1

CHAPTER I

Introduction

 The contemporary American state is an exceeding example of modernism and the

ideal Western state in terms of lifestyle, fashion, art, music and a lot more. So much that most

non-Western countries often attempt to model the “American way” in order to feel more

validated and more in-tune with what is assumed to be “in vogue.” For the longest time, the

United States of America has had a strong influence on major political and economic

activities that have occurred across the globe. How did the United States of America obtain

such supremacy and why does it have such a strong influence on the rest of the world? Is it

really as holistic as it appears to be or is it merely putting up a façade? What drives the

country to behave this way? Several questions come to mind when one attempts to

understand the American state and on rubbing off the grease, one is exposed to the inner

layer. A layer that is rusted by racial discrimination, gender discrimination, religious

stereotyping, inequality of opportunity, unequal pay, and the list goes on.

While every country has its flaws, the United States of America has a pattern due to

which these very flaws have come into being. In order to understand its origin, it becomes

vital to delve into the history of the country and how, over time, people from various

backgrounds have adopted a plethora of mediums to express the atrocities that they have

faced. When one attempts to delve into the study of African Americans, the most common

discussion that one tends to arouse is that of Slavery and Human Rights. But African

American history is so much more than Slavery. In fact, slavery, housing segregation,

blockbusting, racial steering, redlining, are all a consequence of racism. The problem lies

when one fails to identify the root and merely cuts the branches off; a temporary relief but a

permanent hassle.
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 It seems as though at the time of its inception, democracy in the United States of

America seemed to pose itself as the most viable and effective governmental structure; one

that could not only accommodate diverse ideologies, cultures and beliefs, but also cater to

this extreme diversity. However, the progression of time has witnessed a slow regression of

thought and till this day, a black man in the States has to think twice before stepping into a

white neighbourhood and watch his behaviour which is under the constant scrutiny of a white

man. A democratic government claims to embrace the ideals of liberty, justice and equality.

These instances make one ponder, is a democratic government really the way to go? Or is it a

utopia that fails to fit itself into the harsh reality of the world? Is a democracy, in fact, the

“best” kind of government?

 “The black experience is Black and serious,

Cause being black, my experience is, never being heard.”

  Written in 2011, Childish Gambino’s Hold You Down, is a song that talks about the

insecurity, doubt and ridicule that a young black boy goes through, and how he is forced to

succumb to silence. One cannot help but ask, how is it possible that even in today’s day and

age- an era that glorifies the institution of democracy and the right to expression- that a black

man still feels unheard, uncared for, and unattended to? In a situation where every movement,

action and demand is scrutinised to the most miniscule level, there is often a sense of lack of

belongingness, insecurity of life and of status and the most tantalising, a diaspora; a failure to

be able to call “home” one’s actual home. Like Childish Gambino, a lot of other musicians,

poets, authors and artists have evinced their anxieties that are caused because of the colour of

their skin.
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It becomes vital then to analyse how the audience of such works receives these pieces

and the impact that they have on their audiences. One might mistake the work of African

Americans to be a call for help, sympathy or even pity, but it is so much more than any of

those things. These very talented and gifted artists hone their work so as to kindle empathy

amongst their audiences to create a better world; one where people can feel comfortable in

their own skin and happy with who they are. This analysis will be attempted by examining

the emotional implications of Toni Morrison’s iconic novel, Beloved. Prior to that, it is

important to trace African American history from its roots in terms of its timeline and the

literature that each period has generated.

AFRICAN AMERICAN HISTORY

  The first black people who came to North America were not slaves, but explorers.

Among the most famous were Estevanico, who opened what we know today as New Mexico

and Arizona for Spanish settlement, and Jean Baptiste Point du Sable who founded a trading

post on the southern shore of Lake Michigan from which the city of Chicago came into being.

The first African Americans in British North America were brought to work as labourers,

arriving in Jamestown, Virginia in 1619 aboard a Dutch slave ship. Little did they know that

merely seventeen men and three women would change everything for their race. Initially,

these Africans were not considered as slaves but as indentured servants who could become

free if they worked satisfactorily for their masters for a stipulated time period. But by 1700,

the growing plantation economy of Virginia called for a workforce that was cheaper than free

labour and more easily controlled. By establishing the institution of chattel slavery, a black

person became not only a temporary servant but a permanent commodity or personal property

of the owner who could be used for economic gains. Under this system, the Africans

imported to North America were brainwashed as much as possible for his or her culture. The
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newly minted slave was relegated to a condition that the historian Orlando Patterson calls

“social death.” The system of chattel slavery was developed specifically to prevent Africans

and their descendants from building a new identity except with accordance to the dictates of

their oppressors. Instead of an individual being, slavery desired a being that by legal

definition had no family, no personal honour, no community, no past, and no future. The very

motive of slavery was to create a sense of alienation from all human ties except those that

bound the slave in absolute dependence to the master’s will. Self-reliance, a celebrated tenet

of the American definition of “rugged individualism” was forbidden to the slave since this

notion would not possess those who did not possess themselves.

One might wonder, why the Negroes? Why not British or Indian slaves? Indian

servitude and slavery were abject failures and the attempts proved futile. The white servants

were found to be unsatisfactory because their supply could not match the amount of work that

was to be done, and indentured servants had to be replaced every few years as their period of

service expired. The solution to these very vexing hurdles was the perpetual servitude of the

Negroes.

  In such trying times, Virginia realised that their servitude would be fool-proof as they

could not claim the immunities accorded to Christians because of their colour, and larger

possibilities lay in the exploitation of black labour. All that was needed was the legislative

sanctions to give validity to the practice which was already blooming. The initial laws and

those of succeeding years were designed to secure in the whites the title of Negroes so that

they could be held in perpetual servitude. It appeared to be the only solution to the problem of

labour, and these colonists were not inclined to shift from the enslavement of a people if such

a procedure was to have a salutary effect on the economic life of the colony.
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In the last quarter of the seventeenth century, slave importations into Virginia

increased so sharply that some inhabitants began to doubt the advisability of the country with

ungovernable and irascible Negroes who had recently moved from a “barbaric” land. At the

close of the century they were being brought in at a rate of more than thousand per year, and

this very size of the importations emphasized to the Virginians the dangers of a large Negro

population. Consequently, the number of Negros surpassed the number of white inhabitants

which aroused a sense of danger and insecurity amongst the latter. There were rumours, real

and fancied, of conspiracies of rebellion. These rumours had much to do with the enactment

of laws placing heavy duties on the importation of slaves. Virginians had real reason to fear

the Negro population, for as early as 1663, the slaves gave evidence of being restive under

yoke and began conspiring to rebel against their masters. In 1687, a plot uncovered in the

Northern Neck in which the slaves, during a funeral had planned to kill all the whites in the

vicinity in a desperate bid for freedom. In 1684, lawlessness among the slaves had become so

widespread that Governor Andros complained that there was insufficient enforcement of the

code.

By the end of the seventeenth century, the slave code of Virginia was well

established. No slave was allowed to leave the plantation presumably on an errand for his

master without the written permission of his master. Disobeying the prescribed rules would

result in brutal repercussions which included being whipped, maimed, branded, lashed or

even hung to death. For example, for robbing a house or a store, a slave was given sixty

lashes by the sheriff, placed in the pillory with his ears nailed to the posts for half an hour,

and then his ears were severed from his head. Before the end of the colonial period Virginia,

like her neighbours, had become an armed camp in which the masters figuratively kept their

guns cocked and trained on the slaves in order to keep them docile and tractable and in which
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the assembly, the courts, and the custodians of the law worked for the maintenance of peace

and order among the black workers.

Similar was the situation of Maryland where there was a healthy influx of African

slaves and a very strong implementation of slavery laws which were rebuked through violent

means by slaves subjected to that merciless treatment. The settlers of Maryland were under

no delusions regarding their function in the economic life in the New World, and if Negro

slaves would enhance their opportunities, neither the Catholic fanatics nor the contentious

Protestants would hesitate to use them.

During the Restoration period several acts were passed to encourage the importation

of slaves into Maryland. One of these was the Act of 1671 which contended that conversion

of slaves into Christianity did not affect their status. There was also a duty imposed on the

importation of slaves but it appears as though this duty was levied so as to obtain economic

advantages as opposed to discouraging human trafficking.

  Negro slaves were brought by the West India Company so as to cater to the huge

plantations that it owned in New Netherlands. Previously operated by the Dutch and called

New Netherlands, was captured by the English and renamed New York in 1664. It then

became certain that slavery would only expand. The Negro population in New York grew at a

very rapid pace and it was much later that the potential threat that this inflation could pose

was realised. There was suddenly a widespread insecurity amongst whites which called for

stringent measures and strict laws, barring the blacks from doing anything that made the

white man uncomfortable or could hamper his security. In the 1741, the hysteria resulting

from the fear of slave uprising plunged the city of New York into an orgy of Negro

persecutions that occurred anywhere during the colonial period.

 A common observation that can be made is that slavery began in the Southern

colonies primarily for economic growth and enhancement of trade. It was a result of the

colonists to test other labour systems before resorting to Negro slavery. The tobacco in

Virginia, North Carolina, and Maryland, and the rice and indigo of South Carolina and

Georgia made these places the hub of slave trade.

While the earliest justification offered by Europeans for the recognition of Negro

slavery was the salvation of souls, this seems to have been of secondary importance to the

colonialists in the New World. There were no strong evangelical churches at the outset, and

the furtherance of Christianity was viewed by the majority with sheer indifference. The early

view that Christianisation opened the way to “freedom” served to diminish what zeal there

may have been and officers of the church and state had difficulty in persuading planters that

Christianity had no manumitting powers. Gradually the doctrine that freedom was inherent in

Christianity began to wane and was supplanted by a point of view that was in itself a

rationalisation of the institution. This ‘rationalisation” was that slavery was good as it brought

heathens into contact with Christianity and led to salvation of their souls. The heathenism of

Africans, thus became one of the most important justifications to slavery. Further, there was a

racial basis. If it was justifiable to enslave heathens because they had not been exposed to

Christianity, the attention had to be centred on Negros, since other imported servants came

from Christian lands. There began to evolve an idea that it was the Negro who was the

barbarian and the race needed to be “humanised” in order to reconnect with civility. For

them, “by nature, temperament, pigmentation and civilisation- here, an assumption of a lack

of it- the Negro’s natural lot was slavery.”

  By the middle of the eighteenth century, slavery became an integral part of a maturing

American economic system. There had been protests against the slave trade, some colonies
8

had imposed almost prohibitive import duties, and some religious groups, like the Quakers,

had questioned the right of one man to hold another in bondage. There had not been no direct

attack upon the institution and in the northern colonies too, where there was no extensive us

of slaves, the majority of the articulate colonists paid little attention to slavery. It seemed to

them that colonial problems required their attention more than anything else. It was in the

1760s and the 1770s that the Negros’ struggle for freedom was growing. While James Otis’

was laying down his protest in his work, Rights of the British Colonies the Negros themselves

were petitioning the General court of Massachusetts for their freedom. The Boston Massacre

of 1770 witnessed the fall of the first American, albeit of African descent, a runaway slave,

Crispus Attuck who was instrumental in bringing together “a motley rabble of saucy boys' '

against British soldiers in Boston. The significance of Attuck’s death seems to lie in the

dramatic connection which it pointed out between the struggle against England and the status

of Negros in America. Thomas Jefferson wrote “A Summary View of the Rights of British

America” in which he blamed British colonialists for preventing the blockage of slavery. In

their thinking the colonists had thus moved from the position of acceptance of the institution

of slavery to the position that it was inconsistent with their fight with England and finally do

the view that England was responsible for the continuation of slavery. This view was soon

translated into action in 1774 when the Continental Congress passed an agreement not to

import any slaves after December, 1775.  These retaliatory measures, however, were

temporary in nature. The protest against slavery proved to be ineffective because there was a

disagreement from Southern colonists who stated that slave trade was not a consequence of

only British orders. During the War for Independence, the sentiment against the unrestricted

importation of slaves became so strong that the prohibitive duties were laid on such

importations and remained in force till the foreign slave trade was outlawed. Though

organised rebellion was unpopular, there was considerable opposition on the part of the
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individuals. There were several instances where Negro women killed their masters by

poisoning them. In other cases, workshops, houses and offices of white people were

ransacked and burned. The concept of slavery was played around with for the benefit of the

Americans solely to attain freedom from the British. The movement for the freedom of

America prevailed regardless of the demands of the Negros. The only point of contention was

whether or not the Negros would fight in the American War of Independence. Though there

were mixed feelings on the subject, several African Americans did end up fighting alongside

White men to free America from the bonds of Englishmen, and finally attained this freedom

on 4 July, 1776.

Manumission and anti-slavery societies became more widespread after the war. The

Quakers were amongst the first to propose manumission and were joined by many anti-

slavery believers. For instance, in 1785, the New York Society for Promoting the

Manumission of Slaves was organised. Similar institutions were organised in Delaware,

Virginia and Massachusetts. This however, was once again faced by strong opposition from

abolitionists who were in fact concerned about the capital they had invested on slaves.

Consequently, slave trade once again flourished so as to serve capitalist demands and

gradually, the population of slaves increased. The rise in their population called for faster

trade, with domestic trade being introduced as a necessary activity. Slaves were hired by the

day, the month, or by the year.

Nat Turner’s Revolt

Born into slavery on October 2, 1800, in Southampton County, Virginia, Turner was recorded

as "Nat" by Benjamin Turner, the man who held his mother and him as slaves. When

Benjamin Turner died in 1810, Nat was inherited as property by Benjamin's son Samuel

Turner. For most of his life, he was known as "Nat", but after the 1831 rebellion, he was
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widely referred to as "Nat Turner". Turner knew little about the background of his father,

who was believed to have escaped from slavery when Turner was a young boy. Turner spent

his entire life in Southampton County, a plantation area where slaves comprised the majority

of the population. He was identified as having "natural intelligence and quickness of

apprehension, surpassed by few." He learned to read and write at a young age. Deeply

religious, Nat was often seen fasting, praying, or immersed in reading the stories of the Bible.

Turner's religious convictions manifested as frequent visions, which he interpreted as

messages from God. His belief in the visions was such that when Turner was 22 years old, he

ran away from his owner; he returned a month later after claiming to have received a spiritual

revelation. Turner often conducted services, preaching the Bible to his fellow slaves, who

dubbed him "The Prophet". Turner garnered white followers such as Etheldred T. Brantley,

whom Turner was credited with having convinced to "cease from his wickedness".

In early 1828, Turner was convinced that he "was ordained for some great purpose in

the hands of the Almighty." While working in his owner's fields on May 12, Turner said later

that he heard a loud noise in the heavens, and the Spirit instantly appeared to me and said the

Serpent was loosened, and Christ had laid down the yoke he had borne for the sins of men,

and that I should take it on and fight against the Serpent, for the time was fast approaching

when the first should be last and the last should be first.

Beginning in February 1831, Turner claimed certain atmospheric conditions as a sign

to begin preparations for a rebellion against slaveowners. On February 12, 1831, an annular

solar eclipse was visible in Virginia. Turner envisioned this as a black man's hand reaching

over the sun. He initially planned the rebellion to begin on July 4, Independence Day. Turner

postponed it because of illness and to use the delay for additional planning with his co-

conspirators. On August 7 there was another solar eclipse, in which the sun appeared bluish-
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green, possibly the result of lingering atmospheric debris from an eruption of Mount St.

Helens in present-day Washington state. Turner interpreted this as the final signal, and about

a 2 weeks later, on August 21, he began the uprising.

On the night of August 21, he and a small band of followers killed his owners, the

Travis family, and set off toward the town of Jerusalem, where they planned to capture an

armoury and gather more recruits. The group, which eventually numbered around 75 blacks,

killed some 60 whites in two days before armed resistance from local whites and the arrival

of state militia forces overwhelmed them just outside Jerusalem. Some 100 enslaved people,

including innocent bystanders, lost their lives in the struggle. Turner escaped and spent six

weeks on the run before he was captured, tried and hanged.

Oft–exaggerated reports of the insurrection—some said that hundreds of whites had

been killed—sparked a wave of anxiety across the South. Several states called special

emergency sessions of the legislature, and most strengthened their codes in order to limit the

education, movement and assembly of enslaved people. While supporters of slavery pointed

to the Turner rebellion as evidence that blacks were inherently inferior barbarians requiring

an institution such as slavery to discipline them, the increased repression of southern blacks

would strengthen anti–slavery feeling in the North through the 1860s and intensify the

regional tensions building toward civil war.

Abolitionism and the Underground Railroad , 1831

The early abolition movement in North America was fuelled both by slaves’ efforts to

liberate themselves and by groups of white settlers, such as the Quakers, who opposed

slavery on religious or moral grounds. Though the lofty ideals of the Revolutionary era

invigorated the movement, by the late 1780s it was in decline, as the growing southern cotton

industry made slavery an ever more vital part of the national economy. In the early 19th
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century, however, a new brand of radical abolitionism emerged in the North, partly in

reaction to Congress’ passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793 and the tightening of codes

in most southern states. One of its most eloquent voices was William Lloyd Garrison, a

crusading journalist from Massachusetts, who founded the abolitionist newspaper The

Liberator in 1831 and became known as the most radical of America’s antislavery

activists. Antislavery northerners—many of them free blacks—had begun helping enslaved

people escape from southern plantations to the North via a loose network of safe houses as

early as the 1780s called the Underground Railroad. 

An important figure here is Harriet Tubman who was an American abolitionist and

political activist. Born into slavery, Tubman escaped and subsequently made some 13

missions to rescue approximately 70 enslaved people, including family and friends, using
[2]

the network of antislavery activists and safe houses known as the Underground Railroad.

During the American Civil War, she served as an armed scout and spy for the Union Army.

In her later years, Tubman was an activist in the struggle for women's suffrage. Born a slave

in Dorchester County, Maryland, Tubman was beaten and whipped by her various masters as

a child. Early in life, she suffered a traumatic head wound when an irate slave owner threw a

heavy metal weight intending to hit another slave, but hitting her instead. The injury caused

dizziness, pain, and spells of hypersomnia, which occurred throughout her life. After her

injury, Tubman began experiencing strange visions and vivid dreams, which she ascribed to

premonitions from God. These experiences, combined with her Methodist upbringing, led her

to become devoutly religious.

In 1849, Tubman escaped to Philadelphia, then immediately returned to Maryland to

rescue her family. Slowly, one group at a time, she brought relatives with her out of the state,

and eventually guided dozens of other slaves to freedom. Traveling by night and in extreme
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secrecy, Tubman (or "Moses", as she was called) "never lost a passenger". After the Fugitive
[3]

Slave Act of 1850 was passed, she helped guide fugitives farther north into British North

America (Canada), and helped newly freed slaves find work. Tubman met John Brown in

1858, and helped him plan and recruit supporters for his 1859 raid on Harpers Ferry.

Civil War and Emancipation, 1861

In the spring of 1861, the bitter sectional conflicts that had been intensifying between

North and South over the course of four decades erupted into civil war, with 11 southern

states seceding from the Union and forming the Confederate States of America. Though

President Abraham Lincoln’s antislavery views were well established, and his election as the

nation’s first Republican president had been the catalyst that pushed the first southern states

to secede in late 1860, the Civil War at its outset was not a war to abolish slavery. Lincoln

sought first and foremost to preserve the Union, and he knew that few people even in the

North—let alone the border slave states still loyal to Washington—would have supported a

war against slavery in 1861. By the summer of 1862, however, Lincoln had come to believe

he could not avoid the slavery question much longer. Five days after the bloody Union

victory at Antietam in September, he issued a preliminary emancipation proclamation; on

January 1, 1863, he made it official that enslaved people within any State, or designated part

of a State in rebellion, “shall be then, thenceforward, and forever free.” Lincoln justified his
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decision as a wartime measure, and as such he did not go so far as to free enslaved people in

the border states loyal to the Union, an omission that angered many abolitionists.

By freeing some 3 million enslaved people in the rebel states, the Emancipation

Proclamation deprived the Confederacy of the bulk of its labour forces and put international

public opinion strongly on the Union side. Some 186,000 black soldiers would join the Union

Army by the time the war ended in 1865, and 38,000 lost their lives. The total number of

dead at war’s end was 620,000 (out of a population of some 35 million), making it the

costliest conflict in American history.

The Post–Slavery South, 1865

Though the Union victory in the Civil War gave some 4 million enslaved people their

freedom, significant challenges awaited during the Reconstruction period. The 13th

Amendment, adopted late in 1865, officially abolished slavery, but the question of freed

blacks’ status in the post–war South remained. As white southerners gradually re-established

civil authority in the former Confederate states in 1865 and 1866, they enacted a series of

laws known as the black codes, which were designed to restrict freed blacks’ activity and

ensure their availability as a labour force. 

Impatient with the leniency shown toward the former Confederate states by Andrew

Johnson, who became president after Lincoln’s assassination in April 1865, so–called Radical

Republicans in Congress overrode Johnson’s veto and passed the Reconstruction Act of

1867, which basically placed the South under martial law. The following year, the 14th

Amendment broadened the definition of citizenship, granting —equal protection” of the

Constitution to people who had been enslaved. Congress required southern states to ratify the

14th Amendment and enact universal male suffrage before they could re-join the Union, and

the state constitutions during those years were the most progressive in the region’s history.

The 15th Amendment, adopted in 1870, guaranteed that a citizen’s right to vote would

not be denied —on account of race, colour, or previous condition of servitude.” During

Reconstruction, blacks won election to southern state governments and even to the U.S.

Congress. Their growing influence greatly dismayed many white southerners, who felt

control slipping ever further away from them. The white protective societies that arose during

this period—the largest of which was the Ku Klux Klan (KKK)—sought to disenfranchise

blacks by using voter fraud and intimidation as well as more extreme violence. By 1877,

when the last federal soldiers left the South and Reconstruction drew to a close, blacks had

seen dishearteningly little improvement in their economic and social status, and what political

gains they had made had been wiped away by the vigorous efforts of white supremacist

forces throughout the region.

 NAACP Founded, 1909

In June 1905, a group led by the prominent black educator W.E.B. Du Bois met at

Niagara Falls, Canada, sparking a new political protest movement to demand civil rights for

blacks in the old spirit of abolitionism. As America’s exploding urban population faced

shortages of employment and housing, violent hostility towards blacks had increased around

the country; lynching, though illegal, was a widespread practice. A wave of race riots—

particularly one in Springfield, Illinois in 1908—lent a sense of urgency to the Niagara

Movement and its supporters, who in 1909 joined their agenda with that of a new permanent

civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People

(NAACP). Among the NAACP’s stated goals were the abolition of all forced segregation, the
16

enforcement of the 14th and 15th Amendments, equal education for blacks and whites and

complete enfranchisement of all black men (though proponents of female suffrage were part

of the original NAACP, the issue was not mentioned).

First established in Chicago, the NAACP had expanded to more than 400 locations by

1921. One of its earliest programs was a crusade against lynching and other lawless acts;

those efforts—including a nationwide protest of D.W. Griffiths’ silent film Birth of a Nation

(1915), which glorified white supremacy and the Ku Klux Klan—would continue into the

1920s, playing a crucial role in drastically reducing the number of lynchings carried out in the

United States. Du Bois edited the NAACP’s official magazine, The Crisis, from 1910 to

1934, publishing many of the leading voices in African American literature and politics and

helping fuel the spread of the Harlem Renaissance in the 1920s.

Harlem Renaissance, 1920

In the 1920s, the great migration of blacks from the rural South to the urban North

sparked an African American cultural renaissance that took its name from the New York City

neighbourhood of Harlem but became a widespread movement in cities throughout the North

and West. Also known as the Black Renaissance or the New Negro Movement, the Harlem

Renaissance marked the first time that mainstream publishers and critics turned their attention

seriously to African American literature, music, art and politics. Blues singer Bessie Smith,

pianist Jelly Roll Morton, bandleader Louis Armstrong, composer Duke Ellington, dancer

Josephine Baker and actor Paul Robeson were among the leading entertainment talents of the

Harlem Renaissance, while Paul Laurence Dunbar, James Weldon Johnson, Claude McKay,

Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston were some of its most eloquent writers.

There was a flip side to this greater exposure, however: Emerging black writers relied

heavily on white–owned publications and publishing houses, while in Harlem’s most famous
17

cabaret, the Cotton Club, the preeminent black entertainers of the day played to exclusively

white audiences. In 1926, a controversial bestseller about Harlem life by the white novelist

Carl von Vechten exemplified the attitude of many white urban sophisticates, who looked to

black culture as a window into a more “primitive” and “vital” way of life. W.E.B. Du Bois,

for one, railed against Van Vechten’s novel and criticized works by black writers, such as

McKay’s novel Home to Harlem, that he saw as reinforcing negative stereotypes of blacks.

With the onset of the Great Depression, as organizations like the NAACP and the National

Urban League switched their focus to the economic and political problems facing blacks, the

Harlem Renaissance drew to a close. Its influence had stretched around the world, opening

the doors of mainstream culture to black artists and writers.

Jackie Robinson, 1947

By 1900, the unwritten colour line barring blacks from white teams in professional baseball

was strictly enforced. Jackie Robinson, a sharecropper’s son from Georgia, joined the Kansas

City Monarchs of the Negro American League in 1945 after a stint in the U.S. Army (he

earned an honourable discharge after facing a court–martial for refusing to move to the back

of a segregated bus). His play caught the attention of Branch Rickey, general manager of the

Brooklyn Dodgers, who had been considering bringing an end to segregation in baseball.

Rickey signed Robinson to a Dodgers farm team that same year and two years later moved

him up, making Robinson the first African American player to play on a major league team.

Robinson played his first game with the Dodgers on April 15, 1947; he led the

National League in stolen bases that season, earning Rookie of the Year honors. Over the

next nine years, Robinson compiled a .311 batting average and led the Dodgers to six league

championships and one World Series victory. Despite his success on the field, however, he

encountered hostility from both fans and other players. Members of the St. Louis Cardinals
18

even threatened to strike if Robinson played; baseball commissioner Ford Frick settled the

question by threatening to suspend any player who went on strike.

After Robinson’s historic breakthrough, baseball was steadily integrated, with

professional basketball and tennis following suit in 1950. His ground-breaking achievement

transcended sports, however: As soon as he signed the contract with Rickey, Robinson

became one of the most visible African Americans in the country, and a figure that blacks

could look to as a source of pride, inspiration and hope. As his success and fame grew,

Robinson began speaking out publicly for black equality. In 1949, he testified before the

House Un–American Activities Committee to discuss the appeal of Communism to black

Americans, surprising them with a ferocious condemnation of the racial discrimination

embodied by the Jim Crow segregation laws of the South: “The white public should start

toward real understanding by appreciating that every single Negro who is worth his salt is

going to resent any kind of slurs and discrimination because of his race, and he’s going to use

every bit of intelligence…to stop it…”

Rosa Parks and the Montgomery Bus Boycott, December 1955

On December 1, 1955, an African American woman named Rosa Parks was riding a

city bus in Montgomery, Alabama when the driver told her to give up her seat to a white man.

Parks refused and was arrested for violating the city’s racial segregation ordinances, which

mandated that blacks sit in the back of public buses and give up their seats for white riders if

the front seats were full. Parks, a 42–year–old seamstress, was also the secretary of the

Montgomery chapter of the NAACP. As she later explained: “I had been pushed as far as I

could stand to be pushed. I had decided that I would have to know once and for all what

rights I had as a human being and a citizen.” 

Four days after Parks’ arrest, an activist organization called the Montgomery

Improvement Association—led by a young pastor named Martin Luther King, Jr.—

spearheaded a boycott of the city’s municipal bus company. Because African Americans

made up some 70 percent of the bus company’s riders at the time, and the great majority of

Montgomery’s black citizens supported the bus boycott, its impact was immediate. About 90

participants in the Montgomery Bus Boycott, including King, were indicted under a law

forbidding conspiracy to obstruct the operation of a business. Found guilty, King immediately

appealed the decision. Meanwhile, the boycott stretched on for more than a year, and the bus

company struggled to avoid bankruptcy. On November 13, 1956, in Browder v. Gayle, the

U.S. Supreme Court upheld a lower court’s decision declaring the bus company’s segregation

seating policy unconstitutional under the equal protection clause of the 14th Amendment.

King, called off the boycott on December 20, and Rosa Parks—known as the “mother of the

civil rights movement”—would be one of the first to ride the newly desegregated buses.

Civil Rights Act of 1964, July 1964

Thanks to the campaign of nonviolent resistance championed by Martin Luther King

Jr. beginning in the late 1950s, the civil rights movement had begun to gain serious

momentum in the United States by 1960. That year, John F. Kennedy made passage of new

civil rights legislation part of his presidential campaign platform; he won more than 70

percent of the African American vote. Congress was debating Kennedy’s civil rights reform

bill when he was killed by an assassin’s bullet in Dallas, Texas in November 1963. It was left

to Lyndon Johnson (not previously known for his support of civil rights) to push the Civil

Rights Act—the most far-reaching act of legislation supporting racial equality in American

history—through Congress in June 1964.

At its most basic level, the act gave the federal government more power to protect

citizens against discrimination on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin. It

mandated the desegregation of most public accommodations, including lunch counters, bus

depots, parks and swimming pools, and established the Equal Employment Opportunity

Commission (EEOC) to ensure equal treatment of minorities in the workplace. The act also

guaranteed equal voting rights by removing biased registration requirements and procedures,

and authorized the U.S. Office of Education to provide aid to assist with school

desegregation. In a televised ceremony on July 2, 1964, Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act

into law using 75 pens; he presented one of them to King, who counted it among his most

prized possessions.

Malcolm X Shot to Death, February 1965

In 1952, the former Malcolm Little was released from prison after serving six years

on a robbery charge; while incarcerated, he had joined the Nation of Islam (NOI, commonly

known as the Black Muslims), given up drinking and drugs and replaced his surname with an

X to signify his rejection of his “slave” name. Charismatic and eloquent, Malcolm soon

became an influential leader of the NOI, which combined Islam with black nationalism and

sought to encourage disadvantaged young blacks searching for confidence in segregated

America.

As the outspoken public voice of the Black Muslim faith, Malcolm challenged the

mainstream civil rights movement and the nonviolent pursuit of integration championed by

Martin Luther King Jr. Instead, he urged followers to defend themselves against white

aggression “by any means necessary.” Mounting tensions between Malcolm and NOI founder

Elijah Muhammad led Malcolm to form his own mosque in 1964. He made a pilgrimage to
21

Mecca that same year and underwent a second conversion, this time to Sunni Islam. Calling

himself el–Hajj Malik el–Shabazz, he renounced NOI’s philosophy of separatism and

advocated a more inclusive approach to the struggle for black rights. On February 21, 1965,

during a speaking engagement in Harlem, three members of the NOI rushed the stage and

shot Malcolm some 15 times at close range. After Malcolm’s death, his bestselling book, The

Autobiography of Malcolm X popularized his ideas, particularly among black youth, and laid

the foundation for the Black Power movement of the late 1960s and 1970s. 

Rise of Black Power

After the heady rush of the civil rights movement’s first years, anger and frustration

was increasing among many African Americans, who saw clearly that true equality—social,

economic and political—still eluded them. In the late 1960s and early ’70s, this frustration

fuelled the rise of the Black Power movement. According to then–SNCC chairman Stokely

Carmichael, who first popularized the term “black power” in 1966, the traditional civil rights

movement and its emphasis on nonviolence, did not go far enough, and the federal legislation

it had achieved failed to address the economic and social disadvantages facing blacks in

America.

Black Power was a form of both self–definition and self–defence for African

Americans; it called on them to stop looking to the institutions of white America—which

were believed to be inherently racist—and act for themselves, by themselves, to seize the
22

gains they desired, including better jobs, housing and education. Also in 1966, Huey P.

Newton and Bobby Seale, college students in Oakland, California, founded the Black Panther

Party. While its original mission was to protect blacks from white brutality by sending patrol

groups into black neighbourhoods, the Panthers soon developed into a Marxist group that

promoted Black Power by urging African Americans to arm themselves and demand full

employment, decent housing and control over their own communities. Clashes ensued

between the Panthers and police in California, New York and Chicago, and in 1967 Newton

was convicted of voluntary manslaughter after killing a police officer. His trial brought

national attention to the organization, which at its peak in the late 1960s boasted some 2,000

members.

Martin Luther King Assassinated, April 4, 1968

On April 4, 1968, the world was stunned and saddened by the news that the civil

rights activist and Nobel Peace Prize winner Martin Luther King Jr. had been shot and killed

on the balcony of a motel in Memphis, Tennessee, where he had gone to support a sanitation

workers’ strike. King’s death opened a huge rift between white and black Americans, as

many blacks saw the killing as a rejection of their vigorous pursuit of equality through the

nonviolent resistance he had championed. In more than 100 cities, several days of riots,

burning and looting followed his death.

The accused killer, a white man named James Earl Ray, was captured and tried

immediately; he entered a guilty plea and was sentenced to 99 years in prison; no testimony

was heard. Ray later recanted his confession, and despite several inquiries into the matter by
23

the U.S. government, many continued to believe that the speedy trial had been a cover–up for

a larger conspiracy. King’s assassination, along with the killing of Malcolm X three years

earlier, radicalized many moderate African American activists, fuelling the growth of the

Black Power movement and the Black Panther Party.

The success of conservative politicians that year—including Richard Nixon’s election

as president and the third–party candidacy of the ardent segregationist George Wallace, who

won 13 percent of the vote—further discouraged African Americans, many of whom felt that

the tide was turning against the civil rights movement.

 AFRICAN AMERICAN LITERATURE

Just as African American history is extremely varied, their writings too are centred

around limited areas including the role of African Americans within the larger American

society and what it means to be an American. Professor Albert J. Raboteau states, “all

African American studies including African American literature speaks to the deeper

meaning of the African American presence in this nation. This presence has been a test case

of the nation’s claims to freedom, democracy, equality and the inclusivity of all.”

In its rawest form, African American literature seeks to explore the very issues of

freedom and equality which were long denied to Negros who were abducted from their native

land and forced into slavery and suffering by their American lords. The initial literary
24

expressions focused on the political and religious prejudices that were faced by the Blacks.

African American  literature also constitutes a vital branch of African diaspora which not

only has been influenced by the great African diasporic heritage but also goes on to influence

African diasporic writings in many countries. Not only written but also African oral culture is

rich in poetry including, including spirituals, African American gospel music, blues and rap.

As a matter of fact, this oral poetry also appears in the African American tradition of Church

sermons, which make use of deliberate repetition, alliteration and cadence.

Therefore, to African American literature, its endearing impulse is the resistance to human

tyranny and its sustaining spirit is its dedication to human dignity and well-being.

 Although the founders of the United States pride themselves on embracing the ideals

of equality and liberty, the racial chauvinism of most white Americans brought about a

difference in their religious and political responsibilities to the blacks. There were a variety of

conditions and hypocrisies posed by the Whites. They were content with the Negros claims to

an equal right to God’s grace so long as their salvation was independent of their desire for

independence or redemption of the white supremacy. The political avenues, the Whites had

an extremely optimistic view of their abilities and presumed themselves to be the arbiters of

privileges, rights and opportunities.

Recognising these very contradictions, the Blacks sought to initiate a communication

with the Whites and the very first medium that they employed was the traditional Christian

gospel of the universal brotherhood of humanity. All they wanted was to be heard and treated

with the most basic level of dignity; as people and not commodities. One such exemplary

work was composed by Phyllis Wheatley (1752-84). She published her book “Poems on

Various Subjects” in 1773, just three years before American Independence. Born in Senegal,
25

Africa, Wheatley was captured and sold into slavery at the age of seven. Upon being brought

to America, she was owned by a Boston merchant. She writes:

 “Some view our sable race with scornful eye,

‘Their colour is a diabolic die.’

Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,

May be refin'd, and join th' angelic train.”

 – On Being Brought from Africa to America, Phillis Wheatly.

 Through these lines, Wheatly insists that Black folk have an equal claim to spiritual

ascension despite their skin, and having established that, urges the White folk to consider the

black man’s right to social and political participation.

Wheatly and her contemporaries, Lucy Terry and Jupiter Hammon, seem to have been

motivated to obtain a populous Christian readership. The oldest piece of African American

literature known was called “Bars Fight” (1746) composed by Lucy Terry. This poem was

not published until 1855 in Josiah Holland’s “History of Western Massachusetts.” Others too

like David Walker, Maria Stewart, Frederick Douglass and Olaudah Equiano implored the

backsliding congregation to live up to the standard of their very reputed religion and its

prescribed code of conduct. Equiano in his Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah

Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa constantly refers to the Whites as “O, ye nominal Christians!” in

order to make them realise their lack of responsibility towards this very duty. While these

contemporaries focused on specific areas where they wanted to bring about change, their

influence branched into social and literary trends at the time as well. For example,

Wheatley’s poetic ability was a testament to the black man’s mastery over the English
26

language which challenged the hardened European prejudice “black people are incapable of

literary expression.”

Another important literary figure is William Wells Brown and Victor Sejour who

produced the earliest works of fiction by African American writers. Brown was an

abolitionist, historian, playwright and novelist. Born into slavery in the Southern United

States, Brown escaped to the North, where he worked for abolitionist causes and was a

prolific writer. He wrote the first African American novel, Clotel; or, The President’s

Daughter. The novel was based on the rumour that Thomas Jefferson was fathering a

daughter with his slave.

 Slave Narratives

Slave narratives, first-hand accounts of African Americans who experienced slavery,

are essential tools in the study of American history and literature and have played a central

role in national debates about slavery, freedom, and American identity. The recorded

experiences of African American slaves are also arguably one of North Carolina's greatest

contributions to American literature as a whole. Following emancipation, the autobiography

was the most popular literary tool of black writers; slave narratives outnumbered novels

written by African Americans until the Great Depression. Along with their fictional

descendants, the state's slave narratives continue to challenge readers to explore questions of

race, social justice, and the meaning of freedom.

Narratives of the antebellum period, usually written by fugitive slaves, focused

primarily on the experiences of African Americans held in bondage in the South. Many

antebellum narrators depicted slavery as a condition of extreme physical, intellectual,

emotional, and spiritual deprivation. Their accounts stirred dialogue between blacks and

whites about slavery and freedom, as former slaves wrote both to enlighten white readers
27

about the realities of institutional slavery and to convince them that the black people were

deserving of full human rights. Published slave narratives began to appear throughout the

English-speaking world in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries through the

efforts of abolitionists, and a significant number sold in the tens of thousands. 

Works like Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) represented the evils of slavery while “Anti-

Tom” literature by White Southern writers like William Gilmore Simms were composed to

support slavery. The most popular slave narrator is none other than Frederick Douglass. In his

first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), he expresses the

hopelessness he undergoes for not knowing his birthday as early evidence of a “restless

spirit” which was further provoked by the institution (here, slavery) that he was forced into.

He recalls having an extremely miserable life not limited to just beatings and whippings from

his master but also suffering from hunger and cold. Another important narrator is Harriet

Jacobs recounts in her book, Life of A Slave Girl  “I would rather drudge out my life on a

cotton plantation, till the grave opened to give me rest, than to live with an unprincipled

master and a jealous mistress” expressing her deplorable condition in her personal as well as

professional capacity where she was subjected to undue abuse and harassment.

Post-Slavery Era

After the end of slavery and the American Civil War, a number of African American

authors continued to write non-fiction works about the ramifications of slavery. Among the

most popular of these writers is W.E.B Du Bois (1868-1963), one of the original founders of

the NAACP. At the turn of the century, Du Bois published a highly influential collection of

essays titled The Souls of Black Folk. As the name suggests, the book discusses the grave

issues of race and Du Bois’ personal experiences. It contained his famous quote: “the
28

problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour-line.” Du Bois believed that

African Americans should, because of their common interests, work together to battle

prejudice and inequality.

Another prominent name is that of Booker T. Washington. He was an educator and

the founder of Tuskegee Institute, a college established for Blacks In Alabama. Popular for

his work, Up from Slavery (1901), Washington’s approach is different from Du Bois’ who is

rather confrontational in his approach while Washington attempts to ignite an urge in the

black man to work towards an upliftment of his own being and the Black society so as to

qualify for freedom and equal treatment. While this viewpoint was popular among some

blacks and quite a few whites, it was quite short-lived.

A third writer who gained significant attention during that period was Paul Laurence

Dunbar who wrote in the local black dialect of the day, was the first African American poet

to gain national prominence. His first book of poetry, Oak and Ivy, was published in 1893.

Much of Dunbar’s work such as Malindy Sings (1906) which includes photographs taken by

the Hampton Institute Camera Club providing a glimpse into the lives of rural African

Americans of the day. Though Dunbar died young, he was a prolific poet, essayist, novelist

and short story writer. Finally, the first ever African American writer of fiction, Charles W.

Chestnutt produced a collection of short stories and three novels from 1899-1905. Born in

Cleveland, Ohio, Chestnutt was a slave himself and went on to become the most influential

and respected African American writer, reaching a significant audience with his analysis and

indictments on racism.

 Harlem Renaissance

  The Great Migration began because of a "push" and a "pull." Disenfranchisement and

Jim Crow laws led many African Americans to hope for a new life up north. Hate groups and
29

hate crimes cast alarm among African American families of the Deep South. The promise of

owning land had not materialized. Most blacks toiled as sharecroppers trapped in an endless

cycle of debt. In the 1890s, a boll weevil blight damaged the cotton crop throughout the

region, increasing the despair. All these factors served to push African Americans to seek

better lives. The booming northern economy forged the pull. Industrial jobs were numerous,

and factory owners looked near and far for sources of cheap labour. Unfortunately,

northerners did not welcome African Americans with open arms. While the legal systems of

the northern states were not as obstructionist toward African American rights, the prejudice

among the populace was as acrimonious. White laborers complained that African Americans

were flooding the employment market and lowering wages. Most new migrants found

themselves segregated by practice in run down urban slums. The largest of these was Harlem.

Writers, actors, artists, and musicians glorified African American traditions, and at the same

time created new ones.

African Americans had endured centuries of slavery and the struggle for abolition.

The end of bondage had not brought the promised land many had envisioned. Instead, white

supremacy was quickly, legally, and violently restored to the New South, where ninety

percent of African Americans lived. Starting in about 1890, African Americans migrated to

the North in great numbers. This Great Migration eventually relocated hundreds of thousands

of African Americans from the rural South to the urban North. Many discovered they had

shared common experiences in their past histories and their uncertain present circumstances.

Instead of wallowing in self-pity, the recently dispossessed ignited an explosion of cultural

pride. Indeed, African American culture was reborn in the Harlem Renaissance.

The Harlem Renaissance is one of the most remarkable time periods in African

American history. Over a span of 20 years, 1920-1940, the Afro-American community

underwent significant transformations with a renewed sense of self-worth and expression.

Based off Harlem, a black neighbourhood in New York City, the movement enabled a larger

flowering of social thought and culture with numerous black artists, musicians, and another

producing classical works in the fields from jazz to theatre. The renaissance, however, is

perhaps best known for the literature that came out of it. Among the most famous writers of

the renaissance is Langston Hughes. Hughes first gained attention through the 1922 poetry

collection, The Book of American Negro Poetry. Edited by James Weldon Johnson, this book

featured a compilation of the period’s most talented poets (like Claude McKay). In 1926,

Hughes published a collection of poetry, The Weary Blues, and in 1930, a novel, Not Without

Laughter.

Perhaps Hughes’ most famous poem is The Negro Speaks of Rivers where we talks

about the dreams, aspirations and desires of a young boy. He also wrote short stories. In fact,

Simple Speaks His Mind (1950), is arguably the best-known collection of simple stories

produced in a book format.

Another exemplary writer of the renaissance is the novelist, Zora Neale Hurston

author of the classic Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937). Because Hurston was a woman

and the fact that in her time, her work was not considered to be of social or political

significance, her work fell into obscurity for decades until it was rediscovered in the 1970s by

Alice Walker. She mentions Hurston in one of her most popular essays in which Walker

found a role model for all female African American writers. While Hurston and Hughes are

the two most influential writers to come out of the Harlem Renaissance, a number of other

writers such as Jean Toomer, Countee Cullen and Dorothy West also made a very

extraordinary impact.
31

No aspect of the Harlem Renaissance shaped America and the entire world as much as

jazz. Jazz flouted many musical conventions with its syncopated rhythms and improvised

instrumental solos. Thousands of city dwellers flocked night after night to see the same

performers. Improvisation meant that no two performances would ever be the same. Harlem's

Cotton Club boasted the talents of Duke Ellington. Singers such as Bessie Smith and Billie

Holiday popularized blues and jazz vocals. Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong drew

huge audiences as white Americans as well as African Americans caught jazz fever.

The continuing hardships faced by African Americans in the Deep South and the

urban North were severe. It took the environment of the new American city to bring in close

proximity some of the greatest minds of the day. Harlem brought notice to great works that

might otherwise have been lost or never produced. The results were phenomenal. The artists

of the Harlem Renaissance undoubtedly transformed African American culture. But the

impact on all American culture was equally strong. For the first time, white America could

not look away. The Harlem Renaissance proved to be a turning point for African American

literature. Prior to this time, books by African Americans were read only by Black people.

Through the renaissance, African American literature-as well as black fine art and

performance art began to be absorbed into mainstream American culture.

 Black Arts Movement

The term “Black Arts Movement” describes a set of attitudes, influential from 1965 to

1976, about African American cultural production, which assumed that political activism was

a primary responsibility of black artists. It also decreed that the only valid political end of

black artists' efforts was liberation from white political and artistic power structures. Just as

white people were to be stripped of their right to proscribe or define black identity, white

aesthetic standards were to be overthrown and replaced with creative values arising from the

black community.

Larry Neal, one of the movement's founders, noted in his essay The Black Arts

Movement (1968) that this agenda made the Black Arts Movement “the aesthetic and

spiritual sister of the Black Power concept.” Like Black Power, the Black Arts ideology had

roots in earlier African American historical moments; also like Black Power, the specifics of

the movement arose in response to the integrationist ethos of the late 1950s. As such, it

marked an important era in the evolution of African American artistry, a moment when black

writers, visual artists, and musicians forged their own declarations of independence from

white America. Because of the proscriptive nature of its tenets, it also created much

controversy. Through its evocation of such resistance, the Black Arts Movement also

prepared the way for subsequent black artists, who have moved away from essentialist racial

characterizations to articulate a more sweeping, multifaceted understanding of racial identity.

In many ways the Black Arts Movement was a lineal descendant of the Harlem

Renaissance, or at least of the wing that privileged the art and experiences of “the folk” over

the high art of white culture. The link is so strong, in fact, that some scholars refer to the

Black Arts Movement era as the Second Renaissance. One sees this connection clearly in a

reading of Neal's essay alongside Langston Hughes's The Negro Artist and the Racial

Mountain (1926). Indeed, “The Negro Artist” was deemed sufficiently important to the
33

architects of the Black Aesthetic for Addison Gayle to include it among the selections in his

definitive 1971 anthology of the theory of the movement, The Black Aesthetic. The Black

Arts Movement overlapped with the articulation of the principles referred to as the Black

Aesthetic. One might say the former is practice, the latter theory. Hughes's seminal essay

advocates that black writers resist external attempts to control their art, arguing instead that

the “truly great” black artist will be the one who can fully embrace and freely express his

blackness. The hallmark of this, in Hughes's vision, is an artist's ability to reject bourgeois

posturing and to privilege instead the more elemental experience of the black masses, those

whom he refers to as “low-down folks.” This call resonates strongly with Neal's call for “a

cultural revolution in art and ideas [that] speaks to the spiritual and cultural needs of Black

people, regardless of whether or not whites approve.” Neal and his peers went a step farther

than their predecessors, however, arguing that it was not enough to reject white aesthetic

standards; instead, they claimed, white artistic standards must be destroyed.

Such extreme terminology created, or at least exacerbated, rifts within the African

American literary community. Perhaps no single break is more illustrative or more

troublesome than the Black Aestheticians' rejection of Ralph Ellison. Ellison's Invisible Man

(1952) set a standard for African American fiction and established its author as a preeminent

man of American letters. Although the novel challenges simplistic, white-defined portrayals

of black identity, its fundamental ethos is undeniably integrationist. Furthermore, with its

evocation of classic white texts like Herman Melville's Moby-Dick (1851), Mark Twain's

Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), and Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Notes from the

Underground (1864), Invisible Man supported the values of a traditional Western (read

“white”) literary aesthetic, even though Ellison extended those standards through his

concomitant celebration of black folk culture. For this, Ellison earned a number of
34

“establishment” accolades, including the National Book Award. Also, in 1965 a group of

American scholars and authors named Invisible Man the most accomplished American novel

published since 1945. The 1965 designation came at the time when African American writers

were mounting the struggle to find a black literary voice that would shortly arise in the form

of the Black Arts Movement; the honour only confirmed these young writers' opinions of

Ellison as an assimilationist. This, by extension, also made him irrelevant to the movement

and an Uncle Tom in their eyes.

Ellison was far from the only figure whose work was deemed politically inadequate by the

Black Aestheticians; rather, one might best view their reaction to him as illustrative of a

tendency in the movement to make restrictive pronouncements about what art by African

Americans qualified as “black enough” for the movement's purposes. The profound irony of

this particular case is that Ellison, like the Black Aestheticians, sought to reimagine black

identity and to break it out of the strictures imposed on notions of blackness by a white

majority. Recognizing this link between Ellison and his detractors proves useful, as it allows

one to contextualize the Black Arts Movement in the continuum of efforts to redefine black

being. Without the Black Aestheticians' call for a strict separation of black and white creative

identity, African American literature likely could not have evolved as it did. At the same

time, however, the commonalities between Black Arts artists and those predecessors like

Ellison, whom they so pointedly rejected, illustrate why the movement was necessarily a step

in a process. Only with the expansion of notions of black identity can true creative freedom

come, and real expansion by definition demands movement beyond any group's rigid

definition of identity, be it externally or internally imposed.

  Civil Rights Movement Era

A considerable migration of African Americans began during World War I, hitting its

high point during World War II. During the Great Migration, Black people left the racism and

lack of opportunities in the American South and settled in northern cities like Chicago, where

they found work in factories and mills. The migration produced a new sense of independence

in the Black community and contributed to the vibrant Black urban culture seen during the

Harlem Renaissance. The migration was instrumental in empowering the Civil Rights

movement which made a powerful impression on Black writers during the 1940s, 50s and

60s. Black authors were vehemently pushing for an end to racism and segregation through

their literary expression.

During this period of time, there was a huge surge of activism taking place to reverse

this discrimination and injustice. Activists worked together and used non-violent protest and

specific acts of targeted civil disobedience, such as the Montgomery Bus Boycott and the

Greensboro Woolworth Sit-Ins, in order to bring about change. Much of this organizing and

activism took place in the Southern part of the United States; however, people from all over

the country—of all races and religions—joined activists to proclaim their support and

commitment to freedom and equality. For example, on August 28, 1963, 250,000 Americans

came to Washington, D.C. for the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. They came to

have their voices heard and listen to speeches by many civil rights leaders, especially Martin

Luther King, Jr., who delivered what would become one of the most influential speeches in

history which said the remarkable words:

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its

creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal." I have a
36

dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of

former slave owners will be able to sit down together at a table of brotherhood. I have a

dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a desert state, sweltering with the heat of

injustice and oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a

dream that my four children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the

colour of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today.”

Between 1954 and 1968, civil rights legislation was passed. Fundamental and lasting

change was made during this relatively short period of time and its impact can be seen in a

myriad of ways in our society today. However, civil rights issues such as immigration, racial

disparities in the criminal justice system, the perpetual segregation of our nation’s schools—

to name just a few—remain and are in need of ongoing work. In 1954, The Supreme Court, in

Brown v. Board of Education, ruled that schools could no longer be segregated and that state

laws establishing separate public schools for black and white students were unconstitutional.

In 1964, The Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibited discrimination in public places, provided

for the integration of schools and other public facilities and made employment discrimination

illegal based on race, colour, religion, sex or national origin. The document was the most

sweeping civil rights legislation since Reconstruction. In 1965, The Voting Rights Act of

1965 was passed. This legislation protected minority voting rights, barring states from

passing laws that would discriminate against minority voters and requiring certain state and

local governments with a history of voting discrimination to get approval from the federal

government before making any changes to their voting laws or procedures. And finally by

1968, the Civil Rights Act of 1968, commonly known as the “Fair Housing Act,” provided

equal housing opportunities regardless of race, creed or national origin and made it illegal to

interfere with housing rights and opportunities.

One of the very first writers to do so was James Baldwin, whose work primarily

addressed race and sexuality. Baldwin, who is best known for his book Go Tell It On The

Mountain, wrote deeply personal stories and essays while examining what it was like to be

both Black and homosexual at a time when neither of these identities was accepted by

American culture. His idol and friend was Richard Wright, who he called “the greatest black

author in the world for me” is best known for his novel, Native Son (1940),  which narrates

the story of a black man struggling for acceptance in Chicago.

Another great novelist from this period is Ralph Ellison, best known for his novel

Invisible Man (1952) which won the National Book Award in 1953. Even though Ellison did

not complete another novel during his lifetime, “Invisible Man” was so influential that it

secured his place in literary history. The Civil Rights time period also witnessed the rise of

the first female Black poets, most notably Gwendolyn Brooks, who became the first African

American to win the Pulitzer Prize for Annie Allen. Along with brooks, other female poets

who became well-known during the 1950s and 60s are Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez.

During this time a lot of playwrights also got national attention. One of the most

popular amongst these was Lorraine Hansberry, whose play A Raisin in the Sun focused on a

poor Black family living in Chicago. The play won the 1959 New York Drama Critics’ Circle

Award. It is worth noting that a number of important essays and books about human beings

were written by the leaders of the Civil Rights Movement. A popular example is Martin

Luther King Jr. 's Letter from Birmingham Jail.

 Coming to the Contemporary

 The early 1970s witnessed the integration of African American Literature into

mainstream literature and continually achieved “best-selling” and “award-winning” status.

This was also the time when the work of African American writers was actually accepted by
38

academia as a legitimate genre of American Literature. As part of the larger Black Arts

Movement which was inspired by the Civil Rights and Black Power Movements, African

American literature began to be defined and analysed as a separate and important genre.

Writers like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker and poets like James Emanuel are credited for

bringing this recognition to African American literature. In fact, Emanuel’s introduction of

African American poetry in the City College of New York heavily influenced the birth of the

genre. Influential anthologies of this time included Black Fire: An Anthology of Afro-

American Writing edited by LeRoi Jones (now known as Amiri Baraka) and Larry Neal in

1968 and The Negro Caravan, co-edited by Sterling Brown, Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses Lee

in 1969.

Toni Morrison, meanwhile, helped promote Black literature and authors when she

worked as an editor for Random House in the1960s and 1970s, where she edited books by

Toni Cade Bambara, Gayl Jones and other authors. Little did Morrison know then that she

would later emerge as one of the most powerful African American writers in the 20 century.
th

Her first novel, The Bluest Eye was published in century. Among her most famous novels is

Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988. This story describes a slave who

found freedom but killed her infant daughter to save her from a life of slavery. Another one

of her exemplary works is Song of Solomon, a tale about materialism and brotherhood.

Morrison is the first-African American woman to have won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

In the 1970s, novelist and poet Alice Walker wrote a very popular essay that brought

Zora Neale Hurston and her classic Their Eyes Were Watching God back into the attention of

the literary world. As mentioned previously, it was then that this work was actually

accoladed. In 1982, Walker won the Pulitzer Prize as well as the American Book Award for

The Color Purple, an epistolary novel. It tells the story of a young woman, Celie, who is
39

sexually abused by her stepfather and later by her husband whom she is forced to get married

to.

The 70s also saw African American books topping the best-seller lists. Amongst the

first books to do was Roots: The Saga of an American Family by Alex Haley, which also won

the Pulitzer Prize. Haley later went on to write The Autobiography of Malcolm X in 1965.

Other important writers in recent years include fiction writers like Gayl Jones, Rasheed

Clark, Ishmael Reed, Jamaica Kincaid, Randall Kenan and John Edgar Wideman. One cannot

discuss contemporary writers without mentioning the infamous, Maya Angelou, one of the

most celebrated women in Black Literature and history.

There was a difference between the kind of language that black writers employed and

the oral tradition that they introduced, however, the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the most

dramatic change in African American literature in terms of the involvement of women and

their work. This occurred as a result of the intersection of two movements- the black

movement and the women’s movement. Certainly, the increased visibility of African

American women writers exemplifies the relationship between the political movements and

literary canons. Earlier women writers such as Jessie Fauset, Nella Larsen, Zora Neale

Hustron, Ann Petry, Dorothy West, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Paule Marshall had placed back

women at the center of their narratives. Their texts, however, had not been perceived by

either the mainstream or the African American literary establishment as significant. It was not

that in the 1970s the African American women had suddenly become literary artists; rather, it

was that the cultural ethos was ready to accept them as writers who were engaging in the

valid exploration of central socio-political and literary issues. 

The first novels written in the 1960s critique relations with black women and men,

and not just black women with white people. By concentrating on relationships within the
40

black community, these authors confirmed that it was to the blacks that they were addressing

their work. Rather than idealising black communities, as so many writings of the 1960s had

attempted to do, African American women writers of the 1970s articulated the complexities

of African American culture and history; at the same time, they demonstrated how black

communities had also deeply internalised racist stereotypes that radically affected their

definitions for and expectations of men and women. 

  In the beginning of the twentieth century, many African Americans were moving

from the rural South to the urban North, afraid of the increasing violence in southern states

and holding hopes for a better life and prosperity. That became known as the Great

Migration. As a consequence of this migration, in Harlem, New York, a black middle class

emerged. According to Marks “at the end of the 1920s there were 164,566 black people

living in Harlem, making it the most densely populated black area in the world”. In

conjunction with other different social forces, this large African American population would

soon make the place the headquarters for an important cultural and artistic movement, which

would become known as The New Negro Movement or the Harlem Renaissance. As Bernard

suggests in her analysis of the Harlem Renaissance, The New Negro Movement and the

Politics of Art, the production of the period is marked by contradictions and a struggle to

understand identity.

   Feminism is of crucial interest to postcolonial discourse for two reasons. Firstly, both

patriarchy and imperialism can be seen to exert analogous forms of domination over those

they render subordinate. Hence the experience of women in patriarchy and those of colonized

subjects can be paralleled in a number of ways and both feminist and postcolonial politics

oppose such dominance. Secondly, there have been vigorous debates in a number of

colonized societies over whether gender or colonial oppression is the more important political
41

factor in women’s lives. For both groups, language has been a vehicle for subverting

patriarchal and imperial power. Colonialism operates very differently for women and for

men. There is “double colonization” for women as women are subjected both to general

discrimination as colonial subjects and specific discrimination as women. The world of

women as Simone de Beauvoir observes in The Second Sex, “is everywhere enclosed,

limited, dominated by the male universe; high as she may raise herself, far as she may

venture, there will always be a ceiling over her head, walls that will block her way”.

Women’s oppression is the most widespread and the deepest form of oppression in society.

Patriarchy has assumed that women are naturally inferior to men, lacking rational thought. As

she is biologically endowed with the supreme task of reproduction to carry the human race

forward, it is considered to be imperative to subsume her individuality to serve the needs of

her husband.

  There are three major circles of reality in American society which reflects degrees of

power and powerlessness. There is a large circle in which White people, most of them men,

experience influence and power. Far away from it there is a smaller circle, a narrow space in

which Black people experience uncertainty, exploitation and powerlessness. Hidden in this

second circle is the third one, a small dark enclosure in which Black women experience pain,

isolation and vulnerability. These are the distinguishing marks of Black womanhood in White

America. The Black woman thus faces the reality of triple-subjugation of class, race and

gender. According to Alice Walker, the term “Black Feminism” does not fully describe the

triple-subjugated condition of Black women. Hence she has expounded the concept of

“Womanism” saying, “I just want to have words that describe things correctly. Now to me,

‘black feminist’ does not do that. I need a word that is organic, that really comes out of the

culture that really expresses the spirit that we see in black women. And it’s just…womanish”.
42

In her widely popular work In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens (1983) Alice Walker

describes her concept of Womanism poetically as, “Womanist is to feminist as purple to

lavender”. While Black Feminism benefits the privileged Black women, especially those in

the academia, Womanism addresses issues of masses of Black women doing all kinds of

menial work. The word “womanish” stemming from the Black folk expression, “you acting

womanish” signifies that the woman in question is “responsible”, “in charge” and “serious”.

“Womanist” is a woman who loves other women “sexually and or non-sexually”. She prefers

and appreciates “women’s culture” and “women’s strength”. The womanist takes pride in

being Black and female. Womanism repudiates the conventional White norms of beauty and

glorifies women with “big legs, big hips and black skin”.

   If the Black Arts Movement then failed black women by not taking their gender into

their agenda, the feminist movements of the period failed them by not taking race into theirs.

As hooks points out, a black woman looking for a theory that would encompass both gender

and race would be pretty isolated: No other group in America has so had their identity

socialized out of existence as have black women. We are rarely recognized as a group

separate and distinct from black men, or as a present part of the larger group “women” in this

culture. When black people are talked about, sexism militates against the acknowledgement

of the interests of black women; when women are talked about racism militates against a

recognition of black female interests. When black people are talked about the focus tends to

be on black men; and when women are talked about the focus tends to be on white women.

(hooks 21) One can argue that groups such as Native American or Latina women do get as

ignored as African American women, and as Barbara Smith points out in her “Toward a

Black Feminist Criticism”, lesbian black women are even more oppressed than heterosexual

black women. However, hooks’ words are true in stating how black movements tend to
43

ignore the female gender and how feminism tends to ignore blackness. As the theorist affirms

throughout her book Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, black women identity

can only be seriously thought of when race, gender and class are all considered together.

Black women cannot–and would not–benefit from taking a moment to think only of being

black, then another to think only of being women. They are all of it at once, and the

oppression they have faced is singular to them–neither black men nor white women have

experienced exactly the same (hooks 28–29).

OBJECTIVES

·  To understand the narrative techniques of African American literature through Toni

Morrison’s “Beloved”

·  To analyse the descriptive techniques used in African American literature  through

Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”

·  To analyse the underlying themes and their implications through Toni Morrison’s

“Beloved”

·  To apply tools of the Reader-Response theory to understand the text through Toni

Morrison’s “Beloved”

·  To understand the meaning and limitations of Empathy and Narrative Empathy

through Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”

·  To analyse the impact of Empathy and Narrative Empathy and the readers through

Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”

AIMS
44

This paper attempts to enquire, question and analyse the extent to which one would go

to empathise with a character and his or actions, even if such actions do not align with

one’s own ethical or moral standing. It attempts at analysing the various techniques

employed by the writer to instil this level of empathy amongst her audiences, the impact

of this empathy, and finally, the limitations of this empathy.

CHAPTER II

LITERARY ANALYSIS/REVIEW

 Toni Morrison, originally Chloe Anthony Wofford, Morrison grew up in the

American Midwest in a family that possessed an intense love of and appreciation for black

culture. Storytelling, songs, and folktales were a deeply formative part of her childhood. She

attended Howard University (B.A., 1953) and Cornell University (M.A., 1955). After

teaching at Texas Southern University for two years, she taught at Howard from 1957 to

1964. In 1965 Morrison became a fiction editor at Random House, where she worked for a

number of years. In 1984 she began teaching writing at the State University of New York at

Albany, which she left in 1989 to join the faculty of Princeton University; she retired in

2006. 

  When Wofford was about 15, a group of white people lynched two black businessmen

who lived on his street. Morrison later said: "He never told us that he'd seen bodies. But he

had seen them. And that was too traumatic, I think, for him." Soon after the lynching, George

Wofford moved to the racially integrated town of Lorain, Ohio, in the hope of escaping

racism and securing gainful employment in Ohio's burgeoning industrial economy. He

worked odd jobs and as a welder for U.S. Steel. Ramah Wofford was a homemaker and a

devout member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.

When Morrison was about two years old, her family's landlord set fire to the house in

which they lived, while they were home, because her parents could not pay the rent. Her

family responded to what she called this "bizarre form of evil" by laughing at the landlord

rather than falling into despair. Morrison later said her family's response demonstrated how to

keep your integrity and claim your own life in the face of acts of such "monumental

crudeness."

Morrison’s parents were, like so many other African Americans, migrants from the

South, and the southern heritage influences her work, especially its major theme of African

American displacements. They instilled in her a sense of heritage and language through

telling traditional African American folktales and ghost stories and singing songs. Morrison

read frequently as a child; among her favourite authors were Jane Austen and Leo Tolstoy.

She became a Catholic at the age of twelve and took the baptismal name Anthony (after

Anthony of Padua), which led to her nickname, Toni. Attending Lorain High School, she was
 

on the debate team, the yearbook staff, and in the drama club.

Toni Morrison has, in the last two decades published six novels and an essay

collection that have transformed one’s view of American history and literature. For Morrison,

the history and literature of the United States and of our present world are “incoherent”

without an understanding of the African American presence. Her work always engages major

contemporary social issues: the interrelatedness of racism, class exploitation and sexism,

domination, and imperialism; the spirituality and power of oral folk traditions and values; the

mythic scope of the oppressed groups, between personal desire and political urgencies. Her

work also articulates perennial human concerns and paradoxes: how are our concepts of the
46

good, the beautiful, and the powerful related; what is goodness and evil; how our sense of

identity derives from community while maintaining individual uniqueness?

Morrison says:

 “If anything I do, in the way of writing novels (or whatever I write), isn’t about the village

or the community or about you, then it is not about anything. I am not interested in indulging

myself in some private, closed exercise of my imagination that fulfils only the obligation of

my personal dreams- which is to say yes, the work must be political… It seems to me that the

best art is political and you ought to make it unquestionably political and irrevocably

beautiful at the same time.”

 As this quotation shows, Morrison insists on a visceral relationship between writer

and reader. In an early interview she says that her writing “expects, demands participatory

reading… [my] language has some holes and spaces so the reader can come into it.” Readers

throughout the world have responded to her call, for Morrison not only is a writer praised by

literary critics and intellectuals but is also an immensely popular one. Morrison believed the

black American experience was worthy of sustained aesthetic attention, and not just so that

white people could learn valuable lessons about race. “I didn’t want it to be a teaching tool

for white people,” she told Als of her work “I wanted it to be true — not from outside the

culture, as a writer looking back at it. I wanted it to come from inside the culture, and speak

to people inside the culture. It was about a refusal to pander or distort or gain political points.

I wanted to reveal and raise questions.” And Morrison did not only pursue that goal in her

work as a novelist. She also spent more than a decade working as an editor at Random House,

where she championed the work of black authors. It was there that she helped put in place the

raw material for a black American literary canon. Morrison’s parents were, like so many
47

other African Americans, migrants from the South, and the southern heritage influences her

work, especially its major theme of African American displacements.

Through “Beloved” Morrison employs various themes and symbols to depict the

physical and psychological effects that slavery has on African American. Morrison takes a

real-life event from African American history and gives special importance to the brutality

and torment of slavery to remind the reader about the abysmal past of her race. In an

interview with National Endowment for the Arts, Morrison spoke about how Beloved, her

most exemplary work, came into being. She said:

 “Sometimes you hear things or see things or write things, and you don’t know where they

came from but they’re very important and they don’t disappear. The writing is discovery of

what that really means. I wasn’t at all sure in Beloved that I would have a character called

Beloved. I said at the beginning [of the book] the house was full of poison or venom, but I

thought that was just the haunting. But the big question, it turned out, was who was in the

position to judge what [Sethe] had done. Who could say that her efforts to kill her children

under those particular circumstances were wrong? They couldn’t decide; even the courts

couldn’t. Some people wanted her to return to the plantation because she was property.

Other people, the abolitionist in particular, wanted her tried for murder, and that would

suggest that she was a mother responsible for her child. The slave system says she wasn’t,

that her child was just another piece of goods. I couldn’t decide, and nobody else seemed

able. I thought the only person who was legitimate, who could decide whether [the killing]

was a good thing or not, was the dead girl. But I was about a third into the book before that

realization came. So I had to make a living ghost called Beloved who then would react

mournfully, desperately, lovingly, or furiously, as a baby would if you killed it and it had

something to say about it.”

It is rather interesting that though Morrison adopts a very strong approach towards

racism and sexism in her works, does not identify herself as a feminist. When asked in an

interview, "Why distance oneself from feminism?" she replied:

"In order to be as free as I possibly can, in my own imagination, I can't take positions that

are closed. Everything I've ever done, in the writing world, has been to expand articulation,

rather than to close it, to open doors, sometimes, not even closing the book — leaving the

endings open for reinterpretation, re-visitation and a little ambiguity. It may also seem off-

putting to some readers, who may feel that I'm involved in writing some kind of feminist tract.

I don't subscribe to patriarchy, and I don't think it should be substituted with matriarchy. I

think it's a question of equitable access, and opening doors to all sorts of things.”

 Morrison identifies with the concept of “Womanism.” “Womanism” was a term

coined by African American author, Alice Walker to set aside mainstream White feminists

from feminist women of colour and primarily to resist Anti-blackness within the feminist

movement. It was felt that White feminists often did not understand, consider,  or were

ignorant of the additional support and welfare that black women were in dire need of. An

excerpt from the primary goals of Womanists conveys their ideology as follows: 

“We are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class

oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and

practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking. The

synthesis of these oppressions creates the conditions of our lives. As Black women we see

Black feminism as the logical political movement to combat the manifold and simultaneous

oppressions that all women of colour face.” 

“Beloved” won the Pulitzer Prize that April. In 2006, after polling hundreds of

writers, editors and critics, The Book Review named the novel the best American work of
49

fiction of the previous quarter-century. Her other novels include “Jazz” (1992), set in 1920s

New York; “A Mercy” (2008), which divorces the institution of slavery from ideas of race by

setting the narrative in the 17th century, where servitude, black or white, was apt to be

determined by class; and “Home” (2012), about a black Korean War veteran’s struggles on

returning to the Jim Crow South. Ms. Morrison’s volumes of nonfiction include “Playing in

the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination” (1992) and “What Moves at the Margin:

Selected Nonfiction” (2008, edited by Carolyn C. Denard). She wrote the libretto for

“Margaret Garner,” an opera by Richard Danielpour that received its world premiere at the

Detroit Opera House in 2005 with the mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves in the title role. In

1989, Ms. Morrison joined the faculty of Princeton, where she taught courses in the

Humanities and African American Studies, and was a member of the Creative Writing

Programme. She went on emeritus status in 2006. Ms. Morrison is survived by her son

Harold Ford Morrison and three grandchildren. Another son, Slade, with whom she

collaborated on the texts of many books for children, died in 2010. Her other laurels include

the National Humanities Medal in 2000 and the Presidential Medal of Freedom, presented in

2012 by President Barack Obama. The Toni Morrison Society, devoted to the study of her

life and work, was founded in 1993.

An Insight into Beloved

 In her own writing, Morrison lavished the under-discussed 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. Based on the real-life story of the slave
50

Margaret Garner, who, on January 28, 1856, Garner killed her two-year old daughter and

attempted to kill her other two children just because she did not want her children to be sent

to the plantation where she was forced to work. Morrison thinks that the horrible issues

related to slavery are avoided and forgotten in the traditional slave narratives; therefore, she

seeks to lay emphasis on the painful and forgotten aspects of slavery. Morrison’s novels force

its reader to recognize the existence and conditions of slavery in a nation that would prefer to

forget that such an atrocious act was ever committed. In Beloved,  Morrison's epigraph is a

fitting opening for a novel about grace, love, and forgiveness. The epigraph sets the tone for

the opening chapter, in which a wilful ghost destroys the peace of Sethe's home — a home

that is free of slavery but still laden with servitude's emotional freight. Paul's words, wrathful

and forbidding in certain respects, also contain a promise: "For he will finish the work, and

cut it short in righteousness: because a short work will the Lord make upon the earth." In

simple words, it means either shape up or ship out, because God is coming back for the true

believers, gathering them up, and taking them to heaven with speed and finality. The ghost of

slavery in Beloved 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. When a young woman claiming to be the now-adult Beloved comes to

Sethe’s house, Sethe begins to believe that she may at last be able to forget: that if Beloved is

truly alive, then what Sethe did to her never happened, and so slavery may be erased,

forgotten, papered over. But it rapidly and inexorably becomes clear that forgetting is

impossible. The character of Beloved embodies three generations of slavery and is a symbol

of the ghost of the more general historical past of slavery just as she haunts the lives of her

mother, Denver, and anyone else who comes in contact with the family on Bluestone Road.

She forces the characters in the novel, most notably her mother, to first recognize the pain
51

from her past before she can begin to work through it and her presence causes all of the

characters to come to terms with themselves before she leaves. Not only does this story-

telling offer the possibility of reconciliation with the past or a better understanding of it on a

symbolic level with the character Beloved serving as a symbol, it serves some important

functions for the reader as well. Beloved, when viewed symbolically is more than merely a

character in “Beloved” but holds great importance as a symbol in the novel as well. These

stories that are contained within the complex character of Beloved in the novel by Toni

Morrison, many of which are mere fragments that cannot be truly pieced together until the

end of the novel, relate a vivid, stark and relentless portrait of some of the worst horrors of

slavery.

The novel presents a black community unwilling to confront their past, and thus

haunted by the embodiment of it. The author does not protest slavery, but is rather concerned

with its effects on the African American psyche. Beloved demonstrates Toni Morrison’s skill

in penetrating the unconstrained psyches of numerous characters who shoulder the horrific

burden of a slaver’s hidden sins. The novelist dedicates this novel to “sixty million and

more,” the estimated number of blacks who died in slavery. Moreover, she strongly insists

that her literary context is essentially African American and Beloved overtly invokes slave

narrative as its precursors. In 1873, slavery was abolished in Cincinnati, Ohio for ten years.

This is the setting in which Morrison places the characters for her powerfully moving novel.

Sethe, a black woman of extraordinary power, is the heroine of this novel who is willing to

sacrifice not only to gain her own emancipation, but also to prevent her children from falling

under the yoke of forced servitude. Sethe, a thirteen-year old child, who seems older than her

age, of unnamed slave parents, arrives at Sweet Home, an idyllic plantation in Kentucky

operated by Garner, an unusually humane master, and his wife, Lillian. Sethe mentions the
52

fact about her mother who was a slave too who worked in an indigo field from dawn to

nightfall. In fact, her mother was hanged. She recalls that many slaves were killed along with

her mother, and that Nan, a one-armed black governess, took over the role of parent and

taught Sethe her mother’s native dialect. In this respect, Morrison reveals that Sethe has lost

the sense of motherhood. During this period, Sethe selected Halle Suggs to be her mate. They

got married while she was 18, and bears him three children: Haword, Bulgar and Denver. The

slaves Paul D., Paul A, Sethe and Sixo lived in a farm ruled by the benign Garners, a

childless couple. After the death of Garner, his wife turns control of the plantation over to her

brother-in-law, the school master, who proves to be a brutal overseer. The situation has been

described by the writer to reveal the unbearable case of their lives. She expresses: There had

been four of them who belonged to the farm, Sethe the only female. Mrs. Garner, crying like

a baby, had sold his brother to pay off the debts that surfaced the minute she was widowed.

Then the schoolteacher arrived to put things in order. But what he did broke three more

Sweet Home men and punched the glittering iron out of Sethe’s eyes, leaving two open wells

that did not reflect firelight. As a result, the harmony of the farm was destroyed by the

inhumane behaviour of the schoolteacher who forced the slaves to desperate measures of

flight and rebellion. Hence, Sethe, tries to reveal the cataclysmic situation of torture, horror

and bad memories for trying to escape the plantation. Sethe and her daughter, Denver, reside

in a haunted two-storey house at 124 Bluestone Road outside Ohio. As a matter of fact, her

house was once a way station. Historically, the way station was a treasured salvation for ex-

slaves who lacked food, clothing, and safe passage among the whites. The way station also

served as a postal centre, and message drop. Chance meetings with other wayfarers

sometimes reunited them with friends and loved ones. In addition, the way station provided a

warm, dry and safe rest stop along the wearying road away from slavery. In that house,

Denver is a reclusive eighteen-year old daughter who once upon a time lived with her two
53

brothers: Buglar, Howard, and her infant sister, Beloved. Now they are “all by themselves in

the grey and white house on Bluestone Road” (p.3). Morrison exposes the plight of the young

woman Denver in that house that she cannot stand anymore: "I can't no more. I can't no

more…. I can't live here, I don’t know where to go or what to do, but I can't live here.

Nobody speaks, comes by. Boys don’t like me. Girls don’t either. (p.14). Thus, Sethe and

Denver lived in an isolated place and their peaceful time was ruptured by the unexpected or

unforeseen arrival of Paul D., a survivor of Sweet Home: the Kentucky slave farm where

Sethe, her husband, Halle, and their children were also enslaved. Sethe divulged to Paul D the

catastrophic events that caused her to run away from Sweet Home, then she surrendered her

sons and daughter to a woman in a wagon because she was worried about the family’s future

under the schoolmaster’s reign. Her description of the assault is straightforward; she tells

Paul D very succinctly about the roughness and cruelty of the white people especially the two

white boys-the schoolmaster’s nephews who beat her while she was pregnant with Denver

injuring her so badly that her back skin had been dead for years. She refers to the station as

follows: “Those boys came in there and took my milk, that's what they came in there for.

Held me down and took it…. School-teacher made one open up my back, and when it closed

it made a tree. It still grows there. They used cowhide on me and they took my milk they beat

me and I was pregnant. And they took my milk.” (p.17) They sucked out her breast milk and

lashed her with rawhide whips. She repeatedly used the words “they took my milk” to

describe her violation. Of the act itself, we learn only the fact that the two teenage white boys

hold her down and suck her breast milk. Sethe, the most prominent of the novel’s many

sufferers who bears the physical scars of slavery’s terrible violence upon her back, was still

continuing to wander the past to Paul D. In this sense, she recalled that she reported to Mrs.

Garner that schoolmaster’s nephew attacked her while he watched the atrocity. It is worth

mentioning that Morrison uses the technique of stream of consciousness because we are
54

travelling throughout Sethe’s mental journey. She, in a flashback, mentions the barbarity of

those four white men: schoolmaster, one nephew, one slave catcher and a sheriff. Under the

fear that her children would be slaves, she, in the wood, had murdered her daughter, Beloved.

She killed her so that no "gang of whites would invade her daughter’s private parts, soil her

daughter’s things" (p.251). According to her, death is a kinder alternative than rape; that

"anybody white could take your whole self… and dirty you, dirty you so bad you could not

like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forget who you were and couldn’t think it up"

(p.252). She had killed her own child with a handsaw. The foursome wounded Buglar and

Howard threatened to bash Denver’s brain. Stamp paid, a former slave who ferries Sethe and

Denver across the Ohio River, tried to take Beloved’s corpse from the mother’s clinging

hands and give Denver to her. A mother killing her own child is an act that subverts the

natural order of the world. A mother is expected to create life, not destroy it, but with Sethe’s

case, she was neurotic and afraid at that specific moment when she imagined that her child

might face the same assault in future. Thus, she prefers to put an end to this situation. On the

other hand, one notices that she was very anxious about the feeling of Beloved, her murdered

child. She stated “Do you forgive me? Will you stay? You safe here now ” (p. 170). But later

on, it seems to us that Sethe tries to justify her deed by saying or declaring that “If I had not

killed her, she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her”

(p.175). As a matter of fact, a mixture of motherhood images roils in Sethe’s tangled internal

monologue. Being the victim of slavery, Sethe often thought about her daughter and had lived

with her daughter’s ghost for years. Being inferior to others, Sethe thinks that this feature is

the best way to save her child from slavery, from being treated barbarically. For her, it is a

natural right to protect her child from the apparition of slavery, while on the other hand, it is

something against the law of nature. Hence, Morrison alludes to an important idea at that

time when Sethe’s picture appeared in a white newspaper. News about blacks does not
55

normally appear in white papers unless something terrible enough has occurred to capture the

white reader’s interest. Just as it is unnatural for the white community to acknowledge any

blacks, it is unnatural for a black community made up of ex-slaves not to protect their own

from white slave catches. That is what happened on the day Sethe tried to murder her child.

In that place, the beating she received for freeing her children cost her a piece of tongue that

she bit off when the lash opened the skin on her back. She recalled her humiliation at hearing

the schoolmaster instructing his nephews to catalogue her human traits and her animal traits.

The author mentions "the picture of the men coming to nurse her was as lifeless as the nerves

in her back where the skin buckled like a washboard. Nor was there the faintest scent of ink

or the cherry gum and oak bark from which it was made. Nothing. Just the breeze cooling her

face as she rushed toward water"(p.6). The realization that Buglar and Howard would soon be

larger enough for schoolmaster to sell disturbed her sleep. She, in turn, congratulated herself

for managing to save her children from slavery. In place of harmony, Sethe rewarded herself

with the satisfaction that she succeeded in rescuing her children from whipping, lynching,

starvation, and sale. Then she managed to escape from Sweet Home while she was pregnant

with her fourth child. She and her new-born arrived at 124 Bluestone Road. Because Sethe

actively worked to repress the rape and infanticide, rather than remember, mourn, and there

by heal, she was trapped by her memories: “her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded

with the past and hunger for more, it left her no room to imagine, let alone plan for, the next

day” (p.70). We can ponder Sethe as a tragic heroine of this story. Because of her outrageous

act of self-sufficiency, her neighbours rescind the sympathy and camaraderie usually

extended to ex-slaves, and they exile her in the land of freedom that she risked everything to

attain. After Baby Sugg’s death, Sethe’s mother-in-law, mourners refuse to enter 124 or

partake of Sethe’s food. As a result, she had lost harmony. In turn, she suffered from blame

and alienation. Before Beloved’s death, Sethe’s infant child, the community of ex-slaves
56

shared their miseries in the warmth of Baby Sugg’s house and shared spontaneous bursts of

revelation and rejoicing in the cleaning. Not only was Sethe the victim of the brutal white

society, but also the victim of her husband. She suffered from her husband who was supposed

to be her protector from the external world. Here, Halle, the husband, mistreated her. He, to a

certain extent, let the schoolmaster’s nephew to steal her breast milk while he was hidden in

the barn loft. Traumatized by his wife’s suffering, Halle eventually lost his mind because “it

broke him” (p.69). Being a victim of slavery, Sethe was deprived even from a natural right as

a living human being when she naively requested a marriage service to honour her union with

Halle. Here, it is worth mentioning that slaves do not have the same type of marital

conventions as whites. Finally, she enjoyed her brief honeymoon in Mr. Garner’s cornfield.

The plight of slavery will shift from Sethe to Paul D Garner, a former slave from

Sweet Home who survived the horrors of slavery and had evolved into a resourceful,

contemplative man. He pondered his servitude after schoolmaster took over the management

of Sweet Home, the slave realized that they had nurtured a false sense of security. Paul D. has

undergone terrible, dehumanizing experiences which had toughened him and made him

nearly impervious to hardship and pain. Morrison reminds us of his toughness when she

describes his working conditions at the slaughterhouse. Paul D., we know by now, is not a

man who is easily shocked. He is horrified, terrified by the nature of Sethe’s crime and by her

inability to comprehend why her actions were wrong. His entrance into Sethe's life

represented the potential for a happier future for her and Denver. The writer reflects the ill-

treatment and the dehumanizing of those black people especially Paul D. who relives the

savage treatment that he endured while shackled to ten other slaves and transported to a

brutal prison for the crime of threatening to kill Brandywine, the man who bought him from

schoolmaster after the attempted escape from Sweet Home . Eighty-six days into his sentence
57

, Paul D. and the other prisoners, chained together and threatened with suffocation under a

mudslide, dived beneath their cell’s restraining bars and escaped. The prisoners fled to a

Cherokee Camp, where native Americans fed them mush and released them from their leg

irons. Those black people could comfort each other by applying fingers and hands as a kind

of tangible blessing. As a matter of fact, those characters were incapable of obliterating the

hurtful memories of enslavement. Here, we notice that Paul D. suffered from the bad

memories of his experience that he was stifled by an iron bit as he waited for transportation to

Camp in Alfred, Georgia. Paul D. informed Sethe that the worst of his humiliation after being

captured by schoolmaster was the glare of mister, the deformed rooster that he helped hatch

from his shell. He declared confession of pain and degradation. The bestial image of mister,

the regal rooster, smiling from his tub, destroyed Paul D’s remaining sense of humanity as he

waited to be carted off to prison. He was stripped of his human dignity and treated like an

animal. He mourned the man of Sweet Home, “one crazy, one sold, one missing, one hurt,

and me licking iron with my hands crossed behind me” (p.195). He questioned the reason for

human suffering and the extent to which a man must bear the burden. The novelist makes it

clear in this novel that the victimization of former slaves does not stop with their escape from

slave states. The brutality of the schoolmaster is unbelievable in the sense that he indicated

that he would sell Paul D. for $900 and replace him with two young male slaves so that

“Sweet Home would be worth the trouble it was causing him” (p. 77). Schoolmaster

struggled to take Paul D. alive but eventually determined that Sixo was of no use to Sweet

Home. He, in a very savage way, lit a fire and roosted Sixo who was tied at the waist to a

tree, then the schoolmaster shot Sixo to quiet his singing to his unborn child; They came to

capture,…. By the light of the homing fire Sixo straightens. He is through with his song. He

laughs…. His feet are cooking; the cloth of his trousers smokes. He laughs. Something is

funny. Paul D. guesses what it is when Sixo interrupts his laughter to call out, “Seven-O!
58

seven-O!” (p. 226). Both of them, Sethe and Paul D., were dehumanized during their slave

experiences; their responses to the experience differed due to their different roles. She

suffered a lot, her separation from her husband and the trauma of a severe lashing caused her

to be a miserable woman. Hence, the arrival of Paul D. offered a serious challenge to the

permanence of Sethe’s suspended life, for within hours of his arrival, his presence had

inspired Sethe not only to recite details of her traumatic past, but also to mourn that past:

“may be this one time she could remind the baby girl Sethe killed come in the form of a

mirror shattering, tiny handprints appearing on a cake, and a pool of red light undulating in

front of a door” (p. 204). Beloved herself is the traumatic past in bodily form. Morrison links

her not only to the murdered baby, but also to the other experiences of trauma that Sethe as

well as the other community members, lived through during slavery and middle passage.8

Once Sethe believes that Beloved is her baby returned to flesh, she thinks she has been freed

from the pain of that trauma “ I couldn’t lay down nowhere in peace, back them” (p. 79). She

thinks, recalling her daughter’s death “now I can, I can sleep like the drowned, have mercy.

She came back to me, my daughter, and she is mine” (p. 204). Because she is living with the

embodiment of her catastrophic past, Sethe is being smothered; her life revolves entirely

around her past. Not only does Sethe suffer from the nightmares of her past life and what she

did, but we see that her living daughter, Denver, suffers from the same trouble or effect.

Denver, a solitary child-woman, takes refuge in a circle of box-wood shrubs and inhales the

fragrance of cologne. Sethe makes plain to Paul D. that Denver is the centre of her life and

the sole concern of her daily existence. Her brief comment that the jail rats “bit everything in

there but her” (p. 224), delineates the extent of Sethe’s protection. Although Denver has

never been lived as a slave, she suffers from the ramifications of her mother's experiences and

the magnitude of discovery caused her to withdraw from the community and to retreat into

the sheltered but unhealthy 124. Denver; after the death of Baby Suggs, she lost her trust,
59

even in herself because Baby Suggs played an important role to lead Denver to the right path.

Baby Suggs, the spiritual guide, taught her to appreciate and love her own body. Now, the

hope of Denver’s future is Beloved, who returns to fill the emptiness left by Sugg’s death. It

is worth mentioning that the intrusion of Paul D. helps Sethe and Denver to forget their

terrible life, but that visitor who is the embodiment of Sethe’s daughter, Beloved, destroyed

their harmony. In this respect, Beloved embodies not just the spirit of the child Sethe killed

but also all of the past pain and suffering from which Sethe and Denver have never been able

to escape. 9 Thus Beloved is their voice and their experience. Here, Morrison shows us that

Beloved is a multifaceted character: she is the ghost of a child, the ghost of the nameless

slaves, the ghost of a terrible but inescapable past. Sethe and Denver will have to learn to

overcome Beloved’s power, the power of the past- before they can create a life for

themselves in the future. Like Sethe, Denver examines her seclusion which is made bearable

now by the company of her ghostly sister. Isolated and longing for sisterly communion,

Denver loves this visitor saying that “ she is mine, Beloved. She is mine” ( p.125). Serving a

self-imposed sentence of nameless fear, alienation, and yearning, Denver retreats to the

“secret house,” the green chapel that shuts out the hurt. Denver prefers to cling to the

presence of the ghost of Beloved and resenting Paul D. 's intrusion into her and her mother’s

lives. In this sense, Paul D, the intruding male figure in a female-dominated environment,

disturbs Denver. So, after three days, she demands to know whether Paul D intends to stay or

not. Paul D. knows enough of the past-slavery era to realize that it is dangerous for “a used

to- be slave woman to love anything that much After Beloved disappears, Sethe becomes

immersed in her mourning. Paul D reminds her that there is life beyond their pain: “Me and

you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” ( p.273). She

refocuses on herself by asking “me?, me?” Knowledge is the path toward recovery; thus
60

Morrison focuses the end of the novel upon the possibilities of healing and future happiness

for the black community, and in particular, for Sethe and Paul D.

Not all critics praised Beloved, however. African American conservative social critic

Stanley Crouch, for instance, complained in his review in The New Republic that the novel

"reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries," and that

Morrison "perpetually interrupts her narrative with maudlin ideological commercials."

Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African American history,

sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy. Morrison said that they are intended to be read

together, explaining, "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of

the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you." The second novel in the

trilogy, Jazz, came out in 1992. Told in language that imitates the rhythms of jazz music, the

novel is about a love triangle during the Harlem Renaissance in New York City. That year

she also published her first book of literary criticism, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the

Literary Imagination (1992), an examination of the African American presence in White

American literature.

 
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THEMES IN BELOVED

While the language employed in Beloved might seem poetic, it is a representation of a

hard-hitting reality that expresses a very grave amount of atrocity and trauma that the

characters have experienced and attempted to overcome. Morrison uses certain specific

themes which enhance the rendition of her story.

Isolation

There is an obvious theme of isolation in Beloved. There was the separation of Sethe

and Denver from the rest of the world. There was also the loneliness of each main character

throughout the book. There were also other areas of the book where the idea of detachment

from something was obvious. People's opinions about the house made them stay away and

there was also the inner detachment of Sethe from herself. The theme that Toni Morrison had

in mind when the book was written was isolation.

One of the main characters suffered most from this theme of isolation indefinitely;

Sethe. Through her life she was forced to make many indelicate decisions which could have

cost her, her life, but comparatively the only life that was lost was her daughter’s. The way

her daughter was conceived was not what Sethe wanted. When a woman is raped, she loses a 

part of herself and a piece of dignity. Sethe became detached from herself for she felt that

nothing in the world could do right if something like this could happen to her.

Not only did she have to deal with that fact, which created some inner isolation, she

also had to make the decision whether or not to kill her daughter or let her suffer through a

life of slavery. She made the decision to have her daughter killed. This also created some

detachment from herself. Perhaps she felt as if her mind had deceived her because she had
62

her daughter killed. But yet, she knew that it was in the best interest of the child for she

couldn't bear to see her child be born into a life of slavery. “

Sethe however goes through many instances where this probably happened. Another

example of how Sethe could have felt det from herself as well as segregated from the rest of

the world, could be of how other people thought of her and her family and what they did to

show it. People are cruel, some just show it more than others. I felt bad for Denver and how

she was teased at school. They would tease her and accuse her mother of being a witch,

which we know is not true But what it shows is how Denver becomes isolated from the world

during the years where friends are needed. I'm sure that at one point or another Denver told

Sethe about what was happening at school, which pushed her more and more away from

society.

The public in the novel did not much interaction with the characters. This might be

considered as the author's way of proving the theme of isolation. The theme is further

reflected in the  isolation of Sethe from her inner self, Denver and her separation from society

because of the children at school and finally, the very evident detachment of Sethe's family

from the rest of the world because of her past and what people think of the house and the

family. Isolation can be a very powerful theme in literature.

 Dehumanising of Slaves

Slavery is also significant so far as the dehumanizing of the slaves is concerned and

the white people had the power to dehumanize because they were the masters, thus superior

to the blacks. The white masters are depicted as devoid of emotion and sense of

responsibility. Baby Suggs’s husband escaped from slavery. Halle Suggs who is the husband

of Seth has brought his mother’s (Baby Suggs) freedom from slavery. It was a great event in

his past. He had to work continuously countless years without any rest or wage. Paul D was
63

forced to watch his wife be assaulted by his masters for a year. Such was the helpless and

pathetic condition of the slaves. They were not only helpless but also hapless. The white

people had the power to dehumanize the slaves. Slaves were not considered as human beings,

but they were considered either as property or animals. The slaves were unable to clasp any

stable identity to define themselves. Slave women were regarded as breeders in the sense that

they would give free future slaves by giving birth to children. The use of the words such as

‘slaves’, ‘niggers’, ‘beast’, ‘animals’- degraded the slaves. The white schoolteacher used the

slaves as a subject of experiment. Like an anthropologist, he measured their heads and

classified and noted the good and bad things of the slaves. He also noted down the “human”

and “animal” behaviours of the slaves. The slaves tried to forget their past so that they could

move on with their lives but ownership over their own body when their being was determined

by somebody else. Stamp Paid in Beloved mentions white men having the power over

language, that they employed to incessantly scold and taunt their slaves. They had a

preconceived notion that the African American people had dark forest inside of them that

needed to be contained, if not entirely destroyed. So, they designated them as debased,

barbaric, and uncivilized. “White people believed that whatever the manners, under every

dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping

snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood. In a way… they were right… But it

wasn’t the jungle blacks brought with them to this place… It was the jungle white folks

planted in them. And it grew. It spread… until it invaded the whites who had made it….

Made them bloody, silly, worse than even they wanted to be, so scared were they of the

jungle they had made. The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums

were their own.” (p. 99) They thought that their culture was uncivilized, and they were a

primitive race of people. They all had been tortured and their culture had been mangled. It is
64

through the character of  Mr. Bodwin’s realisation at the end of the novel that brings about

the recognition of the misdeeds done by whites to the black community.

Sethe’s life was full of ups and downs. There several traces of complete

dehumanization of Sethe in the story. In fact, it is her character around which the central plot

revolves. Her body is a text of slavery. Sethe mentions that there is a tree with numerous

branches growing on her back. Sethe said “I got a tree on my back…” (Morrison,7). This

means that there are lots of lashes on  Sethe’s back caused by the whip of the two nephews of

the schoolteacher. The symbol of this “tree” reflects the physical cruelty of slavery. These

scars on her back project the desperate attempt to dehumanize her. Sethe tells Paul D thus:

“After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there

for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn’t

speak but her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made

one open my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still. '' (p.8) Further,

Sethe has to sell herself for ten minutes in order to inscribe the words ‘Beloved’ on the

tombstone of her first dead daughter. “But those ten minutes...were longer than life, more

alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked her fingers like oil” (p.2 ). Sethe was so

deeply immersed in her past that she would often forget about her present.

Theme of Memory

Memories are works of fiction, selective representations of experiences actual or

imagined. They provide a framework for creating meaning in one's own life as well as in the

lives of others. In Beloved, memory is a dangerous and debilitating faculty of human

consciousness. Sethe endures the tyranny of the self-imposed prison of memory. She

expresses an insatiable obsession with her memories, with the past. Sethe is compelled to

explore and explain an overwhelming sense of yearning, longing, thirst for something beyond
65

herself, her daughter, her Beloved. Though Beloved becomes a physical manifestation of

these memories, her will is essentially defined by and tied to the thoughts, experiences and

emotions of Sethe. Sethe's struggle is an intensely personal process of self-negation; her

identity is complicated, convoluted, and nearly consumed by her memory. Morrison suggests

at least implicitly that Sethe's crisis is by no means unique. Rather than a positive or negative

trait, memory (and the self-destructive powers contained within it) may be an unavoidable

part of the human condition.

Like Mr. Bodwin who hid his childhood treasures in the yard at 124, Sethe attempts to

bury her most precious possessions in order to protect them literally and metaphorically.

"Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing...the part of her that was clean" (251).

Sethe cannot bear for her children to possibly suffer the pain and humiliations she has

endured. She would rather live with the memories of her crimes, the memories of how her

children might have been, than surrender her future and theirs to school teacher. Her decision

to kill her children and herself is simultaneously an act of self-affirmation and self-

destruction, paradoxically selfish and selfless.

 Memories, however, persist. They remain, lurking in places like 124 and Sweet

Home to remind Sethe that the punishment she suffers is self-inflicted and self-perpetuating.

First as a poltergeist and later as a mysterious young woman, the memory of Beloved remains

unrequited. Beloved's appetite is insatiable. She "never got enough of anything... the more

she took, the more Sethe began to talk, explain.." (240-1). No effort, no amount, no

explanation is adequate. Sethe gives her face to Beloved and still she demands more. Beloved

eventually becomes bloated with Sethe's loving excesses, but her thirst remains unquenched.

Paul D. understands the dangers inherent in this kind of love when he warns Sethe, "Your

love is too thick" (164). Beloved has no distinct identity separate from Sethe. Without Sethe,
66

Beloved is ultimately left "crouching in a dark, dark place, forgetting to smile" (252).

Likewise, Sethe's own identity is nearly lost or completely surrendered in her fusion with

Beloved.

Though short of ultimate union or reunion with Beloved in death, Sethe is unable and

unwilling to challenge Beloved's place in her mind and in her home. Only help from others

can save her. Denver makes the first humble appeals for help on behalf of her mother. In

doing so, she begins to understand and appreciate the vital necessity of a concept of self,

influenced by but not completely dependent upon memory. Though Denver does not directly

impart this discovery to her mother Paul D. does when he tells her, "You your best thing,

Sethe. You are" (273). Ella provides the most vocal and coherent opposition to a life

dominated by the past. Her ideas seem to be built upon the foundation of Baby Suggs wisdom

which said, "We flesh… Love it. Love it hard", advocating a sensual existence grounded

firmly in the present (88). "Ella didn't like the idea of past errors taking possession of the

present...Daily life took as much as she had. The future was sunset; the past something to

leave behind...every day was a test and a trial" (256). In some ways, her thoughts seem to

echo Nietzsche's metaphor of the Eternal Return of the Same. As an ethical endeavour, he

challenges every individual to live each moment, each hour, each day, as though he or she

was doomed to repeat it for eternity. Memory represents an obstacle to such an existence. It is

both a barrier and bridge between individuals. By the conclusion of the novel, memories

dissipate and dissolve. They do not linger. The reader is left with a sense that some things

should be forgotten or at least ignored. "Remembering seemed unwise.” Perhaps, memory

houses a great paradox: the ability to create a false sense of completeness, the ability to

provoke the most profound sense of loss. It is the paradox woven into the nature of memory
67

which moves time forward. "The force behind the movement of time is a mourning that will

not be comforted."

  Motherhood and Slavery

Toni Morrison’s Beloved explores the many horrors of, as well as emotional and

physical damage incurred by, slavery. One of the most poignant and potentially devastating

effects is the effect it has on motherhood. Slavery, as illustrated by Morrison, destroyed

mother-child relationships. Slavery turned children of slaves into property—property that was

not the slaves,’ but the masters;’ mothers could not nurse or raise their own children: a

provision to ensure they would not become attached to them; and the horrors of slavery

caused emotional disconnects that led to mothers mentally neglecting their children. This was

perhaps because mothers knew they would be losing their children sooner or later anyway.

Morrison explores the fact that slave mothers often were not allowed to raise or nurse their

own children, and shows the damage it does to the mother-child relationships. She illustrates

this with three episodes in the novel: (1) Sethe’s relationship with her own mother; (2) Baby

Suggs’ relationships with her children; and (3) the milk stealing scene. Each of these

experiences demonstrates the harmful effects of slavery on motherhood.

Sethe did not get the chance to know her mother, and only encountered her one time

that she could recall; her mother pulled her aside to show her a branding under her breast, and

told her that if anything happened to her, Sethe could recognize her by that mark (72). When

her mother is hanged, Sethe recognizes her branding. According to Lynda Koolish, of San
68

Diego State University, Sethe was deeply affected, not only by her lack of a relationship with

her mother, but also by her mother’s hanging. Slavery had so destroyed Sethe’s mother that

she chose to leave her only living child, presumably the only child she loved, to try to escape.

Nan tells Sethe that she was with her mother on the ship from Africa, and they were both

raped and impregnated several times by the crew. She explains, “’She threw them all away

but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites

she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black

man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around” (Morrison

74). So it is clear that Sethe was loved by her mother, but her mother still tried to leave her

behind.

Sethe would rather kill her children than subject them to the horrors of slavery once

she had escaped with them. She shows this when she tells Paul D, “I couldn’t let her nor any

of em live under schoolteacher. […] I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” (192-3).

Her mother, however, perhaps knew that if she tried to escape with Sethe and had been

captured, Sethe would have also been hanged. While Sethe tries to kill her children to save

them, her mother killed her other babies in order to challenge her sexual and economic

oppression, according to Michele A.L. Barzey of Black Theology in Britain: A Journal of

Contextual Praxis (12). Sethe does not see that her mother did not want to put her life even

more at risk by trying to escape with her. This forever shapes the way Sethe thinks of

motherhood and slavery. The fact that Sethe does not know her mother or understand her

motives affects her relationship with her own children in different ways: she hates that her

mother could not nurse her, so she places extreme importance on nursing her own children;

and she tries to be disconnected from her children for fear that she will lose all of them, as

she lost her mother.

While Sethe’s emotional disconnect with her children comes after she has been able

to “love em proper” (Morrison 190), Baby Suggs’ emotional disconnect with her children

starts immediately. According to Barzey, she “refused to let herself love children who could

be taken away from her” (14). Morrison clearly illustrates this when she explains why she

had prepared herself for Halle’s death. She had been prepared for that better than she had for

his life. The last of her children, whom she barely glanced at when he was born because it

wasn’t worth the trouble to try to learn features you would never see change into adulthood

anyway. Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips with her

own—fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a mother would recognize

anywhere. She didn’t know to this day what their permanent teeth looked like; or how they

held their heads when they walked. Did Patty lose her lisp? What colour did Famous’ skin

finally take? Was that a cleft in Johnny’s chin or just a dimple that would disappear soon or

his jawbone changed? Four girls, and the last time she saw them there was no hair under their

arms. Does Ardelia still love the burned bottom of bread? All seven were gone or dead. What

would be the point of looking too hard at the youngest one? (163-5) Baby Suggs had lost all

of her children in one way or another, and her emotional block was a method of self-

preservation: if she did not know her children, she could not miss them when they were gone.

Moreover, the metaphorical reduction of slaves to livestock constructs the idea that

they are property to be bought and sold; slave children are a form of self-sustaining crop to

slave masters—theirs to be bought and sold, and not the mother’s to love and nurture.

According to Koolish, “While pregnancy thus creates for many women the illusion of an

undifferentiated and relatively unconflicted fusion between mother and child, slavery makes

impossible both in pregnancy and its aftermath, the ideal experience of mothering” (p.182).

Slavery, in its very essence, prohibits mothers from bonding with their children. This is
70

because it is understood that they are property. When a slave mother kills one of her children,

the main charge against her is “loss of and/or damage to property” (p. 12). Sethe clearly

alludes to this when she says that “they [her children] wasn’t [sic] mine to love” (p. 190). In

fact, slaves, as well as slave children, were considered the same as work-animals to their

masters. This point is made explicitly clear when schoolteacher thinks that Sethe had “at least

ten breeding years left. But now she’d gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew

who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run. Schoolteacher had chastised that nephew,

telling him to think—just think—what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point

of education” (p. 176). Schoolteacher, and slave masters like him, did not regard slaves as

human, but instead believed that they were sub-human, with human-like and animal-like

qualities. This justified the horrible treatment slaves were forced to endure. Not only did the

horrible treatment leave physical scars, but also very deep emotional scars. This is especially

the case when Sethe’s milk is stolen. Since she was not only deprived of nursing from her

mother for more than the first few weeks of life, but she was also nursed last by Nan and left

hungry, Sethe understood the importance of breastfeeding for both mothers and children. She

said, “Nan had to nurse white babies and me too because Ma’am was in the rice. The little

white babies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call

my own. I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and

holler for it, and to have so little left” (236). This was likely the reason Sethe was so

concerned about providing milk for her children. She knew how it felt to not have a mother to

love and provide for her. Her milk was all she had for her children, but she made sure they

had enough. As she imagines telling Beloved, Sethe thinks, “… only me had your milk, and

God do what He would, I was going to get it to you. You remember that, don’t you; that I

did? That when I got here I had milk enough for all?” (233).
71

She desperately wanted Beloved to understand that, even though she was violated, she

still had enough milk for her baby. Barzey explains:

“Sethe’s love for her children, her striving to nurture them, her desire to keep them safe is

symbolized by her ability to breastfeed them. The schoolteacher and his sons had held her

down and drank her breast milk. When she told Mrs. Garner what had happened, she was

beaten. Yet when she spoke of the incident, she was more angry about the fact that: “they had

stolen the milk intended for her child than the whipping that had left her with a back so

scarred she had no feeling in it. She had to get away from Sweet Home, not for herself, but so

that she could feed her baby daughter whom she had entrusted to another runaway slave.

(14)”

Sethe was so appalled that they dared to try to steal from her child, by stealing her

milk, that it was a far worse atrocity to steal her milk than to open her back for telling on

them. By stealing her milk, they had not only committed a crime against Sethe, but against

her child, too. They had attempted to take away the only thing Sethe could provide for her

children. But they could not steal the milk from her child, though they’d tried. Sethe says,

“[Beloved] She my daughter. The one I managed to have milk for and to get it to her even

after they stole it; after they handled me like I was the cow, no, the goat, back behind the

stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses” (p. 236-7). So, while the milk-

stealing had scarred Sethe emotionally much worse than her completely scarred back, in her

mind she still won since she still got the milk to her Beloved.

While slavery may have destroyed motherhood and mother-child relationships, it did

not succeed in destroying the love between slave mothers and their children. Sethe had such

love for her children that she couldn’t fathom them living the life she endured; death was

much kinder than slavery. Slavery could never destroy maternal love, but it forced mothers to
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make decisions no mother should have to make: showing your child how to identify your

lifeless body; forgetting all of their features to make their absence less painful; and ultimately

killing them to spare them. 

Theme of Home

From the opening line of the novel, “124 was spiteful,” a sense of place is established

as a key element. The main characters who reside in the house or have previously resided in

the house are directly affected by the haunted spirit of Sethe’s dead baby. While this gives

way to the power of spirits and the supernatural within the novel as a whole, it always gives

meaning to the house and what it stands for, particularly according to Sethe. Sethe refuses to

move out of the house for anything or anyone, including her daughter, Denver. In addition to

giving stubborn responses to Paul D, her daughter and Baby Suggs when they inquire about

moving to a different house, the narrator gives us a glimpse into Sethe’s head by utilizing

third person limited point of view. The narrator describes, “This house he told her to leave as

though a house was a little thing-a shirtwaist or a sewing basket you could walk off from or

give away any old time. She who had never had but this one; she who had to bring a fistful of

salsify into Mrs. Garner’s kitchen every day just to be able to work in it, feel like some part

of it was hers…” (27). For her, this house, the only one she has ever been able to call her

own, is a symbolism of her pride, her only connection to her dead baby and a remembrance

of the hardships she endured to make it out of slavery and into the real world of being able to

buy property and reside in it.

Portrayal of Men and Masculinity

Because Toni Morrison explores the lives of women in all her novels, most critics read her

works as mainly woman-centered, while most studies of her male characters present the men and

their stories as secondary to that of the women characters. However, Morrison also explores the
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constructions of masculinities as complicated by race and history in her works. Through her male

characters’ lives in Beloved, Morrison demonstrates the complexities and paradoxes inherent in the

making of black masculinities and the oppression and denial of selfhood they experience in a slave-

owning era. She thus tells the stories of black male characters and invests them with voice and

visibility. To clearly bring out the realities of being black, male and subordinated, she contrasts black

masculinities with the dominant white hegemonic masculinity practices that restrict and negatively

define black men. Using the lives of selected black and white male characters in Beloved, this paper

examines the manifestations of white hegemonic masculinities in the white characters’ lives and their

impact on black men. It also analyses the creation and operations of black or subordinated

masculinities within the oppressive and often horrific circumstances in which black men find

themselves.

The depiction of the struggling male figure in Toni Morrison’s Beloved is faint in comparison

to female community and characters in the novel, but it is the lack thereof that represents the idea of

the hidden masculine in society. There are a few recurring ideas that hinder males in a way that

accents their gender stress and follow studies of masculinity. By marginalizing men and illustrating

Paul D’s anxiety and Halle’s breakdown, Morrison critiques and sheds light on the hidden pressures

and expectations placed on men by society and the female community through history as it began

with slavery. First, the males express to hide their feelings and practice “thin” love, this aligns with

their lifestyle bound in slavery as they fight to find work and assimilate afterwards. Black male

slaves are also stipend power based on the ‘hospitality’ or radicalness of their masters. While some

masters wield their slaves as weapons of empowerment, an occasional white man will be as civil as

he is able according to the restrictions of society and ownership.

The black males of Beloved: Paul D, Halle, the rest of the Sweet Home men, and Stamp Paid,

approach their masculinity in ways that emphasize their strength and standing in society through
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images, metaphors, and also by accentuating their experiences as a slave in ways that are not

experienced in the same way by female slaves. For instance, their experience of punishment by their

white masters, While their images can be interpreted as phallic, haunting, or animalistic that

accentuate their masculinity, their interpretations also show the oppressions they experience that

define their humanity.

Paul D is one of the major male characters in Beloved, but his story goes mostly unheard and

unstressed, as does his identity as character. His actions throughout the novel are quite judgmental,

yet protective of Sethe’s parenting skills and wellbeing as a lover, but he still cannot understand her

attachment and reasoning towards Beloved, as do many other characters. If readers are to understand

Sethe’s fierce maternal love, Paul D’s meditation on the anxieties and pressures of manhood, a

system that keeps men from that love, must be analysed as a counterbalance. Paul D practices

careful, “thin” love just as some masculine theories do not associate strong masculine figures as

compassionate or adoring because it would contradict their outward appearance and ‘their capability

to be a man.’ He fulfils his masculine role here as he defies love and appearing weak because of it as

Bell Hooks suggests.

From the start of the novel the slaves of Sweet Home are called “men” by their ‘radical’

owner Mr. Garner, “bought…thataway, raised…thataway” (p. 10). Calling a slave ‘man,’ instead of

‘boy’ insinuates a form of respect and empowerment that can be dangerous. Masculinity is accented

by the words and labels associated with it to separate the Sweet Home men from the rest of the slave

community. In the words of Garner, “if you a man yourself, you’ll want your niggers to be men too”

(p. 10). By classifying himself as a powerful, brave man amongst powerful, ‘animalistic’ male slaves

he controls, Mr. Garner demonstrates his fearlessness as slave owner, but he also increases the value

and power of the men he owns. The Sweet Home men are not the common nineteenth century

propaganda slaves that are typically portrayed as “lazy, childlike, docile, or [even] happy in the role
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of the servant” (Morris 77). Instead, they are thriving, hungry black brutes— a separate entity from

the withered ‘boy’ in slavery, something to respect and fear. By dominating and controlling

something as powerful as him, Mr. Garner elevates the competition among other slave owners while

demonstrating the masculinity of himself and the slaves he controls. He appears more ‘civil’ to his

slaves, his decent treatment keeps his slaves from running. Though Sweet Home poses as a haven,

the context of slavery still soils Mr. Garner’s ‘generosity’ because he still possesses ownership over

others.

Morrison first introduces Paul D and his strength as a man when he first walks into “spiteful”

124 (p. 3). He quickly assumes the role of protector and defender in order to cast out the evil and

uneasiness tormenting Sethe and Denver— the damsels in distress. Even Sethe expects she can “trust

things and remember things [just from Paul D’s presence] because the last of the Sweet Home men

was there to catch her if she sank” (p. 18). Paul D ignites the memories, strength, and bonds of Sweet

Home that Sethe was once a part of. Swinging a wooden table and screaming at the house, “You

want to fight, come on! God damn it!” (p. 18). He demonstrates his dominance and anger, proving he

is still a man that fights despite his years as a slave and surviving in a system that is formulated by

removing fight and vigour. Perhaps he is stronger because he was constantly in danger, always

threatened, or maybe he is fulfilling the stereotype of the violent, belligerent black male because he

cannot help it— years of conforming has damaged his identity as a human being.

Paul D’s strength as a man is undeniable until he demonstrates signs of doubt and loneliness.

He recalls that he “had not trembled since 1856 and then for eighty-three days in a row. Locked up

and chained down…” until he faces the evil in 124 only to realize that he was “not shaking from

worry, but because the floorboards were…” (p. 18). This shows that Paul D unintentionally and

subconsciously connects his traumatic past to current experiences without remedying them or

initially understanding them. Cultural critic Todd W. Reeser indicates that “hiding can allow
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masculinity to function without challenge or question” as fear and confusion are masked a sturdy

outward appearance remains (Reeser 7). Paul D keeps his past secret from Sethe until she finds out

the truth about Halle. While he keeps his past concealed he remains a trustworthy and durable male

figure in Sethe’s eyes until he is forced to explain Halle’s own suffering and ultimately reveal her

husband’s weakness.

Unlike Paul D, however, Sethe openly grieves and her sorrow grows and personifies in 124.

Perhaps this is because she is a woman or she has stronger connections with the house and her past.

Sethe is completely ignorant to the possibility that men can feel fear or she holds too much faith in

men to not show weakness. Paul D explains to her, “Let me tell you something. A man ain’t a

goddamn ax. Chopping, hacking, busting every goddamn minute of the day. Things get to him.

Things he can’t chop down because they’re inside” (p. 69). His definition of a man incorporates

social triggers in which the male is a tool of fragile violence and fury, a tool of work and

enslavement, but also defence. While the man, the ax, is available to be utilized, women may rely on

the tool for support and backing. If they rely too heavily on the tool, it can become a hindrance or

eventually break. Hoping 124 will not break him, Paul D swings and hacks at an unknown evil in

which his thrashing and screaming shows the exploitation of his masculinity. While he performs his

masculinity, his exaggeration appears senseless and fearful. With this explanation of the ax, Paul D

acknowledges and reveals the weakness of men in general to Sethe. In doing so, he also creates

eventual doubt in Sethe’s feelings and trust in him with Beloved’s intrusion.

There is a moment in Paul D’s past where his masculinity is completely removed. Eventually

Paul D is sold to a chain gang where he sleeps in a box at night and works all day chained to 46 other

slaves. This community of male slaves forms a quiet brotherhood with unnoticeable cues and words

that band them together. They do not hold each other to specific roles to fill as a masculine
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community would, they are not afraid to show emotion because all 46 are feeling the same thing with

good reason, and when these individuals link every morning they move and work as one.

“When all fort-six were standing in a line in the trench, another rifle shot signalled the climb

out and up to the ground above, where one thousand feet of the best hand-forged chain in Georgia

stretched. Each man bent and waited. The first man picked up the end and threaded it through the

loop on his leg iron. He stood up then, and, shuffling a little, brought the chain tip to the next

prisoner, who did likewise. As the chain was passed on and each man stood in the other’s place, the

line of men turned around, facing the boxes they had come out of. No one spoke to the other. At least

not with words. The eyes had to tell what there was to tell: ‘Help me this morning’s bad’; ‘I’m a

make it’; ‘New man’; ‘Steady now steady.’” (p. 107)

Morrison simultaneously captures the individual male surviving without outside concerns

such as women, old masters, etc., but also relying on a group of individuals with mutual

understanding and respect. This interesting dynamic renders the men helpless on their own, but they

find comfort in each other. They are not loving “thick” or “thin” as they would in society, they are

being human: living by each other’s strength and endangering each other in return. “A man could

risk his own life, but not his brother’s” (p. 109). The masculinity encased in slavery provides a new

medium to paint humanity while also stressing its horrors. Paul D is able to come to terms with his

past, but he still continues to doubt the fundamental aspects of his identity, the source of his

manhood, and his value as a person, which can be accredited to his gender strains and emasculation

due to slavery and his black self.

NARRATIVE EMPATHY

 Empathy
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  The concept of empathy is used to refer to a wide range of psychological capacities

that are thought of as being central for constituting humans as social creatures allowing us to

know what other people are thinking and feeling, to emotionally engage with them, to share

their thoughts and feelings, and to care for their well–being. Ever since the eighteenth

century, due particularly to the influence of the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith,

those capacities have been at the centre of scholarly investigations into the underlying

psychological basis of our social and moral nature. Yet, the concept of empathy is of

relatively recent intellectual heritage. Moreover, since researchers in different disciplines

have focused their investigations on very specific aspects of the broad range of empathy-

related phenomena, one should probably not be surprised by a certain amount of conceptual

confusion and a multiplicity of definitions associated with the empathy concept in a number

of different scientific and non-scientific discourses. 

Empathy in Literature

In The Passionate Muse, Keith Oatley provided an insightful account of the role of

emotions in literary fiction.  He summarized: "Fiction is based on narratives in which

characters act on their intentions and encounter vicissitudes. Readers enjoy entering into the

lives of characters, following their projects, and coming to empathize with them as their

plans progress or meet obstacles. Readers enjoy, too, meeting characters with whom they

sympathize, and being reminded of emotional episodes in their own lives."

Another description offers two modes of empathy based on physiological mimicry and verbal

analogy.  A third mode of empathy called embodied simulation, is best understood using

Chris Eliasmith’s idea of semantic pointers, which are patterns of neural firing that can

represent sensory, motor, and emotional information.  They can support rules such as

“insulted” , “hurt”, where the words in quotations indicate semantic pointers using non-verbal
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representations. For example, “insult” can include the tone of voice, facial expression, and

obnoxious gesture that goes with an abusive remark; and “hurt” is the felt emotional

response.  Empathising with an insulted character in a novel or movie involves running in

your own mind the rule so that you can appreciate more directly how being insulted, for

instance, is hurtful. 

 Contemporary views on Empathetic Narrative

Narrative empathy is empathic emotion towards narratives. Empathy is a term closely

related to sympathy or compassion, and the two are commonly used in relation to each other.

In Empathy and The Novel, Keen “distinguishes the spontaneous, responsive sharing of an

appropriate feeling as empathy, and the more complex, differentiated feeling for another as

sympathy”. One can use Keen’s definition of the terms, and treat empathy as the ability to put

oneself in another’s place and fully manage to understand their situation. Empathy in itself is

morally neutral whereas sympathy is not. For Patrick Colm Hogan “to empathize with

someone is to put oneself in his/her place, and that substitution presupposes something that is

shared”. Hogan distinguishes two separate ways in which this sharing can occur. The first he

calls categorical empathy, which is empathy based on the empathizer and sufferer sharing a

categorical trait – for instance gender, race, nationality, ethnicity, age and so on. This is the

weaker kind of empathy, rarely leading to compassion because it is group-related and not

based on individual mapping of feelings (Keen; Empathy and the Novel). The other is

situational empathy, which occurs when the reader has a memory of a similar situation or

feeling to that of the sufferer. Following Hogan, situational empathy is the form of empathy

that more likely leads to sympathetic or empathetic concern, because of its reliance on “a

reader having a memory of comparable experience” (Keen Empathy and the Novel). As

Hogan points out, the emotional response that empathy leads to is often triggered by how we
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place ourselves in relation to the one we empathize with. If the reader considers herself

inferior to the character, this may lead to idolization. If she values herself and the character as

equals, the reader will most likely be compassionate or sympathetic. A compassionate

response requires an “it could have been me” feeling within the reader. Third, if the reader

values the character as inferior to herself the emotional response will most likely be of pity

(Hogan; What Literature Teaches Us About Emotion). A different aspect distinguishes

difficult empathy from easy empathy. Eric Leake points out the developmental effect of

difficult empathy in literature and the distinction from easy empathy: Whereas an easy

empathy does not require much of a stretch and can suggest a complete grasp, a difficult

empathy pushes the limits of our understanding in reaching out to those with whom we might

not otherwise wish contact or association.

 Martha Nussbaum and the Narrative Imagination

 Philosopher Martha Nussbaum is an acknowledged theorist in the field of philosophy

and humanities, who has “stressed the value of novel reading for the cultivation of empathy”

(Hogan; Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories). She has presented grand

works on emotional studies and found the concept of narrative imagination very important in

the cultivation of world citizenship. Her approach is mainly philosophical, but is also

pedagogical. In Cultivating Humanity, she argues that narrative imagination, acquired by

studying controversial literary works, is one of three essential abilities one must have in order

to become an open-minded world citizen: First, is the capacity to be critical towards oneself

and one’s traditions. The second is the ability to see human beings as a whole and not as

separate groups; understanding how “common needs and aims are differently realized in five

different circumstances” (Nussbaum 10). The third capacity is the narrative imagination,

which is the one central to this thesis. Narrative imagination is the ability to imagine what it
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is like to be in a person’s place, even if that person is very different from oneself. This

capacity, Nussbaum argues, is best acquired through fiction: The first step of understanding

the world from the point of view of the other is essential to any responsible act or judgement,

since we do not know what we are judging until we see the meaning of an action as the

person intends it, the meaning of speech as it expresses something of importance in the

context of that person’s history and social world. The capacity to understand and reflect upon

perspectives different than those we already inhabit can be rehearsed through fiction.

Through literature the reader has the opportunity to investigate thoughts and feelings of

another, and also to be critical of those thoughts and feelings. Allowing oneself to mentally

be in the position of a character in fiction is less challenging for a reader than to do the same

with a person one has just met on the street. Nussbaum believes that this opportunity to “look

inside” the character’s mind also allows the reader to take a necessary step back. With this

she means to reflect upon “whether the person’s own judgement has taken the full measure of

what has happened”. This step back contributes to a better understanding of individuals who

appear to be different from us. Furthermore, she claims that narrative imagination teaches us

to become more reflective human beings in real life. In order for readers to develop this

imaginative ability, she emphasises that “we must encourage them to read critically; not only

to empathize and experience, but also to ask critical questions about that experience.” To

accomplish this, she argues, one must read novels that problematise empathy for characters.

Nussbaum explains, “if we can easily sympathise with a character, the invitation to do so has

relatively little moral value”. Only when forced to leave the comfort zone of what is morally

accepted can one develop an open-minded world citizenship. This is also why she believes

that it is important to teach literature that “challenges conventional wisdom and values”. The

novel Native Son by Richard Wright is one of Nussbaum’s most frequent examples of

important unconventional literature that challenges reader’s empathy. To be able to empathise

with the young African American protagonist “who kills his lover Bessie more casually than

he kills a rat” is extremely difficult. The dissonance between the alternating perspectives of

newspaper articles and the narrated monologues of Bigger Thomas makes it even more

challenging for the reader to empathise. Similar dissonance emerges in Beloved where Toni

Morrison challenges the reader to look past the brutal portrayals of Sethe killing her own

baby girl and try to empathise with Sethe as she portrays herself as an advocate of freedom.

But at the same time, Morrison prevents this empathy from fully taking place by repeating the

event through the critical perspectives of other characters. Suzanne Keen critiques Nussbaum

and other theorists in favour of the empathy altruism theory, claiming that findings on the

altruistic effect of narrative empathy are “inconclusive at best and nearly always exaggerated

in favour of the beneficial effects of novel reading.”

 Suzanne Keen’s Research on Narrative Empathy

  Suzanne Keen “has studied recent writings on emotion more broadly and deeply” than

Nussbaum has (Hogan; Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories). Her

interdisciplinary work takes a critical approach to the connection between narrative empathy

and altruistic behaviour. One of her main arguments is that fiction provides a safe place for

readers, allowing us to distance ourselves from our moral beliefs and values. Therefore, we

can empathise with fiction without feeling any need for altruistic action in real life (Empathy

and the Novel). Much of Keen’s work concerns investigating research and theories on

specific narrative techniques that can be effective in invoking reader’s empathy. Her work is

based on findings from a diversity of research on the emotional effects of reading. She

separates two main areas in which cultivation of reader’s empathy occurs, through character

identification and narrative situation (including point of view and perspective). Character

identification is not a manipulative technique that an author can use to cultivate empathy, but
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happens within the reader herself. However, the author can attempt to manipulate empathy

through the narrative situation, which includes: the nature of the mediation between the

author and the reader, including the person of the narration, the implicit location of the

narrator, the relation of the narrator to the characters, and the internal and external

perspective on characters, including in some cases the style of representation of characters’

consciousness (Keen; Empathy and the Novel). Morrison employs complex narrative voices

and perspectives in her works, as much to problematise empathy as to invoke it. In Narrative

Form, Keen points out that “the manipulation of a narrative situation is one of the most useful

strategies possessed by fiction writers to elicit sympathy, to command respect, and to unleash

the complicated effects that go by the name of irony”. The choice of narrative perspective can

be important for reader’s empathy. “A commonplace of narrative theory suggests that an

internal perspective best promotes character identification” (Keen; Empathy and the Novel).

Tense, the use of analepses, and characterisations are all amongst narrative techniques that

may influence how the reader emotionally responds to a character. The way internal

representations of characters are presented through third-person narratives might also affect

how the reader responds to the characters. Wayne Booth claims, “a psychic vividness of

prolonged and deep inside views” can help an author achieve “intense sympathy” for a

character who would not otherwise get sympathy easily from the reader. Furthermore,

theorists have found that representation of characters’ thoughts through “narrated monologue

has a strong effect on readers’ responses” (Keen; Empathy and the Novel). In narrated

monologue the character’s thoughts are presented within the tense and perspective of the

narrator. We see examples of narrated monologues in Toni Morrison’s work where these

multiple internal perspectives affect the reader’s emotions towards the protagonists.
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 Toni Morrison’s Narrative Perspectives

 Toni Morrison is referred to as “America’s conscience” by several reviewers because

of her unique portrayals of the shameful history of slavery, abuse and segregation in America.

Through her novels, she gives voice to the silenced history of African Americans.

 In Morrison’s novels the reader must always pay attention to whose perspective she

is introduced to, and further reflect upon how this perspective complicates her emotions. This

is significant to our empathetic response to her work because the presence of multiple

perspectives becomes such an important part of the ethical judgement of her protagonists. Her

works portray how nuances of perspectives, subjectivity of truth and the limitations of

empathy problematize our emotional responses as readers. There are three main techniques

through which the narrative situation is manipulated to problematize and challenge the

reader's empathy in Toni Morrison’s famous Beloved.

First, the narrative situation in terms of narrative voice, perspective and disordering of

events manipulates how the reader responds to the plot. In particular, the monologues

accruing at the mid-section of the novel (236-256) are powerful ethical devices. These

alternating narrative perspectives also illustrate the multiplicity of truth, and challenge the

reader’s own version of it. Second, by completely isolating major characters (especially

protagonist Sethe and her daughter Denver), Morrison distances her readers from them. From

this section it can be discerned that isolating individual characters from each other provides a

distance from the protagonist that makes empathetic response challenging for the reader.

Third, the extremity of the events portrayed causes narrative distancing between the whole

narrative and the reader. Morrison alternates familiarity and unfamiliarity in an unpredictable

way. This might cause the reader to question the limits of empathy and problematise the
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emotion of pity. What are the limitations of what we can imagine? Can the extremity of

Sethe’s experiences lead to anything other than pity or personal distress for the reader?

Beloved has had a tremendous impact on the field of African American literature and is

considered an important part of the literary canon. The work is written through several

individual memories of Sethe’s deed the day the  Schoolteacher (slave-owner) and his men

approach Sethe’s home to reclaim her and the children as his “property.” Sethe collects her

four children and runs to the shed to save them from slavery. In the shed she attempts to kill

all of them. She severely hurts her two boys and her baby girl, Denver, and manages to kill

Beloved, her “crawling already” infant, with a handsaw. We are invited into their “spiteful”

house called 124 in 1873, years after the infanticide took place, when “Sethe and her

daughter Denver are its only victims” because everybody else has either run off or died

(Morrison; Beloved 3). The baby ghost of Beloved haunts the house. When Sethe and Paul D

begin to share the painful stories of their mutual past as slaves at the plantation called Sweet

Home, Beloved returns to 124 in physical form, possibly as a symbol of suppressed memory

of the past. Multiple portrayals of Sethe using a handsaw to slice her daughter’s throat, make

the reader unable to take a clear ethical stand about this infanticide and question whether or

not she can empathise with Sethe. Morrison manipulates the narration by alternating internal

and external perceptions of multiple characters, carefully choosing which memory to present

at which time. The structure gives an oral effect to the narrative as new perspectives are

portrayed, and the ability to empathize with Sethe becomes more and more problematic for

the reader throughout the novel. One powerful perspective after another makes the ethical

dilemma large, and the reader must always pay attention to whose eyes she sees through.

Throughout the novel we are presented with a fragmented structure that keeps the

reader at a distance from the narrative. The plot jumps between past and present as we follow
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Sethe’s analepses side by side with those of Paul D, Baby Suggs (Sethe’s mother-in-law),

Stamp Paid and Denver. Even though they portray many of the same events, their memories

do not come together into a tidy wholeness. Molly A. Travis claims, “the full ethical force of

Beloved’s design derives from this side-by-side relationship between stories that do not

coalesce or resolve themselves into harmony” (Travis 237). It is important for Morrison to

tell their perspectives of a shared past separately and equally. This illustrates how these

perspectives differ, and also makes a difference to the reader’s perception of Sethe and the

infanticide. The different portrayals of the traumatic time at Sweet Home, particularly those

of Paul D and Sethe, show the reader how individual memory is. Morrison gives the reader

hints about the infanticide through these memories as well, but it is not until Stamp Paid

shows Paul D a notice in the newspaper that the reader understands that the mystery is about

to be revealed. The first revelation of Sethe’s infanticide is portrayed through the perspective

of the slave owners at Sweet Home. As Schoolteacher and his men approach the shed, the

reader sees the event through the eyes of the man who values Sethe as property that

reproduces itself. The vision is described through the perspective of a cold antagonist who

sees Sethe as an animal “beat beyond the point of education” (p. 176).

“Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-

soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other. She did not

look at them; she simply swung the baby towards the wall planks… Right off it was clear, to

schoolteachers especially, that there was nothing there to claim… Two were lying open-eyed

in the sawdust; a third pumped blood down the dress of the main one.”

As James Phelan argues, the slave catchers’ view of the incident in the shed appears

insensitive and alien, which makes this first telling of the event “an ethical perspective that

[the reader] easily can repudiate”. However, the portrayal of the incident in itself is gruesome
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and harsh, and the prior image of Sethe as merely a victim of slavery vanishes for the reader.

It becomes clear that Sethe and her family are just broken property that cannot be fixed, to

these men. After this insensitive and raw portrayal, Morrison moves to the perspective of

Stamp Paid.

  Since Stamp Paid portrays the first emotional perspective of the event, this can make

him the most dominating agent of ethics in the novel. Through the previous indirect

characterization of Stamp Paid, the reader learns to know him as the man who saves Sethe

and her baby-Denver from death and starvation when they first arrive from Sweet Home. He

is a compassionate and righteous man. Stamp Paid is a man who walks through painful

obstacles just to collect the best blackberries for the women in Sweet Home, only to give

Denver the first taste of the delicious berries (p.160). The characterization of him alongside

his focalization of the infanticide leaves an important impression on the reader. Stamp Paid’s

perspective appears more emotionally loaded to the reader because of his relation to Sethe.

His memory of the day the infanticide took place however, portrays Sethe’s deed as the one

of a scared animal. This positions her as inferior to him as well, but as Phelan emphasizes;

“he does not reduce her to” an animal, though he does compare her actions to those of one:

Snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing; how her face beaked, how her hands

worked like claws, how she collected them every which way… A pretty little slave girl had

recognized a hat, and split to the woodshed to kill her children. (p.185-186) From Stamp

Paid’s point of view, Sethe goes from being “a pretty little slave girl” to being a predator to

her children. The animalistic behaviour is also what the reader first emotionally responds to.

Stamp Paid’s emotions towards her are those of pity, not of sympathy. Therefore, Sethe

becomes an inferior to the reader as well and a target of pity. Pity is an emotion directed

towards an inferior person, and Morrison lets her implied reader become conscious of this
88

emotion created through the eyes of Stamp Paid. “To respond with compassion, [the reader]

must be willing to entertain the thought that the suffering person might be [her]”. If the reader

places herself above the character she will not be able to respond with compassion, but rather

with pity. This is what the reader is most likely to do because of the inferior portrayal of

Sethe: first innocent as a “ pretty little slave girl” and then fierce like a “hawk.” As Hogan

states, “we may have still greater pity if we imagine [Sethe] to lack the capacities to act

appropriately in response to the fear and the [moral] principles” (What Literature Teaches us

about Emotions; 280). Stamp Paid’s emotions towards Sethe seem to be those of “greater

pity.” In his eyes Sethe loses the capacity to think straight and act morally because of her fear

of enslavement. The narrator then moves over to Sethe’s own explanation. For the reader this

is the version that finally will “provide some resolution to the tension” Morrison has built up

through earlier “partial, indirect and cryptic references” to the infanticide (Phelan 323). As

Paul D protests several times when looking at the newspaper: “But this ain’t her mouth…

This ain’t it at all,” and he is absolutely right, the story is not the one of Sethe, but the one of

the society around her (p. 184). The perspective the reader craves is Sethe’s own “mouth.”

The only problem is that Sethe can “never close in, pin it down for anybody who [has] to

ask” (p. 192). Therefore, Morrison leaves out the emotional description from Sethe of what

exactly happened in the shed. By placing her reader in the difficult situation of not being led

in any certain ethical direction by the narrator, Morrison distances her reader from the

incident itself. While the reader in some ways is driven to look for reasons to forgive Sethe’s

deed through the previous sympathetic portrayals of her traumatic past, she is kept from

doing this by the characters who either condemn Sethe or distance themselves from her

actions. As Phelan points out, moving from the white men’s to Stamp Paid’s to Sethe’s

[perspective], is a progression towards increasingly sympathetic views. Therefore we might

be inclined to conclude that Morrison is guiding us toward accepting Sethe’s version. But the
89

triangulation of all three stories indicates that Morrison does not want Sethe’s story to be the

authoritative version because that triangulation calls attention to what Sethe leaves out of her

account: the handsaw, the slit throat, the blood, the swinging of the baby toward the wall.

Sethe’s own perception of the death of Beloved is quite different from what is portrayed by

the others. She is no longer a trapped animal, but a fighter for justice, which makes her

perspective more sympathetic. Stamp Paid believes that ”in her own mind she is acting as the

altruistic mother, “trying to out-hurt the hurter”. Sethe claims to Paul D that she made the

only right choice that day. She kept the children from death by enslavement, which is a

powerful claim that would impose sympathetic response. The problem is, as Phelan points

out, that she leaves out the horror that the other portrayals call attention to. This, together

with Sethe’s later comment to Beloved, “they stopped me from getting us there, but they

didn't stop you from getting here. Haha '' makes it difficult to sympathize with her because of

the brutality of the deed itself (Morrison; Beloved 239). Her perspective causes the implied

reader to feel, as the people watching her step into the cart to prison, that “her head is a bit

too high” and “her back a little too straight” for a mother who has murdered her own baby

girl (p.179).

In the interior monologues of Sethe, Denver and Beloved at the very end of the second part of

the novel, Morrison grants them their own free space to share their versions of the truth.

Travis calls this shift in structure “emblematic of the ethical power of the novel,” because of

how their voices are put in “counterpoint” to each other, to symbolize the multiplicity of

ethics and truth (Travis 237). When Sethe discovers that Beloved is her returned daughter,

she is determined to make Beloved understand her choice of killing her and explains “how if

she hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something [Sethe] could not bear to

happen to her” (p.236). Being free from slavery makes her a person, entitled to love her own
90

children because they are hers to love. Going back to slavery turns her and the children into

the “property” the schoolteacher describes. Lifeless “things” or “dogs” with nothing of their

own to love. Therefore, her definition of dying is the loss of safety and freedom at Sweet

Home. She will not let her children go back to the hell she fought so hard to save them from,

and killing them means saving them from that hell. Sethe becomes an active agent of freedom

in her own eyes. Through Sethe’s reasoning of the infanticide, Morrison also reminds her

reader of the limitations of our empathy. When reflecting upon Paul D’s disapproval of her

choice, Sethe again refers back to the abusive life of enslavement: “I have felt what it felt like

and nobody walking or stretched out is going to make you feel it too. Not you, not none of

mine, and when I tell you mine, I also mean I’m yours” (p. 239). It is difficult to follow Sethe

in her reasoning because of how brutally she kills Beloved when all she wants is to keep her

safe. The reader, understanding that she cannot identify with Sethe’s reasoning, “also

notice[s] differences in the inner world, seeing the delicate interplay between common human

goals and the foreignness that can be created by circumstances' ' (Nussbaum 95). In Sethe’s

monologue even the reader with the categorical connection of motherhood falls short of

identification. Loving motherhood and infanticide do not fit together, so the reader “is not

going to feel,” like Sethe. Sethe’s reasoning is based on a history of oppression, which the

reader realizes that she cannot empathize with. From Sethe, the narrative voice moves over to

Denver’s monologue, which in isolation has empathetic impact on the reader. Denver’s story

is the one that invokes the most sympathy within the reader. Her voice is pure and innocent

and it also contains the most consistent structure. She is hopeful of her father’s return. She

longs for a sister to love. She has a genuine fear of being killed by her mother (p. 242). Loss

of a close relative, love for a sibling, and fear of death are all traits that imply fundamentals

for situational empathy. Keen writes that “a character’s negative affective states, such as

those provoked by undergoing prosecution, suffering, grieving and experiencing painful

obstacles, make a reader’s empathizing more likely” (Empathy and the Novel; 71). Denver as

merely a victim is easier to empathize with for the reader. It is no coincidence that Denver is

the one who portrays her mother’s story of,

“what it took [Sethe] to drag the teeth of that saw under the little chin; to feel the baby blood

pump like oil in her hands…to squeeze her so she could absorb, still, the death spasms that

shot through that adored baby, plump and sweet with life” (Morrison; Beloved 295). This is

probably the most emotional passage of the novel, full of compassion. For a minute the

implied reader is led to feel that Sethe addresses the reader herself, until Morrison reminds

her, “this and much more had Denver heard her say [to Beloved]” (p. 296). Still, Morrison

has not given a direct perspective from Sethe on the murder, and even though the reader

sympathises with Denver’s retelling, it is not Sethe’s own “voice” this time either. Sethe is

only capable of telling the truth to Beloved, because she believes Beloved already has

forgiven her and can understand her. Sethe says, “I’ll explain to her, even though I don´t have

to…She understands everything already” (p. 237). This indicates that Sethe can only explain

to somebody who has already forgiven her and Beloved is the only one in the position to do

so. The three sections, ending with Beloved’s stream of consciousness, demonstrate how

ethical power lays within the equality of the perspectives, which do not fit or make up one

whole (Travis 237). “Beloved, she my daughter” (Morrison; Beloved 237), “Beloved is my

sister” and “I am Beloved, and she is mine” are the first sentences of each of their “chapters”

and show the women’s equal rights to ownership of their stories (242, 248, 253). The lines

ending this narrative structure: “I loved you/You hurt me/ You came back to me/You left me/

I waited for you”(256) illustrate how they contradict each other. Finally, the echoes of voices,

which we cannot identify, “you are mine / You are mine /You are mine” crash into each

other. The reader feels like the characters speak directly to her, demanding her attention and
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demanding sympathy. But what the voices are saying does not provide a complete true

answer to the reader’s moral questions. The inconsistency in this narrative situation is a

powerful empathetic device and in its multiplicity it works against the claims of easy

empathy with a first person perspective.

Sadism in Beloved

Depictions of the suffering feminine body have been repeatedly portrayed in

American women’s literature and photography that references Southern slavery. The sadistic

discourse of enslavement flowed into notions of femininity in the antebellum South. A loud

cry for the Confederacy during the war was to protect and preserve the sanctity of Southern,

white womanhood. But the apparent, and heavily inscribed fault-line between the

iconography of white femininity and the forced placement of the African American woman

as the antithesis to white womanhood- in the sense that the nineteenth century cult of true

womanhood emphasized an idea of sexual purity from which it consciously excluded non-

Caucasian women- must be kept in mind while theorising depictions of violence against

women of different races.

In the nineteenth-century South, under the laws of slavery, it was considered legally

impossible for a white man to rape a black woman: the law argued an enslaved woman could

not be raped because she could not be chaste, categorically, even if she was not yet a woman

but only a little girl. Focusing solely on the vicious racism evident in this indifference in the

history of cultural interpretations of white, African American, and Native American women,
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however, can leave under-theorised ways that these cultural inscriptions of womanhood,

distinct in concept and in act, could and did merge in violent inscription onto the bodies of

feminine subjects of all races. That is, the gendered sadism concocted in the South to forward

the goals of racism could also be turned against the bodies of white daughters, as habits are

wot to repeat themselves in the acts of oppressors. The fictional, poetic, and photographic

works addressed in this study record and reflect this reality of sadism as a tool coined in

racism but at times expressed unilaterally against women tout court.

The depiction of white women’s violence against African American women does not

surface in the specific texts, even though historically this form of violence frequently

occurred. However, the intention here does not stem from a lack of concern for the ways that

women violate each other. On the contrary, the focus is to fully consider the dynamics of how

women watch other women’s violation by focusing on texts in which both violated and

watcher are pf the same race and class. By controlling the variables of race and class, I allow

my study to emphasise the function of gender in violence, rather than the particular kind of

racist othering.

For instance, Beloved, stages key scenes in which the figure of a feminine watcher

who is African American views, or hears about, the sadistic treatment of another African

American character. Here, the difference is between being the watcher and being the

watched; it is not a difference between races and not a difference between social classes. To

fully read Beloved, one needs to theorise the difficult borderlands in which the watcher in the

novel Sethe, as martytos, bears suffering in the sense of representing suffering’s inscription

onto her body and mind. Whilst tracking imaginative landscapes of violence and witnessing,

effects and codes of representation must also be tracked.

In many ways, representation itself can be a kind of witnessing, an extreme example

of the risk of the watcher surfaces when Sethe kills her own daughter, destroying the girl she

calls her “best thing.” Through her role as watcher of sadism, Sethe also wounds herself- and

the novel makes it clear that Sethe’s role is scopic, wounding, and salvific. In this regard, it is

worth bearing in mind that if we, as audiences, are not denoted watchers of these scenes of

violence, we are connoted watchers: we inhabit the ethical prism of the text. As Kali Tal

argues in her introduction to Worlds of Hurt, readers may themselves be re-inscribed when

they read texts depicting trauma. In the verbal and visual texts under consideration in this

book, there are at least two audiences: an audience written or imaged in the text, and an

audience perceiving the text after the fact, from the outside that yet is never entirely outside,

looped into the performative act of a literary or photographic text. When Sethe, the enslaved

mother, kills her daughter, the mother’s act of violence is a performative gesture intended to

visually ward off the sadistic slave master who has arrived to claim his quarry. The audience-

function is represented in Morrison’s novel as neither innocent nor safe.

 Theories of sadistic violence have tended to create a gender divide: the feminine falls

into the place of the violated and masculinity into that of the violator. A different approach

here would be to interrogate the very complicated ethical position of women who watch the

violated body or bodies of other women by considering examples in which a feminine

character regards another, violated, feminine character. The watcher may or may not attempt

to help that violated woman; the definitive mark here is the representation of the feminine

watcher of violence, but the meaning of this representational mark varies.

Sadism in this context diverges from Freudian notions of sexual pleasure through

sadomasochism. It refers, here, to the speculative, visual aspect of acts of cruelty that are

inflicted on the helpless body of a non-agreeing other. The world sadism here is a violence
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inflicted onto the body of a person who cannot meaningfully defend herself or refuse the act

of violence enacted against her- violence that is a vehicle of visuality, performed for the

pleasure of the sadist’s eye. Moreover, the emphasis is on the spectative force of sadism, such

as bearing down on the question of how. Sadism connects to the witnessing and/or

spectatorship of violence. Ultimately it can be said that the distance between witnessing,

watching and enjoying violence is a fine line and one that ought not to be obscured by the

ideological supposition that women do not enjoy watching other women be violated. In some

cases, the feminine watchers of violence are created as figures who work against the

replication of violence, and in other cases, there are female figures who act as an audience to

the violence: a watcher who takes pleasure in watching another woman’s violation. Morrison

initiates her Beloved with an inscription dedicated to the “sixty million and more” victimised

in the era of American Slavery.” It is a novel positioned in the act of witnessing: written to

witness and to be witnessed, a gesture not without controversy. Carrie Mae Weems’ series

From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried is a series built in part of re-photographs of

images that were originally daguerreotypes of enslaved African Americans. In re-

photographing, inscribing and installing these images, Weems established an uncanny

confluence of fiction and reality in the realm of the witness, whose act of bearing witness

resembles what, in Beloved is called “rememory.” On looking at From Here I Saw What

Happened and I Cried the witness enters the uncanny, liminal space between genres, a

liminal space also reflected in Morrison’s dedication for Beloved- for Morrison references

real, historical, kidnapped Africans and enslaved African Americans, in sharp juxtaposition

to  a novel that is a magical re-working of historical material, a mode of both magic realism

and historical fiction.

Morrison’s late twentieth-century novel is representative of a kind of canonical

femininity that creates itself as feminine by representing watching violence without flinching.

A story of feminine witnessing watches sadism in the performative sense but does not posit a

female actor of sadistic violence. Deborah Horvitz argues, in avowedly essentializing terms,

“women feel and express rage… and the difference lies in the link, for the men between

inflicting pain and gaining pleasure.”

Characters in Isolation and Limitations of Empathy

Through the subjective minds of the characters, the reader learns to know them as

individuals and not as a suppressed group of runaway slaves. This is important for cultivation

of reader’s empathy because, as the results of the social study “identifiable victim effect” by

Thomas Schelling show, people in general are more willing to help and empathise with

individuals than with groups. A common advantage of novels in general is this ability to

overcome “group identity” by individualising characters belonging to a categorical group. It

is easier for us to recognise individual subjective experiences and empathize with these.

Hogan confirms this by recognizing categorical empathy as less likely to lead to compassion

and altruism than situational empathy. The ability to individualize characters is generally an

effective tool for writers to cultivate readers’ empathy. However, “Beginning with the first

paragraph of the novel, readers encounter fragmentation in the images of a shattered mirror

and ghostly handprints, but more importantly in the separation of one family member from

the other” (Travis 234). The characters are not just individualised, but they also become

completely isolated from each other and the society around them. Despite the fact that the

characters’ individual memories also portray that many of them have experienced similar

trauma, they cannot fully empathize with each other. Therefore, their perspectives become

“jagged pieces that do not fit comfortably together” (Travis 234). This dissonance becomes
97

emotionally chaotic for the reader. A situation of extreme solitude emerges for the

protagonist, a solitude that also affects the reader. With Sethe unable to explain the

infanticide in a way that makes any of the other characters understand her, they begin to take

their distance from her “thick love,” and so does Morrison’s implied reader. The infanticide

separates Sethe from the society around her as well. Her memory of how their house went

from a busy place where people came and went to the extreme solitude it is in now invites

situational empathy from the reader. White folks from Sweet Home arrive, “leaving the 124

desolate and exposed at the very hour when everybody stopped dropping by” (Morrison;

Beloved 192). Paul D also distances himself from her when he finally accepts the truth of that

newspaper article. Travis points out that even he, who loves her, becomes afraid of her love.

Denver seems to be the one most distanced from Sethe emotionally, and is also isolated on

her own. Denver believes that she must “spend all of [her] outside self-loving [Sethe]” so

Sethe does not kill her (Morrison; Beloved 245). The reader comes to feel this isolation when

Denver portrays how she forgot her mother’s crime for a while, until Nelson Lord asked her

about it, and Denver had to “ask [Sethe] if it was true”. The psychological distance between

the women has become so long that Denver cannot “hear her [mother’s] answer.” After this

event everything becomes “so quiet” for Denver (p. 243). Denver and Sethe together also

become isolated in the house, away from the community around them in that “nobody – but

nobody visits[s] that house” and Denver never leaves it, because of her fear of “it” happening

again (p. 217, 242). When Beloved returns Denver’s life revolves around keeping Beloved

with her, but as Sethe discovers that Beloved is her returned daughter, Denver is again left in

solitude. “Sethe and Beloved cut Denver out of the games… [Sethe] cut Denver out

completely. Even the song that she used to sing to Denver she sang for Beloved alone” (p.

282). The reader also feels the women’s isolation portrayed through Paul D. We get a

powerful picture of Sethe’s solitude through his perspective. He reminds her, “your boys
98

gone you don’t know where. One girl is dead; the other one won’t leave the yard “ (p. 194). It

is clear that the reality of her situation through his eyes is quite different than through her

own. She is completely isolated. For Paul D it seems like Sethe has lost everything by

“choosing” her freedom. And like him, the reader cannot let go of the thought that “there

could have been a way. Some other way” than to kill her children (p. 194). When Paul D

takes this distance to her love this way, even after his experience with slavery and abuse, the

reader is left with little hope of closing down the distance between her and the protagonist as

well. The distance between the reader and protagonist when the infanticide is revealed, like

the one between Paul D and Sethe, becomes a “forest that is locking the distance between

them, giving it shape and heft” (p. 194). The reader’s response to this forest of isolation can

be divided. On one hand, the reader becomes distanced to Sethe as well; if Sethe’s own

family is incapable of understanding her because “If they didn’t get it right off – she could

never explain” (p. 192). How can the reader then claim to empathize, or even sympathize

with her? On the other hand, Sethe’s solitude does invoke sympathy within the reader and the

situational empathy of loneliness and fear. However, the extremity of this fear still distances

her from the other characters. As readers we might generally empathize more easily on a

personal level, but when the isolation of the character becomes so extreme that even the other

characters are completely distanced, it problematizes the reader’s empathy for Sethe.

Morrison carefully closes in some of the distance between Sethe and the other characters, and

therefore also partially with the implied reader. For instance, when Stamp Paid approaches

124 again, and when the community arrives to drive away the bad spirit in 124, they slowly

close in the distance between them and 124 (p. 303). At the very end of the novel when Paul

D approaches the house for the second time, he makes an attempt to understand Sethe. The

ending is a powerful moment in which the two reconcile and join hands. One can wonder

whether this also is the moment when the reader should join hands with Sethe as well.
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 “[Paul D] walks to the front door and opens it. It is stone quiet… Paul D steps inside…There

are too many things to feel about this woman…. He wants to put his story next to hers…He

leans over and takes her hand…his holding fingers are holding hers. (p. 318-322)”

  The emotional image of two damaged souls holding hands is a powerful symbol of

togetherness. Paul D makes a moving attempt to imagine being in Sethe’s place, not to judge

or pity her but to understand and comfort her as her equal. Here, Morrison creates an

important picture of human empathy and shows its healing effect only when it is based on

equality. Empathy in itself is neutral, and the goodness of it only comes through

acknowledgement of difference. When Paul D attempts to put his story next to Sethe’s and

“not over, not under, not within, but next to,” Morrison asks her reader to do the same (Travis

237). Like him, even though the reader tries to understand Sethe, the best she can do is to

acknowledge Sethe’s version, but she cannot relate to it or approve the deed itself. It is an

understatement to say that it is difficult to imagine the life of a mother who kills her own

infant with a saw, to feel the stories of characters who have been tortured and deprived of

their freedom in the most cruel ways, to understand Denver’s fear of being beheaded in her

sleep by her own mother. The extremity of the events these characters altogether portray in

the most normalized way makes it difficult to claim the reader’s empathy. It is impossible to

say that the reader should be able to put herself in their places and be able to feel what they

feel. What Morrison gives her readers, is the opportunity to listen to silenced memories,

analyse and reflect upon what we cannot relate to and “put our stories next to theirs,” because

it is important that these stories are heard. Some of the characters show aversion in their

responses to the trauma in the shed. They find that the easiest way to cope, is to distance

themselves from it and so they do, one by one. Morrison portrays this avoidance most clearly

through Baby Suggs. She goes to bed after things get quiet, starts to dream colours, and
100

finally dies. Stamp Paid portrays her as one who has completely given up after witnessing her

daughter-in-law’s attempt to “slay the children…If there had been sadness in her eyes [Stamp

Paid] would have understood it; but indifference lodged where sadness should have been”

(Morrison; Beloved 209). Indifference is emotional distancing and we also see that Stamp

Paid himself takes distance through his physical removal from 124. Paul D’s escape from the

house when he learns the truth about Sethe is also an act of aversion to her. As the characters

show emotional distancing from Sethe, the reader might want to do the same. However, since

she is introduced to so many perspectives the reader simply cannot turn away until she can

grasp the whole meaning, which again makes a never-ending circle, because Morrison never

gives it to her. Every time Sethe attempts to explain she circles around the event. The

sentence that closes the circle at the end of the novel, “this is not a story to pass on” keeps

Sethe’s traumas locked inside her, unreachable for the reader (pg. 324). In Beloved we see

how Toni Morrison complicates, limits, and prevents the reader’s empathy with Sethe

through multiple perspectives. This she does by giving voice to several portrayals of the

infanticide and by distancing Sethe from other characters, showing her reader how each new

perspective complicates what the reader “knows” as the truth.

CHAPTER III

CONCLUSION

 Throughout the novel Beloved, the characters have been emotionally crippled by their

pasts. The mental and the spiritual wounds caused by slavery are still fresh and have not been

allowed to heal. They endure severe indignities, degradation, dehumanization and suffering
101

under the law, and are consistently victims of prejudice from American society. Sethe, the

heroine, cannot overcome her outrage and sense of violation from her Sweet Home

experiences, nor can she work through the guilt she feels about her daughter's death.

Although Sethe and Paul D. are both dehumanized during their slavery experiences by the

inhumanity of the white people, their responses to the experience differ due to their different

role. Sethe managed to create her own family with Paul D. Within her psyche, she is a new

and a different woman. Thus, Sethe's process of healing in Beloved, her process of learning

to live with her past, is a model for the readers who must confront Sethe's past as part of our

own past, a collective past that lives right where we live. On the other hand, we have Paul D.

who initially appeared to be a normalizing force in Sethe's and Denver's lives. His entrance

into their private lives signalled the beginning of a healthy relationship for Sethe and the

introduction of a father figure for Denver.

Morrison has shown direction to black community for cooperative self-healing, land

forging a bearable life for them. She has shown that through communal interaction the

individual proceeds from repressive isolation to a developed sense of self. Here we see that

facelessness and anonymity imposed by the whites on the black in America is to be fought by

black in collective voice and ideology forged out of cultural and social absence. Morrison’s

conscious focus on collective rather that individual struggle is clarified through her repeated

assertions that Beloved is the story of people rather than a person. She says: “The book was

not about an institution- slavery with a capital ‘S’. It was about those anonymous people

called slaves. What they do to keep on, how they make a life, what they are willing to risk,

however long lasts, in order to relate to one another- that was incredible to me”(Bonnie 48)

Morrison has shown that when Afro- American are at different positions their way of

approach differ to one another: “You got two feet Seth, not four------ what you did was
102

wrong” (p. 202) Morrison has also shown that when Afro-American women are more trusting

to their fellow beings and different times they are cheated not only by white but also by

blacks: “Sethe feels sorry to have been so trusting so quick to surrender” (p. 212) Sethe

mistakenly believing the completeness of her world with her daughter and giving her full

time even leaving her job again shows the devotion of Afro American women towards the

children: “The world is in the room. This here’s all there is and there need to be'' (p. 224)

Sethe though ruined by repeated rapes and untold humiliations by the white masters,

considers her children the best and the clean thing of herself, and hence, she would not let

anybody taint that part of her. That Sethe would go to any extent to dirty herself to retain the

purity of her children is sadly evident when she agrees for “Rutting among the headstones

with the engraver, his young son looking on” (p. 5) For ten minutes as a price to be paid for

engraving the word “Beloved” on the tombstone of her dead daughter. “But those ten

minutes-----were longer than life, more alive, more pulsating than the baby blood that soaked

her fingers like oil” (p. 9) This History, or rather her story, unfolds with her after prison life

but there are pages and pages of flash back, spared initially by the return of Paul D to 124

Bluestone Road outside Cincinnati in Ohio. The year is 1873, the year after the Emancipation

Edict. Technically blacks are free now, but they have to live with their harrowing past of only

a few years ago. Sethe is the daughter in law of Baby Suggs, the wife of Halle and the mother

of Howard, Buglar, Beloved and Denver. She is known as iron –willed women from the

beginning. However, her new master, to whom she sold, “Punched the glittering iron out of

Sethe’s eyes”. As a result, Sethe and the other slaves of sweet home flee during which Halle

is dislocated and not found, chances are there that he might have been shot dead. Sethe has to

run with her three children and the forth in the womb. However when the white master finds

her, instead of surrendering she stops them by hacking the throat of her daughter by hand

saw. In this manner, she ruthlessly refuges to send back her daughter to the same terrible
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world, which has fully sucked her virginity and vitality, Above all, what a black woman

considers heinous is a forced sex imposed on her by a white man and Sethe does not want her

daughter face the similar plight in future, In this event the physical act of murdering one’s

own child needs a lot of moral and emotional courage, It is the outcome of a compelling

situational background in which survival is uncertain every moment and dignity is put to acid

test every second of survival. Therefore, Sethe concludes that killing is putting her daughter

to safety. She says: “I took and put my babies where they’d be safe” (p. 87) Sethe, thus, is the

embodiment of black endurance and fortitude. She has been whipped so many times and with

so much ferocity by the whites that her back has been pulped to resemble a chokecherry tree.

This has left a permanent pain on her back and she does hardly allow anyone to touch it.

Slavery came between women and their children so often that it was dangerous to put that

much emotional energy into loving children. When they are taken away, it can really destroy

the person who loves them. Even the act of marriage for slaves has no meaning in the eyes of

their masters, it implied superfluous meaning of a woman sleeping with one man for quite

some time, until either one or both are sold, or are separated in misadventure. Another

epitome of the black courage in the novel is Baby Suggs. She is a rather powerful presence

then Sethe even when it comes to strong nerves. It is Baby Suggs who receives Sethe at

Bluestone when she returns to her after running away from slavery. Baby Suggs has already

crossed sixty. Except her brave heart there is nothing left intact in her body because slave life

had, “Busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue” (p. 87) She starts

to clear a part of the forest and gathers all the blacks of the locality for preaching to them the

value of their race, rituals that would endow them with enough stamina to forget the past

humiliations and lead a happy life. “Accepting no title of honour before her name… she

became unchurched preacher, one who visited pulpits and open her great heart to those who

could use it… uncalled, un robbed, anointed, she let her great heart beat in their presence”
104

There is such a force of conviction in her talk that the blacks gathered there forgot

temporarily their miserable plight and encouraged by her speech begin to laugh full -

heartedly: “Let your mother hear your laugh, she told them and the woods rang” (p. 87)

Similarly she tells them to dance and they dance and the ground under their feet trembles.

She tells them to cry out all their grief, their eyes run loose, and they weep out all their

sorrows. She teaches them to love everything in life and love “it hard.” As whites have

exploited all the parts of black body, Baby Suggs invites them to love all their limbs. She

encourages the black people not to be ashamed of their blackness, not to be distressed by

their past and slavery but to take a dignified look on all parts of their body, even on, she says,

“Your life holding womb and your life giving private parts” (p. 209). For the whites, enjoying

sex is not the rightful thing a black woman is expected to do. As told by her: “Slaves are not

supposed to have pleasurable feelings on their own; their bodies not supposed to be like that,

but they have to have as many children as they can to please whoever owned them. Still, they

were not supposed to have pleasure deep down” (p. 273) There are numerous instances of

slavery interfering in families. Baby Suggs's husband escaped, so they are apart. Paul D's

brother was sold away from Sweet Home. Stamp Paid had to allow his master to use his wife

sexually for a year. When there are families, it is dangerous to love too much because slavery

may steal away family. Sethe loves her children too much, and they all suffer for it. Thus, the

story of Beloved moves back and forth through time, telling in flashbacks the story of the

character's slave past. It is a portrait of the black slave woman's experience. The story is

important for its demonstration of the concern that slave mothers had for the welfare of their

children. Additionally, it is an attempt to understand the forces, both historically and

personally, that would cause a mother to murder her child rather than allow her to experience

the horrors of slavery.

In many ways, Morrison’s Beloved can be considered as a modern slave narrative.

Like the slave narrative, Toni Morrison’s Beloved documents the accounts of several fictional

slaves, emphasizing on the importance of community. Even though they are fictional

characters based off of historical events, Morrison enlivens the Margaret Garner case in ways

the victims of the experience were unable to do so for a contemporary reader. The Garner

case was portrayed in a stereotyped and belittling newspaper article by a white reporter, but

Morison’s novel pries at the emotions and horrors buried because of slavery. While not all

stories are clearly heard, she allows portions to explain what they can, giving them ownership

of their stories that might not have always been theirs. Just as masculinity hides from public

and outsider attention, slavery hides the humanity behind the people.

Morrison’s Beloved contains features of the black slave narrative. It does not highlight a

single aspect of black culture, but the many that are grounded in slavery. The context of

slavery can also be another subjectivity in itself, just as race, class, gender, etc. because of its

dramatic effects on the individuals. While the readers experience the sufferings of slavery,

they also learn about the moments when slaves are needed to remain passive and quiet, and

also the times when they needed to be forwarded and threatening. Morrison’s narration

positions black males and their relationship in the community that obstructs their identity

through conflicting expectations. While a black man in slavery is needed to show power and

strength against the evil white master, in order to protect family and loved ones, they are

forced to keep fighting for freedom and safety until they break unless they find themselves

incapable and give in. Families were separated, fathers went missing, and the like Paul D,

assimilating into a new societal standing took sacrifice of self. This does not match the black

males’ new expectations to commit to the family, to settle, and to work in a class system that

once enslaved them. To assimilate, they must defy and protect with moderation. We can see
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this in the Civil Rights Movement as black as a collective, are torn between fighting or

conforming to the power the suppresses them. Morrison certifies the humanity and value of

the self, in a way remedying Paul D’s anxiety of his worth, by allowing other characters to

represent the people that were unable to represent themselves into abolition. Instead, the

black community stands as a collective community in a similar way that Paul D’s chain

brotherhood stands together on mutual ground and respect. In modern day, our society still

subdues black culture and historical black narratives as ‘past’ and irrelevant, while black

males are still enslaved in their role as a man in society. Looking at their ancestors, the black

male slaves that fought for their freedom, black males in today’s society will remain hidden

and submissive to their expectations or fight for the respectable life and community they long

deserve. Her narratives mingle the voices of men, women, children and even ghosts in

layered polyphony. Myth, magic and superstition are inextricably intertwined with everyday

verities, a technique that caused Ms. Morrison’s novels to be likened often to those of Latin

American magic realist writers like Gabriel García Márquez.

In “Sula,” a woman blithely lets a train run over her leg for the insurance money it will

give her family. In “Song of Solomon,” a baby girl is named Pilate by her father, who “had

thumbed through the Bible, and since he could not read a word, chose a group of letters that

seemed to him strong and handsome.” In “Beloved,” the spectre of a murdered child takes up

residence in the house of her murderer. Throughout Ms. Morrison’s work, elements like these

coalesce around her abiding concern with slavery and its legacy. In her fiction, the past is

often manifest in a harrowing present— a world of alcoholism, rape, incest and murder,

recounted in unflinching detail. It is a world, Ms. Morrison writes in “Beloved” (the novel is

set in the 19th century but stands as a metaphor for the 20th), in which “anybody white could

take your whole self for anything that came to mind.”

“Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you,” she goes on. “Dirty you so bad you

couldn’t like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn’t

think it up.”

But as Ms. Morrison’s writing also makes clear, the past is just as strongly manifest in

the bonds of family, community and race — bonds that let culture, identity and a sense of

belonging be transmitted from parents to children to grandchildren. These generational

links, her work unfailingly suggests, form the only salutary chains in human experience.

“She is a friend of my mind,” a character in “Beloved,” a former slave, thinks about the

woman he loves. “She gathered me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and gives

them back to me in all the right order. It’s good, you know, when you got a woman who

is a friend of your mind.”

A First Doomed Heroine

Ms. Morrison’s singular approach to narrative is evident in her first novel, “The Bluest

Eye,” written in stolen moments between her day job as a book editor and her life as the

single mother of two young sons. Published in 1970, it is narrated by Claudia McTeer, a

black girl in Ohio, who with her sister, Frieda, is the product of a strict but loving home.

The novel’s doomed heroine is their friend Pecola Breedlove, who at 11, growing up in an

America inundated with images of Shirley Temple and Dick and Jane, believes she is ugly

and prays for the one thing she is sure will save her: blue eyes. In a drunken, savagely

misguided attempt to show Pecola she is desirable, her father rapes her, leaving her pregnant.

Now an outcast both in the community and within her own fractured family, Pecola descends

into madness, believing herself possessed of blue eyes at last.

Reviewing the novel in The New York Times, John Leonard commended Ms. Morrison

for telling the story “with a prose so precise, so faithful to speech and so charged with pain

and wonder that the novel becomes poetry.” The novel prefigures much of Ms. Morrison’s

later work in its preoccupation with history — often painful — as seen through the lens of an

individual life; with characters’ quests, tragic or successful, for their place in the world; with

the redemptive power of community; and with the role women play in the survival of such

communities.

Ms. Morrison explored these themes even more overtly in her second novel, “Sula”

(1973), about the return of a young woman, now a scandalous temptress, to her Midwestern

hometown and the ostracism she confronts there, and in her third, “Song of Solomon” (1977),

the book that cemented her reputation. That book, Ms. Morrison’s first to feature a male

protagonist, centres on the journey, literal and spiritual, of a young Michigan man, Macon

Dead III. Macon is known familiarly as Milkman, a bitter nickname stemming from the

widespread knowledge that his unhappy, neurasthenic mother, “the daughter of the richest

Negro doctor in town,” breast-fed him long past babyhood. (In “Song of Solomon” as in

“Sula,” Ms. Morrison depicts black bourgeois life as one of arid atomization.)The novel

chronicles Milkman’s journey through rural Pennsylvania, a trip nominally undertaken to

recover a cache of gold said to have belonged to his family, but ultimately a voyage in pursuit

of self. “Song of Solomon” was chosen as a main selection by the Book-of-the-Month Club,

the first novel by a black author to be so honoured since Richard Wright’s “Native Son” in

1940.
109

‘Beloved’: Her Masterwork

Ms. Morrison published “Beloved,” widely considered her masterwork, in 1987.

The first of her novels to have an overtly historical setting, the book — rooted in a real

19th-century tragedy — unfolds about a decade after the end of the Civil War. Before

the war, Sethe, a slave, had escaped from the Kentucky plantation on which she worked

and crossed the Ohio River to Cincinnati. She also spirited out her baby daughter, not

yet 2.

“Sethe had twenty-eight days — the travel of one whole moon — of un-slaved life,” Ms.

Morrison wrote. “From the pure clear stream of spit that the little girl dribbled into her face

to her oily blood was twenty-eight days. Days of healing, ease and real- talk. Days of

company: knowing the names of forty, fifty other Negroes, their views, habits; where they

had been and what done; of feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it

better. One taught her the alphabet; another a stitch. All taught her how it felt to wake up at

dawn and decide what to do with the day.”

Then a slave catcher tracks Sethe down. Cornered, she cuts her daughter’s throat

rather than see her return to a life of degradation. Eighteen years have passed. Sethe has been

saved from the gallows by white Abolitionists and is later freed from jail with their help. She

has resumed her life in Cincinnati with her surviving daughter, Denver, with whom she was

pregnant when she fled Kentucky. One day, a strange, nearly silent young woman a little

older than Denver materializes at their door. Known only as Beloved, she moves into the

house and insinuates herself into every facet of their existence.

“Beloved, she my daughter,” Sethe realizes in a stream-of-consciousness monologue

toward the end of the book. “She mine. See. She come back to me of her own free will and I

don’t have to explain a thing. I didn’t have time to explain before because it had to be done

quick. Quick. She had to be safe and I put her where she would be.”

Widely acclaimed by book critics, “Beloved” was made into a 1998 feature film

directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Ms. Winfrey. For mid-20th-century readers, one of

the most striking things about Ms. Morrison’s work was that it delineates a world in which

white people are largely absent, a relatively rare thing in fiction of the period. What was

more, the milieu of her books, typically small-town and Midwestern, “offers an escape from

stereotyped black settings,” as she said in an interview in “Conversations With Toni

Morrison” (1994; edited by Danielle Taylor-Guthrie), adding, “It is neither plantation nor

ghetto.”

Critical response to “Beloved” was overwhelmingly positive, though not uniformly so.

In a corrosive review in The New Republic, the African American critic Stanley Crouch

called it “a blackface holocaust novel,” adding: “The world exists in a purple haze of

overstatement, of false voices, of strained homilies; nothing very subtle is ever really tried.

‘Beloved’ reads largely like a melodrama lashed to the structural conceits of the miniseries.”

But the preponderance of opinion was on the other side. In January 1988, in the wake of the

novel’s publication, The Times Book Review published an open letter signed by two dozen

black writers, among them Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Arnold Rampersad and Alice

Walker, lauding Ms. Morrison and protesting the fact that she had “yet to receive the

keystone honours of the National Book Award or the Pulitzer Prize.”

Toni Morrison indicates, in an interview she recorded with Home Vision in 1987 just

after finishing Beloved, that The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby are the results
111

of such an artistic search. With Beloved, she goes a step further, opening her writerly eye to

look into the question why neither parent nor teacher remember what was done to the mind of

the African when being deported from home, further, why neither parent nor teacher were

aware of the big silence about everything concerning slavery. Speechless by the horrifying

reports she encounters when piling up the material that was to go into The Black Book that

was published by Random House in 1974, Morrison started to collect material on slavery and

its consequences on both the black and white mind and their respective narrative of the world,

which she wanted to use when she would have the strength to face “unspeakable things

unspoken” as both theorist and as writer. The white narrative she calls the Master Narrative.

Schoolteacher’s narrative would be an example. But also Melville’s and Jefferson’s. It is the

narrative of history, science, and the Humanities and their respective theories. The black

narrative she could not name so easily since ‘slave narrative’ was a term that had already

been used elsewhere. Moreover, slave narratives were often written for a white audience in

order to explain to white readers that the black writer was a human being, and not an animal,

to recall Phillis Wheatly[3], the poet, who had to pass a test given by Thomas Hutchinson,

governor of Massachusetts, and some other worthy Bostonians, before she was allowed to

claim her poems as her own. The slave narrative, then, was a narrative written by the slave

him/herself to tell a white readership what it is like to be a slave. The slave narrative attempts

to express the social and psychic pain and disruption of a person whose social functions were

permanently disrupted by work, undernourishment, punishment, and, most devastatingly, the

awareness that “men and women were moved around like checkers. What she called the

nastiness of life was the shock she received on learning that nobody stopped playing checkers

just because the pieces included her children” (p. 23). The slave narrative was followed by

the social and political works of thinkers such as Frederick Douglas, W. E. B. DuBois, Martin

Luther King, Jr, or Malcolm X, writing against the master narrative in order to correct it.
112

  Women authors were not as much interested in forcing white people to recognize

them. In her essay ‘Reflections on the black woman’s role in the community of slaves’

Angela Davis observes: “This was one of the supreme ironies of slavery: in order to approach

its strategic goal – to extract the greatest possible surplus from the labour of the slaves – the

black woman had to be released from the chains of the myth of femininity.” In other words,

black women became emancipated long before white women did, and the price they had to

pay for this liberation was the one no one wanted to think about, let alone to memorize. There

is an interesting parallel. During the Second World War, white women were put in charge of

most jobs left open by fighting men. For once they became their own masters. While the

emancipated slave woman never wanted to go back into a master-slave relationship, it did not

occur to white women to fight for their new positions. It seems that the price the black

woman had to pay for her freedom was so high that nothing, but really nothing, could lull her

back into a state that forced her to kill her own baby. Morrison addresses this issue in several

articles. In 1971 she wrote a piece entitled, ‘What the black woman thinks about women’s

lib’ in which she differentiates between black and white social history: For years in this

country there was no one for black men to vent their rage on except black women. And for

years black women accepted that rage – even regarded that acceptance as their unpleasant

duty. But in doing so, they frequently kicked back, and they seem never to have become the

‘true slave’ that white women see in their own history. It is unarguable that the black woman

did the housework, the drudgery; true she reared the children, often alone, but she did all of

that while occupying a place on the job market, a place her mate could not get or which his

pride would not let him accept. And she had nothing to fall back on: not maleness, nor

whiteness, not ladyhood, not anything. And out of the profound desolation of her reality she

may very well have invented herself. It is the irony of literary history and language that we

now have to think about a term different from ‘slave narrative.’ If we agreed on ‘black
113

narrative’ we might perhaps lose this terrible term. ‘Master narrative’ in the course of the

discourse, particularly as black narrative has become so strong precisely because of the pain

and agony that is connected with it. Master narrative is much easier to face. The grand

gesture into the future that we will possess and handle when the time has come. Our

reading/writing position is the one in which we sail off into a new world to possess it. The

gaze is the one into the future. The past we have made and know it. Master narrative is

always interested in universality. To have it all. To be all. To possess it all. Black narrative is

so much harder to take. There is this vast past no one wants to be reminded off.] Only by

reading each page of the Black Book again and again and again, might one start loosening

their tongues and tell the past as either a memory or “rememory.”

Narrating the past is, of course, a very difficult task. Yet it has to be done. One way of doing

it is writing fiction. It needs the artist to shape this material into a narrative that can do the

truth that is to tell the past: not a story to pass on.

It is very difficult to comprehend the limits of inhumanity that a particular race

especially the master or the white or the superior could inflict on another race, the way they

are dehumanized, and the evil that comes with this institutionalized slavery. Beloved, in a

sense, is a retelling, rewriting of all the slaves who never got the chance to narrate their story

and what Morrison found in many of the slave narratives was that number of these narratives

had in a sense toned down their voice for the sake of a white audience. In an interview,

Morrison shares that she is just retelling and refilling those gaps that have been left in those

slave narratives. What Morrison insists upon is recovering and giving voice to all these kinds

of narratives. So even though we have the story of Sethe, we have to remember that the book

is dedicated to sixty million slaves. So, the rape of Sethe is the rape of the black women and
114

even men who were exploited by their masters. A travesty on Sethe’s individuality is a

travesty on all those slaves.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Atwood, Margaret. “Haunted By Their Nightmares.” Rev. of Beloved; New York

Times 13 Sept. 1987. The New York Times on the Web. The New York Times

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2. Baudry, J.L. “The Apparatus: Metaphysical Approaches to the Impression of Reality

in Cinema.” Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology. Columbia UP. 299–318. 1986.

3. Blanchot, Maurice.   The Writing of the Disaster, trans. Ann Smock (Lincoln:

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4. Booth, Wayne C. The Rhetoric of Fiction. Chicago: University of Chicago , 1961.  

5. Bowers, Susan. "Beloved and the New Apocalypse". In Journal of Ethnic Studies,

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6. Breazele, David. Philosophy and Truth: Selections from Nietzsche’s Notebooks of the

Early 1870s, p. 85 (New Jersey: Humanities Press); 1979.

7. Charles, Davis. Slave Narratives. New York: Oxford University Press. 1985.

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The Black Scholar, 3, p. 7; 1971.

9.  Dubois, W.E.B. Souls of Black Folk. Print. 

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11. Fultz, Lucille P. Toni Morrison : Playing with Difference. Urbana: University of

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13. Hammond, Meghan Marie, and Sue J. Kim, eds. Routledge Interdisciplinary

Perspectives on Literature: Rethinking Empathy through Literature. Florence, KY:

Routledge, 2014. Web.

14. Hoby, Hermione. "Toni Morrison: ’I'm Writing for Black People… I Don't Have to  

Apologise; The Guardian. 25.04.2015.

15. Hogan, Patrick Colm. Affective Narratology: The Emotional Structure of Stories.

Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 2011. Print.

16. Hooks, Bell. The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. New York: Atria,

2004. Print.

17. Horvitz, Deborah. Literary Trauma.  

18. Hostettler, Maya. (1996) Telling the past – doing the truth: Toni Morrison's beloved ,

Women's History Review, 5:3, 401-416.

19. Kastor, Elizabeth. “Toni Morrison’s Beloved Country: The Writer and Her Haunting

Tale of Slavery” Critical Essays on Toni Morrison’s Beloved E.D. Barbara H.

Solomon. New York: G.K. Hall and Co, 1988.

20. Keen, Suzanne. Empathy and the Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010.  

21. Leake, Eric. “Humanising the Inhumane: The Value of Difficult Empathy”

22. Ludwig, Sämi. “Toni Morrison’s Social Criticism”. Tally 125-138.

23.  M. A, Travis. “Beyond Empathy: Narrative Distance and Ethics in Toni Morrison’s

Beloved.

24. Mae Weems, Carrie. From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried

25.  Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987. Print.

26. Morrison, Toni. What The Black Woman Thinks About Women’s Lib. New York

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27. Noble, Marianne. The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature; Princeton

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Liberal Education. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997. Print.

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88    <https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/06/books/toni-morrison-dead.html>
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30. Phelan, James. "Sethe's Choice: 'Beloved' and the Ethics of Reading." Style 32.2

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 31.  Stueber, Karsten, "Empathy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 

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 32. Tal; Worlds of Hurt, 16.

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  CONTENTS

 CHAPTER I: INTRODUCTION

 
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120

CONTENTS

Chapter I: Introduction                                                          1-42

Chapter II: Literature Review/ Analysis                                   43-96

Chapter III: Conclusion                                                          97-109

Bibliography                                                                            110-113