vogue , Bustle, BuzzFeed,  Paper Magazine , Dazed, and NME. She joined EW in August 2022.

When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the Bernard B. Jacobs Theater following a performance of The Outsiders , I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and the unique challenges of bringing a treasured text to Broadway.

After all, author S.E. Hinton ’s timeless coming-of-age tale starring Ponyboy Curtis and his ragtag Greaser family has been entrancing audiences for generations now: first as a 1967 novel that remains seminal reading for middle schoolers across the U.S. to this day, and again in Francis Ford Coppola ’s 1983 film adaptation starring C. Thomas Howell, Matt Dillon , Ralph Macchio , Tom Cruise , Rob Lowe , Emilio Estevez , and Patrick Swayze . Now, The Outsiders has been crafted into a glittering musical that might not hit as hard as its predecessors, but still has the power to inspire an entire generation of young theatergoers just the same. 

The production, which opened on Thursday evening, was adapted for the stage by book writers Adam Rapp and Justin Levine and produced in part by Angelina Jolie . Set in 1967 Tulsa, The Outsiders chronicles the story of 14-year-old Ponyboy Curtis (Brody Grant) and his best friend Johnny Cade (Sky Lakota-Lynch) as they attempt to establish themselves and their place in the world amid soul-crushing poverty, contentious family dynamics, and an increasingly violent class war between their Greaser brothers and the rich Socials (Socs for short).

Matthew Murphy

Everything changes when Ponyboy meets Cherry Valance (Emma Pittman) and discovers that the Socs feel just as stifled by their living circumstances as the Greasers. However, the pair’s heart-to-heart unintentionally sets off a chain of events that sends Ponyboy and Johnny careening down a dangerous new path.

As the young dreamer Ponyboy, Grant delivers a star-making performance in his Broadway debut. From the moment that he appears onstage scribbling away in his notebook, it’s clear that Grant sees the character for what he truly is: a wide-eyed kid, burdened by familial and societal expectations, who longs for something more. In turn, he plays Ponyboy with a softness and affability that is hard not to root for — especially when he’s frequently breaking the fourth wall to talk about the show’s latest developments, or popping down into the front row to watch a movie. His gentle camaraderie with Lakota-Lynch's complex Johnny is also incredibly sweet — and sounds even sweeter when they harmonize with one another on tracks like the poignant " Stay Gold ."

The pair’s onstage family is rounded out with stellar performances by Jason Schmidt and Brent Comer as Ponyboy’s brothers Sodapop and Darrel “Darry” Curtis, Daryl Tofa as Two-Bit, and the absolute scene stealer that is Joshua Boone as Dallas “Dally” Winston. He expertly brings a hardened, protective edge to Dally — a nomad who’s well aware of just how cruel the world can be — that melts away the instant his younger brothers need him. And that’s not even mentioning Boone’s effortlessly smooth voice, which he uses to absolutely bring down the house in not one, but two of the greatest songs of the show: the similarly titled “Run, Run Brother” and “Little Brother.”

Unfortunately, the rest of the musical’s songs — which were penned by folk duo Jamestown Revival, with contributions from Levine — pale in comparison to the aforementioned tracks. While its score is sonically in line with the production’s time period with its eclectic blend of upbeat rockabilly, country, and folk Americana tunes (and certainly sounds great thanks to the cast’s expert crooning and nine-piece accompanying band), Jamestown Revival’s ambiguous lyrics often struggle to tap into the heavy emotions that are playing out onstage.

At one point, Cherry sings that the “hopeless war” between Greasers and Socs “is hopeless,” which leaves more to be desired from a musical that aims to give its emotionally repressed characters an outlet through song. Other numbers threw off the production’s pacing or felt strangely jarring, like having the Greasers perform the upbeat “Hoods Turned Heroes” just seconds before throwing theatergoers into a particularly painful scene. However, there are enough dazzling moments when Jamestown Revival’s music truly does sing (like Ponyboy’s anthem “ Great Expectations ”) that leave one wishing they’d leaned into The Outsiders’ darkness, fire, and fear just a little bit more. 

But, where music fails, brilliant staging speaks. With every beating that Ponyboy takes — and, dang, does that poor boy take a walloping during the musical’s two hour runtime — sound and lighting designers Cody Spencer and Brian MacDevitt, respectively, ensure that theatergoers feel each and every punch through loud, ear-ringing white noise and blinding flashes of light. Meanwhile, director Danya Taymor keeps Ponyboy and his pals moving at a swift gallop onstage, pausing only for a few slow motion fight sequences that were choreographed by brothers Rick and Jeff Kuperman. The musical’s biggest brawl, the rain-soaked Rumble, is some of the most captivating stage fighting currently on Broadway — and led to a surprising amount of fake blood being spilled upon its graveled stage.

However, it’s also worth noting that The Outsiders takes some creative liberties in order to tie up any loose ends during its second act. Without giving too much away, the decisions range from omitting certain characters to much larger contextual changes to its story, which fans of the novel or film may find disappointing.

For many, The Outsiders is a story that not only remains as raw and relatable as when they first read it, but also pushed the very boundaries of young adult fiction with its insightful ruminations on brotherhood, identity, and the cycles of grief and violence. While its musical adaptation may have its squabbles, its heart of gold still remains firmly intact. Grade: B

Related content:

• An oral history of  The Outsiders
• Stay gold with your first look at The Outsiders Broadway musical
• Angelina Jolie hires 15-year-old daughter as assistant for Broadway production of  The   Outsiders
• S.E. Hinton on  The Outsiders ' 50th anniversary: 'I could never be that un-self-conscious again'

• Skip to main content
• Keyboard shortcuts for audio player

Music Reviews

Beyoncé's 'cowboy carter' is a portrait of the artist getting joyously weird.

Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter has ignited discourse about the place of Black musicians in country music. But it's also evidence of its creator's desire to break genre walls by following her most eccentric impulses. Mason Poole/Courtesy of the artist hide caption

Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter has ignited discourse about the place of Black musicians in country music. But it's also evidence of its creator's desire to break genre walls by following her most eccentric impulses.

This essay first appeared in the NPR Music newsletter. Sign up for early access to articles like this one, Tiny Desk exclusives, listening recommendations and more.

After two months of anticipation, Cowboy Carter has been out in the world for nearly a fortnight, and the discourse is thick as sawdust on a honky-tonk floor. Beyoncé's spangled opus, as lengthy and florid as a Sergio Leone classic — it really could have been called The Good, the Bey and the Ugly -- has generated more think pieces than any pop phenomenon since her friendly rival Taylor's Eras tour.

I've kept track of the coverage of Cowboy Carter and it's, well, something. Actually it's everything, ranging from paeans to (not too many) pans . Not weighing in hasn't been an option for most music writers, who have spilled tons of ink documenting the album's backstory, tracing its references, and examining its work of legacy building. What could I add to the discourse? Well, this: Whether it's considered a champion's walk, an overlong stumble, a powerful political gesture or a highly personal cri de couer — one thing Cowboy Carter is, undeniably even if no one has said it, is weird. And that's a wonderful thing.

Music Features

10 takeaways from beyoncé's new album, 'cowboy carter'.

Album Review

On 'cowboy carter,' beyoncé's country is as broad as the public she serves.

Not that Beyoncé herself would ever admit to her own eccentricity. She's declared herself a diligent student of the genre she sought to revise, and many of the touchstones on this massive grab bag of ballads and bangers check the boxes of cultural intervention. She features Dolly and Willie; shows us her boots, brand-name jeans and whiskey bottle; includes a murder ballad and her perspective on that ultimate country emblem, the American flag. (She sees it as red: blood, Alabama clay, indigenous people.)

Her inclusion of the undersung Black Grand Ole Opry pioneer Linda Martell as a collaborator nods to efforts to rectify historical omissions that have been going on in and around Nashville for years — shoutout to the Black Opry crew, to artist and radio host Rissi Palmer and to Martell's granddaughter, who continues to crowd-fund a documentary that Beyoncé really should just finance.

New roots: Black musicians and advocates are forging coalitions outside the system

Best Music Of 2021

How black women reclaimed country and americana music in 2021.

But the way she assembles these hardly unique elements is startling. Sidestepping either a conventional foray into country's traditional sounds or a risk-averse pop approach that would just use those elements as window-dressing, she and her dozens of collaborators assemble a cosmic omnibus of reference points while drilling down on her long-standing obsessions. While it's correct to call this album an epic and a strong political statement, it's an idiosyncratic one, more akin to Jim Jarmusch's off-kilter visions of American heritage — especially Mystery Train -- than, say, Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon .

It may seem off to identify eccentricity in a project that includes radio-ready Miley Cyrus and Post Malone collabs, and which was quickly endorsed by none other than the Vice President. Yet the first thing I thought of when I sat down to listen to Cowboy Carter was an album from 1967 that's beloved by many rock cognoscenti for its very peculiarness. Van Dyke Parks 's Song Cycle was the first solo album by the noted composer, arranger and producer. It is a shambling, sunnily psychedelic portrait of California living from the perspective of a transplanted white East Coaster with Southern roots. (Parks was born in Mississippi but grew up in Princeton singing in a boys' choir.)

Rich with strings and gorgeous melodies and rife with punnily poetical lines like, "Nowadays a Yankee dread not take his time to wend to sea" in a song about Parks's own experience trying to make it within the L.A. music biz hustle, no less, Song Cycle features Parks's birdlike warble, and by birdlike, I don't mean Beyoncé's operatic forays on new songs like "DAUGHTER" or "FLAMENCO," but Tweety Bird or the Peanuts ' Woodstock. Parks made the unfinished psychedelic masterpiece Smile with Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys and later worked with 21st-century visionaries Joanna Newsom and Gaby Moreno, among others. But Song Cycle is his strange baby. Though it's a rich work that offers real insight into the melting late 1960s American West Coast dream, Song Cycle is not for everyone. Parks experimented joyfully with song structure, sound effects and lyricism, painting a floating world that requires time and sympathy to comprehend.

Cowboy Carter sounds absolutely nothing like Song Cycle , yet I thought about the latter as I sunk into the non-linear, fragmentary experience of listening to it. I appreciate how Beyoncé sticks to her guns throughout, just as Parks maintained his whimsicality and dreaminess. Stacked harmonies do here what strings do on Song Cycle , lending grandeur to the opening "American Requiem" and tenderness to the ballads "MY ROSE" and "FLAMENCO" (the latter pairs them artfully with Andalusian hand-claps); yet those vocals also set a kind of Broadway stage for the songs, rendering them winsomely surreal. The album's employment of banjo and pedal steel signify country, sure, but they're used in unusual ways, as Parks uses accordion and balalaika. The distortions are highly individualistic, nothing like what current country sounds like. (Exception: that Post Malone duet, "LEVII'S JEANS.") Same with the roots references. The interlude "OH LOUISIANA" speeds up a Chuck Berry vocal to turn that rock and roll founder into helium. On the tour de force Tina Turner tribute "YA YA," Beyoncé begins with a spoken exchange with her background singers that calls back to her campy turn in Austin Powers in Goldmember as well as to Southern rap's most glorious weirdo breakthrough, Outkast's "Hey Ya!" Sure, this is historical work, but it's hardly textbook.

These tracks stand alongside others in a sprawl of concepts, tempos and tones until Cowboy Carter turns into a full-on megamix, its final four tracks returning to the dance party of Renaissance , abruptly concluded with a literal showstopper, the Broadway-ready "AMEN." The album is immersive, but it's a jerky, bucking rodeo ride, not a narrative that lends itself to easy absorption. And through it all Beyoncé bends country and blues tropes — those two genres are inseparable, something Cowboy Carter acknowledges — to the themes she can never abandon: the perils of attempted monogamy, the joy and terror involved in mothering and her own determination to be great, an ambition that she views as a responsibility more than a privilege.

Concept albums can be relatively straightforward, like Willie Nelson's classic Red Headed Stranger , but often they do come out ornate and leaky as their makers dump all of their ideas within the frame. Beyoncé nods sonically to a few that came after Song Cycle . At certain points, Sly and the Family Stone's murky funk on There's a Riot Goin' On comes to mind. Michael Jackson never made a full-on concept album, but that tarnished legend requires mention because Beyoncé's massive ambition rivals his more than anyone's. (Maybe Madonna's; she did make a concept record, Erotica . Or that soundtrack-maker Prince's.)

More recent touchstones include the high-concept forays of Janelle Monaé, whose " Tightrope " seems as much a touchstone for "YA YA" as does Tina Turner's shimmy, and the efforts of two of her collaborators on Cowboy Carter . Raphael Saadiq, who co-produced several tracks, released a similarly massive and emotionally affecting concept album , Jimmy Lee , in 2019. And the Virginia-born multihyphenate Shaboozie, a visionary character whom Beyoncé has apparently recognized as a kindred soul, paid tribute to the landscapes and culture of his native state on his own 2022 disquisition on the same themes as Cowboy Carter . Its title? Cowboys Live Forever, Outlaws Never Die .

Beyoncé is getting played on country radio. Could her success help other Black women?

When I associate Cowboy Carter with these equally adventurous and strange concept albums and the outsiders who made them, I don't mean to reduce the impact of her work or her centrality as an era-defining artist. Instead, I'm trying to free this fun and unfettered music from the burden of predefined significance. Beyoncé has, by her own will as well as her fans's needs, become what Doreen St. Felix calls an "übermatriarch," not only a biological mother but the nurturing, burdened mother of all of her faithful — and of Black America, a role she inherited and claimed from the equally eccentric and more reluctantly ennobled Aretha Franklin. The seriousness of her responsibilities has earned her a lot: millions nearing billions of dollars, a place among heads of state and a fan base that strikes fear in the hearts of naysayers. But for an artist, such success ultimately confines. Only a few have been able to remain playful and light-footed as their public images have hardened into marble.

Two such artists, as it happens, are ones Beyoncé directly takes on in Cowboy Carter : The Beatles, whose members never stopped releasing humorous and even nonsense songs alongside their wedding-and-funeral ballads and politicized anthems; and Dolly Parton, the most agile pop star of all, who's crossed into nearly every category that's interested her with her own birdlike laugh and dimpled smile. Dolly herself has deep and strange predilections: her many songs about dead children, for example, or her way of turning sexuality cartoonish not only as comic relief, but as a weapon. It's her oddball side as well as her musical genius that's allowed her to slip through so many doors.

Beyoncé did not create Cowboy Carter to honor white artists like Parton, but she made a wise decision by invoking her as a partner and a patron saint. In the spoken interlude that precedes Beyoncé's rewrite of her classic "Jolene," Parton refers to Beyoncé's famous line about a white woman's allure for her Black husband, "Becky with the good hair," as "that hussy with the good hair." She drawls out the insult, though, as if she's in the middle of a Hee Haw skit: huzzzzy . It's a goofy, enjoyably destabilizing moment — an eccentric gesture that reminds us that as serious as music can be, it's most powerful when its subversions are also fun.

Subscribe here for more from the NPR Music newsletter.

Join the Discussion Cancel reply

Add a Comment

Save my information

Post Comment

Share this Story

• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Reddit (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on FlipBoard (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pocket (Opens in new window)

When Dementia Strikes a Beloved Writer

Gabriel garcía márquez’s posthumously published “until august” provides a glimpse into the decline of a creative mind..

Top: In 2006, Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez attends the New Latin American Cinema Festival in Havana, Cuba. Visual: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

I n March, the sons of Gabriel García Márquez, the Nobel Prize-winning Colombian writer, published a posthumous novel against the specific wishes their father expressed before he died in 2014 at the age of 87. García Márquez had struggled through several versions of the book as dementia set in, and, perhaps stung by uncharacteristic negative reviews from his previous novel, didn’t want the new one published.

“ Until August ,” the story of a woman who travels to her mother’s grave once a year and takes a new lover on each visit, got mixed reviews. Some were outright harsh. In The New York Times , Michael Greenberg wrote “It would be hard to imagine a more unsatisfying goodbye.” García Márquez’s decline, he continued, “seems to have been steep enough to prevent him from holding together the kind of imagined world that the writing of fiction demands.”

“Until August” by Gabriel García Márquez (Knopf, 144 pages).

Wendy Mitchell, who was an administrator with England’s National Health Service until her diagnosis of early-onset Alzheimer’s disease in 2014, recalled the moment she learned of the publication plans last year. “I type every day for fear of dementia snatching away that creative skill, which I see as my escape from dementia,” she wrote last October in The Guardian . “Maybe Márquez thought the same?”

The novel’s publication raises some vital questions about living with an aging and perhaps ailing brain. What do mild cognitive impairment and dementia do to our creativity? How do these conditions affect our ability to use words, formulate sentences, and craft stories?

Neuroscientists have been exploring these questions for several decades. First, a few definitions. People with mild cognitive impairment have lost more of their cognitive functioning than others their age, and often struggle to remember things. But they’re capable of managing daily activities like dressing, eating, bathing, and finding their way around. In dementia, cognitive difficulties have increased enough to interfere with daily life, and personality changes are more likely.

García Márquez isn’t the first literary giant whose later work raised questions about the impact of dementia on creativity and language. Nearly 20 years ago, neurologist Peter Garrard of St. George’s University of London delved into the mind of the novelist Iris Murdoch, who won the Booker Prize, the U.K.’s equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction, in 1978.

Garrard wanted to see how Murdoch’s use of language changed, specifically word frequency and word length, so he ran three of her novels through a computer program: her debut 1954 novel, “Under the Net’’; “The Sea, The Sea” (the book that won her the Booker Prize), published in 1978; and her final novel, “Jackson’s Dilemma,” published in 1995, four years before her death. He also compared the complexity of Murdoch’s syntax (how she structured language) across these three works.

Garrard and his colleagues published this analysis in the journal Brain in 2005. They found “clear-cut lexical changes” they wrote of her final book, “without obvious effects on the grammatical properties of the text.” In other words, Murdoch used fewer words, and repeated them more often, while her syntax barely changed.

But sentence length changed dramatically. In the opening paragraph of “The Sea, The Sea,” the average sentence length was 15.6 words, while in her last book it had fallen to 8.6 words. The second, mid-career book was longer with a greater variety of words and more people than her first book, presumably as Murdoch’s confidence as a writer increased. The final book showed a precipitous drop in length and word variety, and had more dialogue and less narrative than either of its predecessors.

García Márquez isn’t the first literary giant whose later work raised questions about the impact of dementia on creativity and language.

García Márquez’s writing style changed as well, according to neuropsychologist Katya Rascovsky at the University of Pennsylvania, who compared the first 20 pages of the author’s most famous book, “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” with the first 20 pages of “Until August.” Of the first book, she says, “It’s like how many words can you put into a sentence, you know? And it’s like the perfect word.” His new novel is simpler, she found: shorter sentences, less complex words, and more word repetitions.

From the very start, there’s a difference, she said. The opening sentence of “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” translated from its original Spanish, reads: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.” The opening of “Until August,” in contrast: “She returned to the island on Friday, August 16, on the three o’clock ferry.”

Murdoch’s writing also flattened towards the end, according to Garrard. For example, her final novel has a character who is writing a book about a philosopher. “Murdoch, being a philosopher herself, would have used that as an opportunity to write about the work of that philosopher,” said Garrard. But she didn’t; she just said the character was writing a book. Garrard also pointed out that the novel employed a less sophisticated vocabulary and had some basic inconsistencies, alongside many simplifications.

As with García Márquez’s last book, critics were harsh on Murdoch’s “Jackson’s Dilemma.” Novelist and literary critic Hugo Barnacle wrote in The Independent that it “never begins to make the remotest kind of sense.”

Get Our Newsletter

• Email This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Garrard’s close analysis of Murdoch caught the eye of Janet Cohen Sherman, clinical director of the Massachusetts General Hospital Psychology Assessment Center and associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School. “I was intrigued by the fact that he was looking to see if he could see changes through the course of her writing,” she said.

Sherman and her colleagues have been researching ways to distinguish normal cognitive aging from mild cognitive impairment. (It’s worth noting here that not all people with mild cognitive impairment will go on to develop Alzheimer’s disease.) They’ve been working on a test that considers the ability to process information: Volunteers were asked to repeat sentences that were read to them, one at a time. The sentences were all the same length, but varied in their complexity. “What you’re doing when you’re listening to somebody, even a sentence, is you’re actively processing that information,” she said. Notably, Sherman added, “if you can’t process the information well, you’re going to struggle to repeat the sentence correctly.”

Ambiguous sentences, no matter the length, proved to be problems for some people with mild cognitive impairment. “If you hear a sentence like ‘The electrician repaired his equipment,’” Sherman says, “it could be that the electrician repaired his own equipment. Or maybe he repaired somebody else’s equipment.” But non-ambiguous sentences such as “The babysitter emptied the bottle and prepared the formula” were easy to repeat back.

Sherman and her colleagues also found that in people with mild cognitive impairment, semantics (the meaning of language) and memory are independent — meaning someone with mild cognitive impairment trying to tell a story could struggle for the right word or phrase but might easily remember an image or a feeling. Or they may have the words ready but not remember the details of a storyline.

Oddly enough, García Márquez himself once described the loss of semantic memory in an exquisitely accurate way, Rascovsky said. At one point in “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” people in the fictional town were hit by a plague of insomnia that resulted in memory loss that very closely paralleled what Rascovsky sees in some of her patients with frontotemporal lobe dementia. “The most devastating symptom of it was a loss of the names and meaning of things,” she said.

“Remarkably,” she and colleagues at the University of California, San Francisco wrote in a paper in Brain, “García Márquez created a striking literary depiction of collective semantic dementia before the syndrome was recognized in neurology.”

The townspeople first lost their earliest memories (the opposite of the usual sequence in Alzheimer’s disease). Then they lost the names and meanings of things – what’s called representational knowledge.

They then started writing notes and attaching them to things: “This is the cow. She must be milked every morning so that she will produce milk, and the milk must be boiled in order to be mixed with coffee to make coffee and milk.”

“Remarkably, García Márquez created a striking literary depiction of collective semantic dementia before the syndrome was recognized in neurology.”

García Márquez evidently had some insight into his own situation. His sons wrote in the preface to “Until August” that their father’s late-in-life dementia was “a source of desperate frustration for him.”

In “Until August,” Rascovsky detected clear signs that the author was struggling. “What made me a little bit sad,” she said, “wasn’t necessarily the simplicity of the story or the characters, but the loss of the sensory experience.” In earlier works, an orange wasn’t simply an orange. García Márquez would provide lush descriptions of its color, its aroma, and the childhood memories it evoked. Not so in his final book.

“When you think about the dissolution of semantic networks,” Rascovsky said, it makes sense “that he would have more difficulty coming up with those concepts and linking them together.”

In the end, Rascovsky said the novel is still “much better than any of us could ever do. But it is not what we’re used to for García Márquez.”

Joanne Silberner writes about global health, mental health, medical research, and climate change. Her work has appeared on NPR and in STAT, Discover, Global Health Now, and the BMJ, among other publications.

Share This Story

• Solar Eclipse 2024

What the World Has Learned From Past Eclipses

C louds scudded over the small volcanic island of Principe, off the western coast of Africa, on the afternoon of May 29, 1919. Arthur Eddington, director of the Cambridge Observatory in the U.K., waited for the Sun to emerge. The remains of a morning thunderstorm could ruin everything.

The island was about to experience the rare and overwhelming sight of a total solar eclipse. For six minutes, the longest eclipse since 1416, the Moon would completely block the face of the Sun, pulling a curtain of darkness over a thin stripe of Earth. Eddington traveled into the eclipse path to try and prove one of the most consequential ideas of his age: Albert Einstein’s new theory of general relativity.

Eddington, a physicist, was one of the few people at the time who understood the theory, which Einstein proposed in 1915. But many other scientists were stymied by the bizarre idea that gravity is not a mutual attraction, but a warping of spacetime. Light itself would be subject to this warping, too. So an eclipse would be the best way to prove whether the theory was true, because with the Sun’s light blocked by the Moon, astronomers would be able to see whether the Sun’s gravity bent the light of distant stars behind it.

Two teams of astronomers boarded ships steaming from Liverpool, England, in March 1919 to watch the eclipse and take the measure of the stars. Eddington and his team went to Principe, and another team led by Frank Dyson of the Greenwich Observatory went to Sobral, Brazil.

Totality, the complete obscuration of the Sun, would be at 2:13 local time in Principe. Moments before the Moon slid in front of the Sun, the clouds finally began breaking up. For a moment, it was totally clear. Eddington and his group hastily captured images of a star cluster found near the Sun that day, called the Hyades, found in the constellation of Taurus. The astronomers were using the best astronomical technology of the time, photographic plates, which are large exposures taken on glass instead of film. Stars appeared on seven of the plates, and solar “prominences,” filaments of gas streaming from the Sun, appeared on others.

Eddington wanted to stay in Principe to measure the Hyades when there was no eclipse, but a ship workers’ strike made him leave early. Later, Eddington and Dyson both compared the glass plates taken during the eclipse to other glass plates captured of the Hyades in a different part of the sky, when there was no eclipse. On the images from Eddington’s and Dyson’s expeditions, the stars were not aligned. The 40-year-old Einstein was right.

“Lights All Askew In the Heavens,” the New York Times proclaimed when the scientific papers were published. The eclipse was the key to the discovery—as so many solar eclipses before and since have illuminated new findings about our universe.

To understand why Eddington and Dyson traveled such distances to watch the eclipse, we need to talk about gravity.

Since at least the days of Isaac Newton, who wrote in 1687, scientists thought gravity was a simple force of mutual attraction. Newton proposed that every object in the universe attracts every other object in the universe, and that the strength of this attraction is related to the size of the objects and the distances among them. This is mostly true, actually, but it’s a little more nuanced than that.

On much larger scales, like among black holes or galaxy clusters, Newtonian gravity falls short. It also can’t accurately account for the movement of large objects that are close together, such as how the orbit of Mercury is affected by its proximity the Sun.

Albert Einstein’s most consequential breakthrough solved these problems. General relativity holds that gravity is not really an invisible force of mutual attraction, but a distortion. Rather than some kind of mutual tug-of-war, large objects like the Sun and other stars respond relative to each other because the space they are in has been altered. Their mass is so great that they bend the fabric of space and time around themselves.

Read More: 10 Surprising Facts About the 2024 Solar Eclipse

This was a weird concept, and many scientists thought Einstein’s ideas and equations were ridiculous. But others thought it sounded reasonable. Einstein and others knew that if the theory was correct, and the fabric of reality is bending around large objects, then light itself would have to follow that bend. The light of a star in the great distance, for instance, would seem to curve around a large object in front of it, nearer to us—like our Sun. But normally, it’s impossible to study stars behind the Sun to measure this effect. Enter an eclipse.

Einstein’s theory gives an equation for how much the Sun’s gravity would displace the images of background stars. Newton’s theory predicts only half that amount of displacement.

Eddington and Dyson measured the Hyades cluster because it contains many stars; the more stars to distort, the better the comparison. Both teams of scientists encountered strange political and natural obstacles in making the discovery, which are chronicled beautifully in the book No Shadow of a Doubt: The 1919 Eclipse That Confirmed Einstein's Theory of Relativity , by the physicist Daniel Kennefick. But the confirmation of Einstein’s ideas was worth it. Eddington said as much in a letter to his mother: “The one good plate that I measured gave a result agreeing with Einstein,” he wrote , “and I think I have got a little confirmation from a second plate.”

The Eddington-Dyson experiments were hardly the first time scientists used eclipses to make profound new discoveries. The idea dates to the beginnings of human civilization.

Careful records of lunar and solar eclipses are one of the greatest legacies of ancient Babylon. Astronomers—or astrologers, really, but the goal was the same—were able to predict both lunar and solar eclipses with impressive accuracy. They worked out what we now call the Saros Cycle, a repeating period of 18 years, 11 days, and 8 hours in which eclipses appear to repeat. One Saros cycle is equal to 223 synodic months, which is the time it takes the Moon to return to the same phase as seen from Earth. They also figured out, though may not have understood it completely, the geometry that enables eclipses to happen.

The path we trace around the Sun is called the ecliptic. Our planet’s axis is tilted with respect to the ecliptic plane, which is why we have seasons, and why the other celestial bodies seem to cross the same general path in our sky.

As the Moon goes around Earth, it, too, crosses the plane of the ecliptic twice in a year. The ascending node is where the Moon moves into the northern ecliptic. The descending node is where the Moon enters the southern ecliptic. When the Moon crosses a node, a total solar eclipse can happen. Ancient astronomers were aware of these points in the sky, and by the apex of Babylonian civilization, they were very good at predicting when eclipses would occur.

Two and a half millennia later, in 2016, astronomers used these same ancient records to measure the change in the rate at which Earth’s rotation is slowing—which is to say, the amount by which are days are lengthening, over thousands of years.

By the middle of the 19 th century, scientific discoveries came at a frenetic pace, and eclipses powered many of them. In October 1868, two astronomers, Pierre Jules César Janssen and Joseph Norman Lockyer, separately measured the colors of sunlight during a total eclipse. Each found evidence of an unknown element, indicating a new discovery: Helium, named for the Greek god of the Sun. In another eclipse in 1869, astronomers found convincing evidence of another new element, which they nicknamed coronium—before learning a few decades later that it was not a new element, but highly ionized iron, indicating that the Sun’s atmosphere is exceptionally, bizarrely hot. This oddity led to the prediction, in the 1950s, of a continual outflow that we now call the solar wind.

And during solar eclipses between 1878 and 1908, astronomers searched in vain for a proposed extra planet within the orbit of Mercury. Provisionally named Vulcan, this planet was thought to exist because Newtonian gravity could not fully describe Mercury’s strange orbit. The matter of the innermost planet’s path was settled, finally, in 1915, when Einstein used general relativity equations to explain it.

Many eclipse expeditions were intended to learn something new, or to prove an idea right—or wrong. But many of these discoveries have major practical effects on us. Understanding the Sun, and why its atmosphere gets so hot, can help us predict solar outbursts that could disrupt the power grid and communications satellites. Understanding gravity, at all scales, allows us to know and to navigate the cosmos.

GPS satellites, for instance, provide accurate measurements down to inches on Earth. Relativity equations account for the effects of the Earth’s gravity and the distances between the satellites and their receivers on the ground. Special relativity holds that the clocks on satellites, which experience weaker gravity, seem to run slower than clocks under the stronger force of gravity on Earth. From the point of view of the satellite, Earth clocks seem to run faster. We can use different satellites in different positions, and different ground stations, to accurately triangulate our positions on Earth down to inches. Without those calculations, GPS satellites would be far less precise.

This year, scientists fanned out across North America and in the skies above it will continue the legacy of eclipse science. Scientists from NASA and several universities and other research institutions will study Earth’s atmosphere; the Sun’s atmosphere; the Sun’s magnetic fields; and the Sun’s atmospheric outbursts, called coronal mass ejections.

When you look up at the Sun and Moon on the eclipse , the Moon’s day — or just observe its shadow darkening the ground beneath the clouds, which seems more likely — think about all the discoveries still yet waiting to happen, just behind the shadow of the Moon.

More Must-Reads From TIME

• Exclusive: Google Workers Revolt Over $1.2 Billion Contract With Israel
• Jane Fonda Champions Climate Action for Every Generation
• Stop Looking for Your Forever Home
• The Sympathizer Counters 50 Years of Hollywood Vietnam War Narratives
• The Bliss of Seeing the Eclipse From Cleveland
• Hormonal Birth Control Doesn’t Deserve Its Bad Reputation
• The Best TV Shows to Watch on Peacock
• Want Weekly Recs on What to Watch, Read, and More? Sign Up for Worth Your Time

Contact us at [email protected]

You May Also Like

Imprinted by Belief

Does It Seem Like the End Times Are Here? These Novels Know Better.

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward.

Credit... Day Brièrre

Supported by

• Share full article

By Ayana Mathis

Ayana Mathis’s most recent novel, “The Unsettled,” was published in September.

• April 11, 2024

On the day my mother died, I sat by her bedside and read the Psalms. The room was quiet — the need for machines had passed — save for the sound of my voice and my mother’s labored breathing. Outside her room, the hospital went about its business: Lunch trays were delivered, nurses conferred, a television played too loudly down the corridor. Out there, time passed in its usual, unremarkable way. In her room, my mother and I had stepped off time’s familiar track.

Everything inessential vanished in her final hours. I read the Psalms because they comforted her. I told her I loved her. She squeezed my hand, which, in that afternoon when she was no longer able to speak, was as profound an expression of love as any words had ever been. When she died hours later, I knew that on the other side of her hospital room door there awaited, at least for me, an altered world.

The subject of this essay is apocalypse, and so I have begun with an ending. If you have lost a deeply beloved, then you have experienced the obliterating finality of death, that catastrophe in the small universe of an individual life. The loss also brings a realization: The “worst thing” that could happen is no longer a future projection; it has exploded into the present.

Apocalypse is generally understood as a future event: widespread suffering, extinctions, various iterations of end-time destruction gunning for us from some tomorrow. Out there, in the vast, unknowable not-yet, apocalypse roars. It paralyzes us with fear, deadens us into numbness or provokes us to hysteria. We are powerless in its face.

But what if we could change our relationship with the end by shifting our perspective on it? The first step might be dwelling more profoundly in the here and now where our crises amass, rather than focusing on the boogeyman future. We already know something about how to do this: We are creatures of loss; we have confronted, or will confront, the “worst things” in the real time of our lives. There is a precedent, then, for how, in this moment, we might collectively approach the apocalyptic worst things. While our beloved still lives, there is possibility: We can give her our attention; we can hold her hand.

I won’t downplay the current horrors — tens of thousands dead in Gaza, conflict in Ukraine, the high-stakes presidential election on the horizon — or imply that all will turn out right. The novels in this essay don’t do that either. Instead, they suggest new ways of seeing: a shift to deeper present-time awareness, even wonder, as the times grow ever more dire. The theologian Catherine Keller calls this “apocalyptic mindfulness.” “A cloud of roiling possibility seems to reveal itself,” she writes in “Facing Apocalypse” (2021). “It guarantees no happy ending. It may, however, enhance the uncertain chance of better outcomes.”

Many of our end-time notions are inflected by the biblical Book of Revelation. Its phantasmagoric visions and lurid scenes of destruction have thoroughly infiltrated Western talk of the end: the Four Horsemen, the beast we call the Antichrist (though Revelation doesn’t use the term), fires, plagues and raging pestilence. It may come as a surprise, then, that apokalypsis, the Greek word for “revelation,” means not “ending” but “unveiling.” As Keller writes, “It means not closure but dis-closure — that is, opening. A chance to open our eyes?” But, to what?

In Ling Ma’s novel “ Severance ” (2018), newly pregnant Candace Chen wanders a near-deserted New York City in the midst of a pandemic caused by a disease called Shen Fever. The majority of the city’s residents have fled or become “fevered,” a zombielike state that leaves victims stuck on repeat: a family endlessly setting the table and saying grace; a saleswoman, her jaw half eaten by decay, folding and refolding polo shirts at an abandoned Juicy Couture store on Fifth Avenue. The fevered are the least threatening zombies imaginable: so busy with their mindless performance of mundane tasks that they don’t notice the living. Ma has a knack for nuanced satire.

Candace sticks around because she’s got nowhere else to go; she’s the orphaned child of Chinese immigrants who died years before. Inexplicably, and perhaps somewhat to her dismay, she remains virus-free. As the pandemic shuts down the city, she doggedly persists with her job in the Bibles department at Spectra, a book production company: “I clicked Send, knowing it was fruitless,” she says. When public transportation stops entirely, she moves into her office on the 32nd floor, overlooking an empty Times Square.

It doesn’t take long to understand that a vast grief underlies Candace’s workaholic paralysis. So intense is her mourning for her parents that for a while the pandemic hardly registers. She needs to hold on to something, even pointless work at Spectra. The office setting is no coincidence: In some sense, Candace, too, is fevered, and her job’s rote repetition is a kind of anesthetic.

The dull but familiar grind of late-capitalist working life acts as a numbing agent, or perhaps a blindfold. When work dries up because the rest of the world is no longer at its desk, Candace rambles around the city utterly alone, taking pictures of derelict buildings that she posts on a blog she calls “NY Ghost.” One afternoon she enters a flooded subway station. “You couldn’t even see the water beneath all the garbage,” Ma writes. “The deeper you tunneled down, the bigger the sound, echoed and magnified by the enclosed space, until this primordial slurp was all that existed.” Grieving Candace is adrift, her internal landscape aligned with the desolation of the external world.

Published two years before the Covid pandemic, “Severance” offers an eerily prescient description of a nation shocked and exhausted. For so many, 2020 was a kind of apocalyptic unveiling. The pandemic revealed the fault lines in our health care and our schools, as well as the fact that so many of us were living in perpetual economic precarity. Then there were the deaths, which as a country we have hardly begun to mourn. Painfully and all at once, we understood the fragility of the systems we relied on, and the instability of our own lives.

Yet alongside the devastation there was transient beauty: In many places, air and water quality improved during lockdown and wildlife resurged. Health-care and essential workers were acknowledged and more respected; we realized the extent of our dependence on one another. If only for a little while, we were thrown into Keller’s “apocalyptic mindfulness.” But the eye snapped shut. We “recovered,” and, like Candace, we find ourselves once again in a collective disquiet, punctuated by bouts of terror as we contemplate the future.

On the final afternoon of her wandering, Candace ventures into the same Juicy Couture store she’d photographed weeks before. Ominously, the fevered saleswoman has been bludgeoned to death. Candace’s unborn child seems frightened too: “The baby moved inside of me, fluttering frantically.” Candace leaves Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel in a yellow taxi she’s commandeered from a fevered driver. She joins a band of survivors led by a creepy zealot named Bob, a former I.T. guy who wears a brace for carpal tunnel syndrome, that most banal of white-collar work maladies. They journey to the Chicago suburbs to homestead in a deserted mall. (I told you Ma has a knack for satire.)

In this semi-cult, Candace’s grief intensifies. She begins to have visions of her mother, who warns her that she and her unborn baby aren’t safe with Bob. Candace’s mother is right. Bob has a penchant for shooting the fevered in the head if he encounters them when he and the others go “stalking” for food and supplies. We squirm at these killings, even if the victims are not quite alive, at least not in the usual sense. Bob’s violent demagoguery opens Candace’s eyes to her metaphorically fevered state, and as we look into the mirror the novel holds up to us, we begin to wonder about our relationship to our own beleaguered world.

At last, Candace’s fever breaks and, fully alive, she escapes Bob and the others in a Nissan stolen from the group’s mini-fleet. She drives into once grand Chicago, swerving to avoid abandoned cars clogging Milwaukee Avenue. Finally, she runs out of gas. “Up ahead there’s a massive littered river, planked by an elaborate, wrought-iron red bridge,” she recounts. “Beyond the bridge is more skyline, more city. I get out and start walking.”

The “end” for Candace and her baby is not, in fact, an ending, but rather, an awakening that follows revelation.

If “Severance” chronicles its protagonist’s end-time stirrings from the stupor of grief, Jenny Offill’s novel “ Weather ” (2020) is its manic cousin, a diaristic account of climate anxiety. Narrated in the first person, aggressively present tense and composed of short chapters that leap from association to observation, the book is like a panicked brain in overdrive.

“Weather”’s protagonist, Lizzie, works as a university librarian in New York City. Her former professor, Sylvia, a climate change expert, finagled the gig for her though Lizzie isn’t really qualified. “Years ago, I was her grad student,” Lizzie explains, “but then I gave up on it. She used to check in on me sometimes to see if I was still squandering my promise. The answer was always yes.”

Lizzie is all wry self-deprecation. As the book progresses, we understand that she is less an underachiever than an empath, so often overwhelmed that her focus scrambles. Or perhaps it’s that she is deeply attentive to things we try to ignore. Her experience of the world is the opposite of Candace’s near-impenetrable grief. Lizzie is porous. Too much gets in: grave news about the environment, the plights of relative strangers — like kindly Mr. Jimmy, a car-service owner being run out of business by Uber. Lizzie “helps” by taking Mr. Jimmy’s car to various appointments, though she can’t afford it and the traffic makes her late.

The novel doesn’t so much unfold as tumble out over the course of a turbulent year that encompasses Donald Trump’s election in 2016. After Trump’s win, tensions rise in Lizzie’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Even Mr. Jimmy is spewing casual vitriol about Middle Eastern people and car bombs. Lizzie’s husband, Ben, retreats to the couch, to read a “giant history of war.” And I haven’t even mentioned Henry, Lizzie’s depressive, recovering-addict brother, who meets a woman, marries and has a baby, all at whiplash speed. When the marriage implodes, Henry winds up on Lizzie and Ben’s couch, using again and barely able to parent his daughter.

For Lizzie, as for most of us, personal and collective catastrophes run parallel. Her vision of the future grows ever darker. She talks to Sylvia about buying land somewhere cooler, where Eli, her young son, and Iris, her newborn niece, might fare better in 30 years or so. “Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?” Sylvia asks.

“I look at her,” Lizzie thinks. “Because until this moment, I did, I did somehow think this.” The realization of her helplessness is unbearable, but Lizzie knows she must bear it: This bleak state of affairs is her son’s inheritance.

Lizzie is gripped by grief and despair — she spends far too much time on doomsday prepper websites — both complicated responses to a planet in the midst of radical, damaging change. “In a world of mortal beings,” Keller writes in “Facing Apocalypse,” “it would seem that without some work of mourning, responsibility for that world cannot develop.” Lizzie’s sense of loss and futility is wrenching, but her response attaches her that much more deeply to this world. Her anxiety is acute because the time in which to act is limited and shot through with urgency.

Lizzie experiences her moment as unprecedented; her end-time sensibility suggests an analogy, albeit to a starkly different context. The Apostle Paul also understood himself to be living through an extraordinary rupture in time. Paul's zeal to spread the Gospel through the ancient world was fueled by his conviction that ordinary time, and life, had been profoundly derailed by Christ’s crucifixion, and was soon to end with his imminent Second Coming. Paul believed he was living in an in-between time that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has aptly called “ the time that remains ,” a phrase borrowed from Paul’s letter to the fledgling church at Corinth. “The time is short,” Paul wrote. “From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not.”

The old world and its rules had not yet passed away but the prospect of Christ’s return cast an altering light on the present, highlighting the impermanence of all things. Everything was revealed to be in flux and therefore subject to reversals and change.

In “Weather,” Lizzie’s frazzled report from the event horizon of impending disaster, the time that remains means that moments are more precious, less bound by previous rules of engagement and more open to radically new ones. Near the end of the novel, Henry reclaims his sobriety, and Lizzie finds renewed, if melancholic, love for this imperiled world. She wants to find a new way to engage, even as she is uncertain what that might be. “There’s the idea in the different traditions. Of the veil,” Lizzie says. “What if we were to tear through it?” The image recalls Keller’s apokalypsis — a revelatory “ dis-closure .”

Jesmyn Ward’s “ Salvage the Bones ” (2011) takes a very different approach to apocalypse. The novel is set over 12 days, before and just after Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast. The 15-year-old narrator, Esch, her father and three brothers live in the Mississippi Delta, outside a coastal town Ward calls Bois Sauvage. Unlike other characters we have encountered, Ward’s need no awakening; and time is far too short for existential anxiety or long-term planning.

The novel opens as China, a pit bull belonging to Esch’s brother Skeetah, is giving birth. Moody, commanding China is the love of Skeetah’s young life and as vivid as any human character in the book. “What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do,” Ward writes. “Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet.” Skeetah hopes to sell China’s puppies for big money. Enough to send his older brother, Randall, to basketball camp, where, the family hopes, he’ll be noticed by college scouts. Enough, perhaps, to help Esch take care of her baby. Esch is pregnant, though not far enough along to show, and she is in love with the baby’s father, her brother Randall’s friend Manny, who keeps her a secret and won’t kiss her on the mouth.

The novel is full of mothers: mothers to be, absent mothers (Esch’s mother died in childbirth years before), animal mothers, even mythical mothers (Esch is fixated on the avenging Medea, whom she’s read about in school). And, of course, Mother Nature is flying across the gulf, heading straight for Bois Sauvage. Mothers in this novel are makers and destroyers. In some cases, they are also unprepared to occupy the role; they are in jeopardy or else the circumstances of their motherhood run afoul of certain proprieties.

Esch’s pregnancy isn’t easy. It may also be hard for readers to accept: Esch is in dire financial straits and young enough to scandalize some of us. Does the prospect of her motherhood elicit the same empathy as Lizzie’s or Candace’s? Whose children do we think of as the hope for the future when the end is nigh? Which mothers are most valued in the collective perception? Not, generally speaking, an impoverished Black girl barely into her teens.

Ward’s concerns are with those who will bear the brunt of the coming storms, both natural and metaphoric, on the page and in the world. Esch and her family face Katrina with nothing besides a few canned goods they’ve scared up, and some plywood nailed over the doors and windows. Esch herself is the sort of vulnerable person Scripture might refer to as “the least of these.” Each time I read the novel, my mind leaps to the biblical Mary, mother of Jesus, a poor, brown, teenage girl who gave birth in a barn because no safer provision was made for her. In that story, the life least protected turns out to be the most essential.

So it is in “Salvage the Bones”: Esch and her unborn child, along with fighting China and her puppies, are the beating heart of this universe. Here, Esch considers which animals flee before a coming storm: “Maybe the bigger animals do,” she reflects. “Maybe the small don’t run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us.”

With “the small,” or those treated as such, as focal points, Ward’s novel is also an indictment. It’s true that Katrina was a natural disaster, but its effects were preventable, or might have been mitigated. Most of us remember the levees breaking. The disaster’s aftermath — thousands, mostly poor, stranded without food or water; critically ill patients dying in storm-ravaged hospitals ; desperate, unarmed civilians shot by police officers — was entirely the fault of humans.

We might extend Ward’s insight to end-time crises in general, in which other Esches are similarly left with the greater share of suffering. We may not be able to reverse the crises themselves, but we can intervene in the devastation they cause, and to whom.

We have been down a harrowing road; there isn’t much comfort here. But perhaps at this critical juncture in our human story, it is not comfort that will aid us most. Perhaps what will aid us most is to enter more fully into dis comfort. To awaken to our grief, like Candace. To try to tear through the veil, like Lizzie. In this way we might begin to believe that the future is not foreclosed upon, whatever it might look like.

I leave us with Esch’s declaration of hope at the end of Ward’s novel. Esch’s family has survived, but Skeetah is searching for China, who disappeared in the storm: “He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore … dull but alive, alive, alive.”

Explore More in Books

Want to know about the best books to read and the latest news start here..

What can fiction tell us about the apocalypse? The writer Ayana Mathis finds unexpected hope in novels of crisis by Ling Ma, Jenny Offill and Jesmyn Ward .

At 28, the poet Tayi Tibble has been hailed as the funny, fresh and immensely skilled voice of a generation in Māori writing .

Amid a surge in book bans, the most challenged books in the United States in 2023 continued to focus on the experiences of L.G.B.T.Q. people or explore themes of race.

Stephen King, who has dominated horror fiction for decades , published his first novel, “Carrie,” in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains the book’s enduring appeal .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

Each week, top authors and critics join the Book Review’s podcast to talk about the latest news in the literary world. Listen here .

Advertisement