"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.
Atwood, Margaret. “Haunted by their Nightmares.” The New York Times. 13 Sept. 1987, pp. 560; 608-9.
Describing Beloved as “another triumph,” the writer Margaret Atwood describes Morrison’s writing in Beloved as “antiminimalist." The prose “is by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point.” Atwood writes poignantly about Beloved’s vivid portrayal of American slavery, noting the way the novel makes the reader “experience American slavery as it was lived by those who were its objects of exchange”—which, Atwood continues, “above all,” means recognizing slavery as “one of the most viciously antifamily institutions human beings have ever devised.”Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, ‘Beloved'’ will put them to rest. In three words or less, it's a hair-raiser. - Margaret Atwood
Notably, Atwood recognizes Morrison’s portrayal of slavery “as a paradigm of how most people behave when they are given absolutely power over other people.” Indeed, as is often the case with ideological or hegemonic structures of power, one of the “first effect[s]” is that those in power “start believing in their own superiority and justifying their actions by it.” In other words, a completely unnatural racial hierarchy takes hold and becomes internalized by those who benefit from the subjugation of Black bodies. Indeed, in a turn from previous reviews of earlier Morrison novels, rather than see the portrayal of “whitepeople” in Beloved as a shortcoming, Atwood understands that “in a novel that abounds in black bodies—headless, hanging from trees, frying to a crisp, locked in woodsheds for purposes of rape, or floating downstream drowned,” then it isn’t any wonder that “ ‘whitepeople,’ especially the men, don’t come off too well.” Moreover, even those “whitepeople” who do “behave with something approaching decency” are unable to see those whom they help “as full-fledged people.”
Atwood does note that Morrison “is careful not to make all the whites awful and all the blacks wonderful,” but one wonders, then, whether that’s a success of Beloved in particular or if Atwood might feel similarly about previous texts, like Tar Baby for instance, which, apparently, left Anatole Broyard “wonder[ing] why the black characters in Tar Baby have all the passion while the white ones are fit only for sitting in greenhouses, manufacturing candy and sticking pins into their babies.” For Atwood, neighbors of leading character Sethe “have their own envy and scapegoating tendencies to answer for” and Paul D., as Atwood describes, is “much kinder” than the “woman-bashers of Alice Walker’s novel The Color Purple” but “has his own limitations and flaws.”