I have to find the hook, the image, the newspaper article that produces sustained musing, a "what if? Beloved originated as a general question, and was launched by a newspaper clipping.
The general question remember, this was the early eighties centered on how — other than equal rights, access, pay, etc. One principal area of fierce debate was control of one's own body — an argument that is as rife now as it was then. Many women were convinced that such rights extended to choosing to be a mother, suggesting that not being a mother was not a deficit and choosing motherlessness for however long could be added to a list of freedoms; that is, one could choose to live a life free of and from child- bearing and no negative or value judgment need apply.
Another aspect of the women's movement involved strong encouragement of women to support other women. Not to have one's relationship to another woman be subordinate to a relationship with a man. That is, the time spent with a female friend was not downtime. It was real time. The completion of the debate was more complicated than that there was much class conflict roiling in it but those were the issues surfacing with gusto.
I addressed the second one women being important friends in Sula. But the first one — freedom as ownership of the body, childlessness chosen as a mark of freedom, engaged me deeply. And here again the silences of historical accounts and the marginalizing of minority peoples in the debate claimed my attention and proved a rich being to explore. From the point of view of slave women, for example. Suppose having children, being called a mother, was the supreme act of freedom — not its opposite?
Under U. It was also an expression of intolerable female independence. It was freedom. And if the claim extended to infanticide for whatever reason — noble or crazed it could and did become politically explosive. The details of her life were riveting.
But I selected and manipulated its parts to suit my own purposes. Still my reluctance to enter the period of slavery was disabling.
The need to reexamine and imagine it was repellent. Plus, I believed nobody else would want to dig deeply into the interior lives of slaves, except to summon their nobility or victimhood, to be outraged or self-righteously gripped by pity.
I was interested in neither. The act of writing is a kind of act of faith. Sometimes what is there — what is already written — is perfect and imitation is absurd and intolerable.
And even when it first came out, it was deeply meaningful to those who picked it up — including an incarcerated man who wrote Morrison to thank her for putting it together. In her own writing, Morrison lavished the underdiscussed lives of black women with language. Her prose is lyrical almost as a default; it is rhythmic and vivid; it sings.
In her hands, to write lyrically feels like an act of both love and defiance. But in her most famous novel, Beloved , about an escaped enslaved woman who kills her baby daughter to prevent her from being taken by slave catchers, Morrison had to balance her tendency toward lyricism with the starkness of her subject matter.
To render enslavement as a personal experience, language must first get out of the way. In Beloved , the ghost of slavery is literal and inescapable. Sethe, the desperate mother based on the historical Margaret Garner , may no longer be enslaved as the novel opens, but she can never forget what slavery as an institution did to her as a person: that it made her kill her infant daughter, Beloved. But it rapidly and inexorably becomes clear that forgetting is impossible.
The opening paragraph of Beloved captures that dread and that beauty as well as anything else Morrison ever wrote:. 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 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old — as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it that was the signal for Buglar ; as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake that was it for Howard.
Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the doorsill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. Each one fled at once — the moment the house committed what was for him the one insult not to be born or witnessed a second time. 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.
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