Recommended Reading
How to read ‘Beloved’ - A Student Guide
Students reading the novel ‘Beloved’ by Toni Morrison, written in 1987, can find themselves facing a daunting task. I first taught this text in 1992 and as it was new on the syllabus I was then teaching, there was very little background information. I had to work with a blank canvas. It is a novel that works on many levels with a multi structured narrative which can be very confusing. These are some of my thoughts.
I firstly had to think how a student could approach the novel. I made notes for each chapter, planned out a mind map as a wall chart and gradually a picture started to emerge. I looked at language; structure; themes; characters; viewpoint and context. I also researched what Toni Morrison had to say about the process of writing.
Although I am talking specifically about one text; this process of analysis shown above, is what is required of us as teachers and students in understanding literature and working towards the examination
Below I have listed some of the readings that can be found in the novel.
- a historic reading in which the African American struggles to find their identity through the experience of slavery
- a supernatural narrative with a ghost that tries to claim the characters through the emotion of love and coterminous feelings of guilt
- the conflict between the spiritual and and the real world
- a feminist reading, whereby the women are dominant within the novel, and their experiences as women are connected to the experience of slavery
- the difference between an oral history and a written one
Armed with the knowledge that there are many interpretations of this novel, examine the way the novel is structured. It is composed of three sections. The first section is the longest and the reader is given a lot of information, and taken back in time through memories. Start to ask questions.
How do the chapters start, how do they end, do they link, if they don't why not, what is Morrison trying to do here? Is the narrative straightforward or unorthodox?
Where is the climax of the novel? Is it in the second section? How fast is it, how slow? Does the plot move backwards or forwards or is it circular? Work it out. And ask why is the author doing it like this, what is Morrison trying to achieve?
What themes are present in the novel? Make a list and highlight what you think are the most important and whether they link to language and structure, as well as the different motifs and symbols that can be found.
Characters: Examine each character carefully. Who is the most important for you and why? Who is a subsidiary character? Are the three main characters equally important? What physical and personal characteristics do they have? How are they developed throughout the novel?
Identify the ways in which Morrison uses language in the text. The use of language is very unusual in this novel and this is an area which students can sometime find difficult. Morrison mixes prose and poetry in order to mirror or describe an experience that is sometimes indescribable, thus she tries to achieve a heightened sense of feeling through rhythm and phrases. Note the middle sections of the novel in the fragmented memories about the slave ships and the feeling of claustrophobia: ‘In the dark my name is Beloved...dark I’m small in that place. I’m like this here...Were you cold...Hot nothing to breathe down there and no room to move in.’ (p.75) The language is fragmented to illustrate the dislocated memories as well as feelings. These memories are not solely Beloved’s memories they reflect the experience of sixty million, mentioned at the beginning of the novel. An experience so horrific that it is ‘about something that the characters don't want to remember, I don't want to remember, black people don't want to remember, white people don't want to remember.’ (Toni Morrison, The Pain of Being Black, Time, 22 May, 1989.)
Another good way to understand the novel is to look at what Morrison says about writing: ‘Writers are among the most sensitive, the most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The ability of writers to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange and mystify the familiar, is the test of their power. The languages they use and the social and historical context in which these languages signify are indirect and direct revelations of that power and its limitation. So it is to them, the creators of American literature, that I look for clarification about the invention and effect of Africanism in the United States.’ (Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark)
Here we can see an author interrogating the writers role which she believes is to be empathic, to become someone else and understand their experience. How language works within the cultural structure and what it can and cannot do. She also seeks to understand the effect of the African American on the United States.
With these ideas in mind we can then begin to understand how her statement relates to the novel through its language, structure, characters and contexts.
So what is the novel about? The main protagonist of the book is Sethe, although one could argue quite credibly that it is Beloved, as the book is named after her. All characters have been badly damaged by the experience of slavery. Sethe escapes out of slavery to Cincinnati whilst pregnant, her other children have gone on ahead, she joins them at her ‘husband’s mother’s house only to be pursued by the ‘white men’ from ‘Sweet Home’ (an ironic name). In despair she kills one of her children (Beloved) and tries to kill the others. This murder is seen as an act of love because she cannot bear the idea of going back into slavery both for herself and her children.
The dead child comes back in an attempt to possess her mother and ultimately to destroy and reclaim her. However, Beloved is doomed not to succeed ‘They forgot her like a bad dream. After they made their tales, shaped and decorated them, those that saw her that day on the porch quickly and deliberately forgot her...Remembering seemed unwise.’ (p.274)
As readers and students of this novel we are always made aware that we are watching the black experience, and we feel, and are made to feel, the anguish and fear that was the slave experience. However, Toni Morrison is very conscious of this and alerts her readers, especially her white readers, that it can only be a second-hand experience. She has stated that: ‘she believes that the presence of black people in America informs and resonates through white literary culture. Her aim is to rememorise the black cultural experience.’ (Playing in the Dark) Thus the ambiguity found at the end of the novel when Morrison raises the question of whether the ghost is remembered or forgotten. ‘Down by the stream in back of 124 her footprints come and go, come and go.’ (p. 274-5)
Morrison also tries to create and develop a new language of blackness and counteract the disappearance of the oral tradition and retell the stories, legends, myths and experience through the written word, as shown in ‘Beloved.’ ‘We don't live in places where we can hear these stories anymore; parent don't sit around and tell their children those classical mythological archetypal stories that we heard years ago. But new information has got to get out. One way is the novel.’ (Playing in the Dark)
Many interpretations can be made about this novel; that it is a story of love corrupted and destroyed by one culture’s need to control and retain power over another culture; it is an epic poem in the style of Odysseus, a journey of great tragedy and heroism; a history of the survival of a people; a record or rememory of historical events that Morrison transforms from the oral to the printed word, not just through one story but many narratives in the novel.
I hope this has helped in some small way to understand this complex and difficult text. Perhaps we should give Toni Morrison the last word: ‘The imagination that produces work which bears and invites rereadings, which motions to future readings as well as contemporary ones, implies a shareable world and an endlessly flexible language.’ (Playing in the Dark)
Pat Osborne.
