Context
Toni Morrison was born Chloe
Anthony Wofford in 1931 and spent the first
years of her life in Ohio. She received an undergraduate degree
in English from Howard University and completed a master's program
at Cornell. When many of her classmates had difficulty pronouncing
her uncommon first name, she changed it to Toni (a derivative of
her middle name). In 1958, she married Harold
Morrison, an architect from Jamaica, and the couple had two sons.
They divorced six years later. After pursuing an academic career
teaching English at Howard, Morrison became an editor at Random
House, where she specialized in black fiction. At the same time,
she began building a body of creative work that, in 1993,
would make her the first African-American woman to receive the Nobel
Prize for Literature. Her 1970 novel The
Bluest Eye was followed by Sula in 1974,
which secured Morrison a nomination for the National Book Award.
In 1977, Morrison won the National Book Critics
Circle Award for her book Song of Solomon. Her
other works include Tar Baby (1981), Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998),
and, of course, Beloved. That novel, considered
by many to be her best, won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.
Today, Morrison is the Robert F. Goheen Professor in the Council
of Humanities at Princeton University, where she conducts undergraduate
workshops in creative writing.
Set during the Reconstruction era in 1873, Beloved centers
on the powers of memory and history. For the former slaves in the novel,
the past is a burden that they desperately and willfully try to forget.
Yet for Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, memories of slavery
are inescapable. They continue to haunt her, literally, in the spirit
of her deceased daughter. Eighteen years earlier, Sethe had murdered
this daughter in order to save her from a life of slavery. Morrison
borrowed the event from the real story of Margaret Garner, who,
like Sethe, escaped from slavery in Kentucky and murdered her child
when slave catchers caught up with her in Ohio. Beloved straddles
the line between fiction and history; from the experiences of a
single family, Morrison creates a powerful commentary on the psychological
and historical legacy of slavery.
Part of Morrison's project in Beloved is
to recuperate a history that had been lost to the ravages of forced
silences and willed forgetfulness. Morrison writes Sethe's story
with the voices of a people who historically have been denied the
power of language. Beloved also contains a didactic
element. From Sethe's experience, we learn that before a stable
future can be created, we must confront and understand the “ghosts”
of the past. Morrison suggests that, like Sethe, contemporary American
readers must confront the history of slavery in order to address
its legacy, which manifests itself in ongoing racial discrimination
and discord.
Morrison once said that she wanted to help
create a canon of black work, noting that black writers too often
have to pander to a white audience when they should be able to concentrate
on the business of writing instead. Many readers believe Morrison's novels
go a long way toward the establishment of her envisioned tradition.
The poetic, elegant style of her writing in Beloved panders
to no one. Morrison challenges and requires the reader to accept
her on her own terms.
