"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.”
Byatt, A.S. “An American Masterpiece.” The Guardian, 16 Oct. 1987.
Toni Morrison has always been an ambitious artist,” A.S. Byatt writes in their review for The Guardian—so much so, however, that her work has, through this very ambition, “in its own brilliant and complex vision,” sometimes becomes “almost clotted or tangled.” But Beloved has a “new strength and simplicity”, according to Byatt, who describes the text as “huge, generous, humane…gripping,” and, moreover, an “American masterpiece.”This novel gave me nightmares and yet I sat up late, paradoxically smiling to myself with intense pleasure at the exact beauty of the singing prose. - A.S. Byatt
Byatt identifies the purposeful suppression or “deliberate limitation of memory” as “the emotional condition of all the people of this story,” a “condition” which Sethe describes early on in the novel, shared as well with Paul D’s tobacco-tin that he buries deep within. At odds with this psychological sweeping-under-the-Hippocampus-rug, is the past. In a suggestively Faulknerian, “the past is never dead; it’s not even past” comparison, Byatt details the way in which the past in Beloved “rises up and cries for blood.” As Sethe suggests, “nothing ever dies.”
“In the foreground,” Byatt writes, “is the life of the black people whose courage and dignity and affection is felt to be almost indomitable.” Noting Morrison’s frequent motif of unique names, in Beloved, “their names are the no-names of non-people and are as alive as jazz with their quiddity and idiosyncrasy.” “By contrast,” Byatt continues, the “world of the whites…is almost wholly distanced,” surfacing to “consciousness only as and when the blacks can briefly bear to contemplate what it has done to them.” Byatt calls Beloved an “adult book,” but, populating this novel-for-grown-ups, are characters whose “essential virtue” Byatt likens to “fairy-tale heroes.” These characters, Byatt contends, “exact our primitive affection unquestioningly.” Morrison drew frequent comparisons to Faulkner in reviews for her earlier works, but, for Byatt, this “love for her people”—no longer just characters, but people—is “Tolstoyan in its detail and greedy curiosity; the reader is inside their doings and sufferings.”
Other familiar names that Byatt mentions include those whose novels existed in the time period in which Beloved is set—and which it “reassesses”: “Melville, Hawthorne, Poe,” Byatt argues, all “wrote riddling allegories about the nature of evil, the haunting of unappeased spirits, the inverted opposition of blackness and whiteness,” but Morrison “with plainness and grace and terror—and judgment—solved the riddle, and showed us the world which haunted theirs.”
Merle Rubin describes Beloved as both a “stunning book” and a “lasting achievement.” For Rubin, the novel “transforms the sorrows of history into the luminous truth of art.” She draws the oft-repeated comparison of Morrison to Faulkner, but argues that Morrison’s style is “simpler, purer, more finely disciplined,” even if the novel’s opening is, as she argues, “deliberately uninviting—an obstacle thrown in our path that puzzles and repels.” From this intentional rough patch, the novel gradually unwinds—or, as Rubin puts it, a “cluster of words and images becomes a group of stories” while the novel itself “builds in sheer suspenseful intensity” and “generates ever-widening circles of moral significance.” For Rubin, the “dominant theme of the novel” is understanding slavery as “theft of kinship, of freedom, of the ability to love, of ‘the milk of human kindness,’ and of humanity itself,” represented in particular by Sethe being held down by the cruel slave master schoolteacher’s nephews who steal her milk: “this is the milk Sethe was bringing to her baby daughter in Ohio,” Rubin writes, the “love she has for her daughter, her kinship with her daughter.”