"Beloved": Reception History
“Ghosts, for me, are just something that have past,” Toni Morrison said in an interview about her fifth and, at the time, newest novel, Beloved, with the Associated Press. She was describing the “area of consciousness” she applies in the novel, an area we are all familiar with and are certain we know exists because, as Morrison explains, “everybody was a child.”
Because we were all children, we know ghosts exist; that trees speak; and that, “lurk[ing] underneath the bed” is a world that is very real. Perhaps this aptly describes the character Beloved, whose childhood is intimately entangled with her death, and whose real-ness is only as certain as everything else that from a past that lingers, thrives, and haunts, a past wracked with both the horrors of slavery and the breaths of freedom that are bittersweet when, like Paul D. on his way from Selma to Mobile, one sees “more dead people than living ones.” Despite being “declared free,” Paul D. could not safely travel from “the foundry in Selma straight to Philadelphia.” This path to constitutional liberty may have been paved, but it is yet to be totally clear of the thorny brush of anti-Black racism that still remains pervasive and overgrown.
When Beloved failed to garner Morrison the National Book Award, forty-eight Black writers, activists, and critics signed a collective letter published in The New York Times on January 24, 1988, that both decried the fact that Morrison had yet to win a National Book Award or a Pulitzer Prize, and praised Morrison’s literary value as an American novelist. Signers included Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Angela Davis, John Edgar Wideman, John A. Williams, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Toni Cade Bambara, Joyce Carol Thomas, Hortense Spillers, Alice Walker, and more.
Eventually, though, Morrison did win the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for Beloved in 1988. She also won the American Book Award and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award for Fiction. In the years to follow its release, however, Beloved faced bans across the country, perhaps most notably when, in 2016, Virginia State Senator Robert H. Black introduced the “Beloved bill.” Calling the novel “moral sewage,” Black’s bill required teachers inform students’ parents of any sexually explicit content in the materials and would allow parents to “opt their children out of reading said books.” In 2007, two parents in Kentucky complained about the book’s violence and was removed from the Eastern High School AP English’s reading list. At a public hearing in 2012, another two parents complained about the book, claiming it “contained violence…and sex acts that provide no historical context” and was written at a “fifth-grade reading level.” Subsequently, the superintendent of the district ordered its removal from English curriculums.
Whether or not any of these parents read the book in its entirety, let alone understood it, remains uncertain. What is certain, though, is that despite some of the scorn, Beloved generated waves of attention and praise, which is captured below in most of the contemporary reviews written about Morrison’s novel.