Toni Morrison's Beloved - Bold but Unsuccessful

The Bold but Unsuccessful Beloved

Toni Morrison's fifth novel, Beloved, a vividly unconventional family saga, is set in Ohio in the mid 1880s. By that time slavery had been shattered by the Civil War, the Emancipation Proclamation and the succeeding constitutional amendments, though daily reality for the freed slaves continued to be a matter of perpetual struggle, not only with segregation and its attendant insults, but the curse of memory.

Morrison's heroine, Sethe, is literally haunted - by the baby daughter she killed in a gesture of terrible mercy, when threatened with recapture after her escape. Though robbed of friends by the poltergeist, she is living in the survivor's state of stunned calm until one of her fellow slaves from Kentucky turns up on her doorstep after eighteen years. Paul D Garner, with his special quality of empathy, is "the kind of a man who could walk into a house and make the women cry."

In the first few hours of his visit he rids Sethe's house of the poltergeist, makes love to Sethe, and hugely antagonises her teenage daughter, Denver, not only by his interest in her mother, but because the poltergeist was her one companion.

The ghost, however, loses little time in effecting a more solid manifestation, as a young woman runaway whom Sethe shelters, and by whom she comes to be dominated. She gives up her job to be with Beloved and while the girl ghost thrives, she and Denver are reduced to near starvation. It is only when Denver dares to come out of her isolation and invoke the help of the rest of her black community that Beloved can be sent back to her grave and Sethe and Paul D. reunited.

Interwoven with this rather obviously symbo...

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...n her description of her escape from the grave - the hold of a slave-ship seems fleetingly invoked - the detail remains too vague for it to have as powerful and effect as those harrowingly physical journeys undertaken by the flesh-and-blood characters elsewhere in the novel.

As a family saga, 'Beloved' is somewhat lop-sided and suffers from gaps. The reader is left with several unanswered questions: what has happened to Sethe's sons, Howard and Buglar, who though frequently invoked do not appear on stage? What will happen to Denver, whose new life is beginning as the novel ends?

In a 'Guardian' interview, Morrison spoke of her reluctance to end the story, and it certainly seems that there is more to be told. It may well be that Beloved's story will turn out to be the painful, moving, but relatively minor part of a much larger narrative.