Toni Morrison,
Beloved & the
legacy of slavery
Redefining African American Identity
Born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, in
1931
Family part of great 20th century migration of African
Americans away from the oppression of the Jim Crow
south to northern cities.
Morrison was important in rise of African American
literature and studies, both as teacher at Howard
University, as an editor at Random house
Her work has helped redefine African American
identity and experience.
Her Body of Work
Morrison has won the
National Book Award, a
Pulitzer Prize and the Nobel
Prize for Literature for a
body of work that includes.
Tar Baby, 1981
The Bluest Eye, 1969
Paradise, 1999
Sula, 1974
Love, 2003
Song of Solomon, 1977
A Mercy, 2008
Beloved, 1987
Jazz, 1992
America & the Scars of Slavery
Though Morrison’s work has focused
on black experience, and particularly
on the experience of Black women, she
long avoided subject of slavery.
Considered taboo within her own
family and culture. Too big, too
traumatic, too embittering, too hard to
face.
Morrison has said that America too has willfully repressed
the memory and shame of slavery, leaving the millions of
slavery’s victims “disremembered and unaccounted for.”
But the “ghosts of the dead,” as she refers to the millions
lost to slavery, “haunted” her.
Slavery in America:
In 17th Century Colonial America, slavery
included white indentured servants, Native
Americans, and African Slaves.
Laws passed that differentiated between the
groups, and removed all legal protection and
human rights for African Slaves.
The cotton and tobacco trade explodes in
the American South, bringing with it an
insatiable need for cheap, forced labor.
African slave trade: Mass captures and
kidnapping—millions brought across the
Middle Passage to the Americas.
An Unprecedented Brutality
In its scale and scope, slavery in 18th Century America
becomes a soul-destroying brutality unprecedented in
human history.
Slavery became a life sentence.
Worse yet, it became generational
Young women valued as breeding stock.
Loss of children, confiscated from mothers and sold at
auction, became the hardest burden of all to bear.
Hundreds of thousands risked all to escape to North.
A couple of relevant particulars
The Middle Passage
http://en.wikipedia.or
g/wiki/Middle_Passag
e
The Fugitive Slave
Acts, and their effects
The Ohio River and
Cincinnati, Ohio.
Back to Morrison & Beloved
Beloved her masterpiece. Chosen in 2000 as the most
important novel of the 20th century in America.
Importance in terms of themes, stylistic innovations and
national identity.
Haunted by ghosts of slavery’s past.
Beloved appears to Morrison “out of
the water” (read excerpt from Forward)
“Trying to make the slave experience
Intimate”
Morrison America & Slavery
“There are no monuments to slavery.” We have chosen to
turn away and forget, once again denying the humanity,
dignity and identity of the enslaved. Literature must be their
monument and collective memory
Loving our country full means coming to terms with all
of its past and heritage. To honor and remember the
victims of slavery grants them their humanity and
enriches our country.
Morrison creates a kind of collective
memory/consciousness of slavery and the slave
experience.
Ways of reading the novel
As a ghost story; a story about the haunting legacy of
slavery on America
As a slave narrative—the brutalities and inhumanities of
slavery from the intimate perspective of the enslaved
As a novel about motherhood and the intensity and
complexity of maternal love and relationships
As a novel about love and relationships
As a novel about memory and history
As a novel about dealing with a traumatic past and
trying to build a better future: Post Traumatic Stress
Syndrome on both personal and national level.
Literary techniques to watch for
Nonlinear structure: Interweaving of past and present
in ways that go far beyond conventional use of
flashbacks in literature.
Biblical allusions and religious overtones
Gothic novel re-imagined; ghosts and thesupernatural
Symbols & motifs
Multiple, shifting narrative voices & points of view
Strange sort of collective consciousness or memory
Sources
“The Writer’s Almanac,” Garrison Keillor, American
Public Radio
Yale-New Haven Teacher’s Instititue, “This Is Not a Story
to Pass On”: Teaching Toni Morrison’s Beloved, by Sophie
Bell
“Toni Morrison’s Beloved,” by Pauls Harijs Toutonghi,
from American Writers Classics, Vol. 2.
“The History of Slavery in America”:
http://www.slaveryinamerica.org/history/overview.htm
“Slavery and the Making of America.” PBS.
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/slavery/