Module ENG312C2 - Lecture 11

Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)

In this lecture I discussed Toni Morrison’s Beloved and made the following points - illustrating them with phrases, sentences and paragraphs indexed to pages in my edition of the novel (Picador 1988). The passages I mentioned, along with some others of interest for the same or related reasons, are on the website under “Teaching & Resources” - Toni Morrison as below.
Note: The points cited on this page comprise an outline the actual lecture and are not intended as a substitute for attendance or your own records. Supplementary lectures and readings are accessible from the “Teaching & Learning” page.

The Jungle Within (OHP)
Beloved - Longert Extracts

Lecture Points

It goes without saying that the novel is tremendously moving and successful as both a testament and a work of literature. Not for nothing did it win the Pulitzer Prize in its year of publication - 1988 - and not for nothing did its author win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993.

For biography of the author and her many remarks on this novel - whose title is associated with a Biblical text go to the web pages indicated on our website or any other source. I am sure that those who have chosen the novel for their presentations will add valuably to these hints, and bring the whole work into keener focus.

  • - The structure of the novel is shaped by its concern with amnesia and recovered memories;
  • - the narrative is conducted in flashbacks rather than chronologically successive events;
  • - these correspond to the stages by which the characters - chiefly Sethe - recall (usually for others, such as Paul D;) what happened to them;
  • - the trama and amnesia of the individual is replicated by the trauma and amnesia of the group (that is, African-Americans descended from slaves);
  • - the novel concerns a mother, Sethe, who kills her child rather than allow it to be ‘recaptured’ by the brutal slave-owner from whom she has escaped;
  • - the dead child ‘comes back’ in the shape of Beloved, a grown up young woman who effectively haunts Sethe’s house;
  • - at the centre of the action is her Sethe’s daughter Denvir, who sets in motion the communal action that finally exorcises the ‘ghost’;
  • - the novel details the kinds of suffering imposed on American blacks by American whites (powerfully exemplifying the idea represented in the novel that the white man ‘doesn’t know when to stop’;
  • - Lynching, mutilation, ‘Overbeating’ and rape are among the forms of physical violence inflicted;
  • - Equally important, the slave-owners (in the part of colonists) impose psychological tortures on the slaves (in the form of colonised) consisting chiefly in the negation of their identity;
  • - We are told, for instance, that they are not allowed to feel ‘pleasure’, and that their function is to reproduce for the market;
  • - This radical form of alienation amounts to a denial of the ownership of one’s own body (by definition, the condition of slavery);
  • - that is why Baby Sugg (grandmother) tells Denvir to ‘love her body’ and ‘listen to it’
  • - the novel raises the question whether Beloved is a real being or a projection of Sethe’s guilt and trauma;
  • - Beloved has a monologue chapter to herself as well as several ‘speeches’ in which he recollects her time among the dead (very like incarceration with her white torturers);
  • - Sethe is finally able to say that here intention in killing Beloved was to keep her ‘safe’ from white men and to ‘outhurt the hurter’;
  • - the novel employs a powerful language based on African-American but also uses devices associated with magic realism and (more generally) postmodernism
  • - It contains within itself a polemic slavery which is strongly informed with the postcolonial theory of Frantz Fanon;
  • E;g;, the passage (on our website) which identifies the white conception that the blacks are essentially related to ‘jungle’ and its dangers is shown to be a projection of their own inner fears;
  • - Beloved can be read as a gothic novel which shares history and haunting with others of the genre;
  • - at the same time it functions as a real ‘abreaction’ - the Freudian term for the process by which old traumas are brought back to memory and resolved;
  • - Paul D’s little tobacco (?) box is a symbol for memory - the closing and forgetting of things that cannot be remembered;
  • - Beloved - the novel itself - is really the opening of that box; it is also a history of American slavery and its sequel - the decolonisation of the African-American mind.

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ENG312C2 - University of Ulster