Featured Reading Guide
Toni Morrison
INCLUDES A READING GUIDE Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for so many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe s new home is not only haunted by the memories of her past but also by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
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topAbout the Book
INCLUDES A READING GUIDE Terrible, unspeakable things happened to Sethe at Sweet Home, the farm where she lived as a slave for so many years until she escaped to Ohio. Her new life is full of hope but eighteen years later she is still not free. Sethe s new home is not only haunted by the memories of her past but also by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.
topToni Morrison interview/review
I think I merged those two words, black and feminist, growing up, because I was surrounded by black women who were very tough and very aggressive and who always assumed they had to work and rear children and manage homes. They had enormously high expectations of their daughters, and cut no quarter with us; it never occurred to me that that was feminist activity. You know, my mother would walk down to a theatre in that little town that had just opened, to make sure that they were not segregating the population — black on this side, white on that. And as soon as it opened up, she would go in there first, and see where the usher put her, and look around and complain to someone.
That was just daily activity for her, and the men as well. So it never occurred to me that she should withdraw from that kind of confrontation with the world at large. And the fact that she was a woman wouldn’t deter her. She was interested in what was going to happen to the children who went to the movies — the black children — and her daughters, as well as her sons.
So I was surrounded by people who took both of those roles seriously. Later, it was called “feminist” behaviour. I had a lot of trouble with those definitions, early on. And I wrote some articles about that, and I wrote “Sula,” really, based on this theoretically brand new idea, which was: Women should be friends with one another. And in the community in which I grew up, there were women who would choose the company of a female friend over a man, anytime. They were really “sisters,” in that sense.
Salon.com, 1998
topStarting Points for Discussion
- Beloved has many elements often found in ghost stories – the haunted house, the vengeful spirit, the hostile community. What distinguishes Beloved from the generic ghost story?
- What does Beloved have to say about the community – its value, its demands, and the relationship of individuals to it?
- In what ways does Paul D stand out from the other male characters? Does the novel offer a consistent view of the relations between men and women in this period of black American history?
- In the early pages of the novel, the spirit world and the material world seem almost indistinguishable. What sort of boundaries exist between the two? How does the belief in a spirit world affect the lives of the characters?
- How much of a ‘person’ is Beloved? Given her mysterious arrival and unexplained departure, does she have any reality other than an embodiment of other people’s emotions, e.g. Sethe’s guilt?
- The narrative of Beloved is fragmented, with point-of-view switching between characters and moments in time – yet a sense of order is very much in evidence. What other devises does Toni Morrison use to shape the novel?
Other Books by Toni Morrison
A Mercy
On the day that Jacob, an Anglo-Dutch trader and adventurer, agrees to accept…
Beloved
It is the mid-1800s. At Sweet Home in Kentuckhy, an era is ending as slavery…
Jazz
It is winter, barely three days into 1926, seven years after Armistice; we are…
Love
May, Christine, Heed, Junior, Vida – even L who cooks for them and sees eve…
Suggested Further Reading
- The Color Purple ~ Alice Walker
- I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings ~ Maya Angelou
- Their Eyes Were Watching God ~ Zora Neal Hurston
- Native Son ~ Richard Wright
- Joy Luck Club ~ Amy Tan