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Beloved is a 1987 novel by the American and Post-Modernist writer Toni Morrison. See Postmodernism. Beloved was set after the American Civil War (1861–1865), it is inspired by the story of an African-American slave, Margaret Garner, who temporarily escaped slavery during 1856 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, a free state. A posse arrived to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue slaves across state borders. Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured.

Beloved's main character, Sethe, kills her daughter and tries to kill her other three children when a posse arrives in Ohio to return them to Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation from which Sethe recently fled. A woman presumed to be her daughter, called Beloved, returns years later to haunt Sethe's home at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati. The story opens with an introduction to the ghost: "124 was spiteful. Full of a baby's venom."

The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. It was adapted during 1998 into a movie of the same name starring Oprah Winfrey. A New York Times survey of writers and literary critics ranked it the best work of American fiction from 1981 to 2006.

The book's dedication reads "Sixty Million and more," dedicated to the Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the Atlantic slave trade. The book's epigraph is Romans 9:25.

Plot summary
The book concerns the story of Sethe and her daughter Denver after their escape from slavery. Their home in Cincinnati is haunted by a revenant, whom they believe to be the ghost of Sethe's daughter. Because of the haunting—which often involves objects being thrown around the room—Sethe's youngest daughter Denver is shy, friendless, and housebound, and her sons, Howard and Buglar, have run away from home by age 13. Baby Suggs, the mother of Sethe's husband Halle, dies in her bed soon afterward.

Paul D, one of the slaves from Sweet Home—the plantation where Baby Suggs, Sethe, Halle, and several other slaves once worked—arrives at Sethe's home and tries to bring a sense of reality into the house. In attempting to make the family forget the past, he forces out the spirit. He seems successful at first; he even brings housebound Denver out of the house for the first time in years. But on the way back, they encounter a young woman sitting in front of the house, calling herself Beloved. Paul D is suspicious and warns Sethe, but she is charmed by the young woman and ignores him. Gradually, Paul D is forced out of Sethe's home by a supernatural presence.

When made to sleep outside in a shed, Paul D is cornered by Beloved. While they have sex, his mind is filled with horrific memories from his past. Overwhelmed with guilt, Paul D tries to tell Sethe about it but cannot, and instead says he wants her pregnant. Sethe is elated, and Paul D resists Beloved and her influence over him. But when he tells friends at work about his plans to start a new family, they react fearfully. Stamp Paid reveals the reason for the community's rejection of Sethe.

When Paul D asks Sethe about it, she tells him what happened: After escaping from Sweet Home and reaching her waiting children at her mother-in-law's home, Sethe was found by her master, who attempted to reclaim her and her children. Sethe grabbed her children, ran into the tool shed, and tried to kill them all. She succeeded only in killing her eldest daughter by running a saw along her neck. Sethe claims that she was "trying to put my babies where they would be safe." The revelation is too much for Paul D and he leaves. Without him, sense of reality and time moving forward disappears.

Sethe comes to believe that Beloved is the 2-year-old daughter she murdered, whose tombstone reads only "Beloved". Sethe begins to spend carelessly and spoil Beloved out of guilt. Beloved becomes angry and more demanding, throwing tantrums when she doesn't get her way. Beloved's presence consumes Sethe's life to the point where she becomes depleted and sacrifices her own need for eating, while Beloved grows bigger and bigger.

In the novel's climax, youngest daughter Denver reaches out and searches for help from the black community, and some of the village women arrive at the house to exorcise Beloved. At the same time, a white man comes into view, the same man that helped Halle's mother, Baby Suggs, by offering her the house as a place to stay after Halle bought her from their owner. He has come for Denver, who asked him for a job, but Denver has not shared this information with Sethe. Unaware of the situation, Sethe attacks the white man with an ice pick and is brought down by the village women. While Sethe is confused and has a "re-memory" of her master coming again, Beloved disappears. The novel resolves with Denver becoming a working member of the community and Paul D returning to Sethe and pledging his love.

Main Characters

 * Sethe
 * Beloved
 * Paul D
 * Denver
 * Baby Suggs

Sweet Home Plantation
Rememory within Beloved is used to examine the natures of slavery within a dystopian society in relation to the detrimental effects of dehumanization that occured at Sweet Home Plantation. Sethe's memories of Sweet Home are not realistic at first as she tries to ignore her history there before escaping. However, she begins to realize that in order for her individual self to progress within the present she must confront the actual horrific events of the past. Sweet Home is where main characters Sethe and Paul D. battle with enslavement. It is symbolic of the place that they cannot "get away from" and the place that holds them back from their true self. Through confronting the past, Sethe realizes that Sweet Home stripped her of the desires to have escape to freedom. In addition Sweet Home's blatant denial the detrimental psychological effects of slavery and "its failure to remember and recognize the difference between freedom and slavery", made Sethe become unreliable and unavailable within the present as Sweet Home Plantation had her unprepared to survive in a progressing society.

The house at 124 Bluestone Road
This is the place where the book opens up. The novel puts emphasis on the numbers associated with the street on this road as the book opens up with "124 was spiteful...". Morrison writes this setting as a house isolated from the rest of Cincinnati and general population as it is at the end of the road without any other houses around it. Moreover, critics call this setting spooky as it is isolated in addition to how it acts as a "living thing". The house's descriptions are always personified for example "124 was spiteful...124 was loud...124 was quiet" as if the house is alive. The house helps to track the occurrences and events with the characters as everything ties back to 124 so this helps the audience keep track of what is happening as the house has a lot of history before Baby Suggs moved in. The house is accustomed to females long before Sethe and Denver move in. This is significant as the house is attuned to female presence more so than male presences so critics argue that the personified house of 124 is more feminine in nature.

Mother-daughter relationships
The maternal bonds between Sethe and her children inhibit her own individuation and prevent the development of her self. Sethe develops a dangerous maternal passion that results in the murder of one daughter, her own “best self,” and the estrangement of the surviving daughter from the black community, both in an attempt to salvage her “fantasy of the future,” her children, from a life in slavery. However, Sethe fails to recognize her daughter Denver’s need for interaction with this community in order to enter into womanhood. Denver finally succeeds at the end of the novel in establishing her own self and embarking on her individuation with the help of Beloved. Contrary to Denver, Sethe only becomes individuated after Beloved’s exorcism, at which point Sethe can fully accept the first relationship that is completely “for her,” her relationship with Paul D. This relationship relieves Sethe from the ensuing destruction of herself that resulted from the maternal bonds controlling her life. Beloved and Sethe are both very much emotionally impaired as a result of Sethe’s previous enslavement. Slavery creates a situation where a mother is separated from her child, which has devastating consequences for both parties. Furthermore, the earliest need a child has is related to the mother: the baby needs milk from the mother. Sethe is traumatized by the experience of having her milk stolen because it means she cannot form the symbolic bond between herself and her daughter.

The Past
In this novel, the past continues to resurface itself. The detrimental events from the past that Sethe and Paul D went through prior to escaping entraps them within their misery during present time. Morrison creates this story in a way that makes the detrimental events of slavery have a significant influence on the present. The main example of this within the novel is the ghost of Sethe’s dead daughter. Although Sethe's daughter is buried and this event is an event of the past, this baby continues to exist in Sethe's home but in the form of a ghost essentially. In addition, in Beloved Sethe teaches her daughter Denver that “Some things just stay,” and that nothing ever really dies. In this instance, Morrison is using Sethe's daughters to signify the past. Moreover, Sethe's old slave plantation ,where most of the detrimental events of the past took place, called sweet home is well within the depths of her past however it continues to present itself within the present. It continuously haunts her through heart-wrenching memories and the characters Paul D and Schoolteacher. No matter how much Sethe tries to free herself from these painful memories, the presence of them forces her be reminded of what she has endured over the years as a slave. Lastly, Beloved constantly shifts between present and the characters' past memories. Morrison uses this storytelling type of writing to narrate between present and past as a way of making the characters confront the history that made them who they are during there present time. This distinctive form of writing Morrison uses between living in the present while reliving events from the past is what Sethe calls "rememory". The past as a theme is recurrent as the main characters essentially are never able to escape it from the beginning through to the end of the novel as many events that take place during their present time are characterized by Sethe's past.

Memories and Story Telling
Sethe's memories live on through story telling. This is a particular writing style present within the novel. Morrison writes Beloved in a way that forces readers to acknowledge the crisis and good nature of reviewing where you came from in order to cope with the present and move towards a better future. This distinctive form of writing is how Morrison keeps memories of the past in existence throughout the novel. Sethe's rememory of what happened to her needs to be triggered. The house she lives in after she escapes called on 124 and the ghost of the daughter she murders are not enough as she tries to forget the past. he chooses to tolerate the pranks of the ghost rather than try and exorcise it. "This passivity distracts her from memories and Sethe is willing to accept the loss of her sons and a dysfunctional relationship with her living daughter as the psychic price." This story telling narrative contributes largely to the this theme as it strings all significant events together. As Sethe informs Denver about her family's past and her birth this subjects Denver to a sense of history by acknowledging her heritage. In addition, between Sethe, Baby Suggs, Paul D, and Denver, their memories influence a continuation of the past resurfacing within the present. The memories subject these former slaves to their own stories and being able to define who they are since the past. The characters in turn through confronting the past through memories are not being characterized by the slave owners which is also a signifying the shift between the past and present. However, this writing style also forces Sethe and Paul D. to relive the painful memories that keep these characters from moving forward in the present. The ending of this novel signifies that there value in remembering the painful events of the past and that society cannot forget about the history of slavery.

Boundaries and Bonds of enslavement
This is a central theme as it overlaps with the rest of the themes present in the text. Beloved really infiltrates the emotional and psychic consequences of slavery as it reveals how the conditions of being a slave in the outside world and the dehumanization that it subjects one to has major repercussions in a person's "internal world". Within this novel, Morrison perpetuates enslavement mentally primarily through Sethe and Paul D.'s memories to illustrate how one is forever bonded to the detrimental events of enslavement that they have faced in the past. The characters internalize the pain they have endured from the memories which keeps "the self" entrapped within the boundaries of an inner world that prevents the characters from being mentally freed within their present. Morrison depicts Sethe as the main character who is entrapped within the bonds of enslavement limiting the progression of the self. Sethe describes it as "Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another". Morrison depicts the main characters Sethe and Paul D. as the ones who constantly battle with this central problem of "recognizing and claiming one's own subjectivity". Beloved illustrates "In order to exist for oneself, one has to exist for an other" this means that to be an aid to the individuals around you, one must be mentally freed of oppression from past events. Sethe's battle with the haunting of her memories is the most prominent example of how one is not mentally freed until finding a way to acknowledge and conquer them. Beloved illustrates how the mental effects of enslavement subjects African Americans to being "unreliable or unavailable" within the present. Specifically, Sethe is depicted as "unreliable and unavailable" due to her long lasting battle with combating the detrimental effects of what occurred at Sweet home Plantation. This unreliability was because once she put herself outside of the boundaries of slavery she was struggling with her real identity as even throughout the present is still bonded to the enslavement at Sweet home Plantation which keeps her unavailable to the people (Denver and Paul D.) who need her the most.

Film adaptation
In 1998, the novel was made into a film directed by Jonathan Demme and produced by and starring Oprah Winfrey.

Legacy
Beloved received the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, which is named for an editor of Publishers Weekly. In accepting the award on October 12, 1988, Morrison observed that “there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby” honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States. “There’s no small bench by the road,” she continued. “And because such a place doesn’t exist (that I know of), the book had to.” Inspired by her remarks, the Toni Morrison Society has now begun to install benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America. The New York Times reported July 28, 2008, that the first “bench by the road” was dedicated July 26 on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, which served as the place of entry for approximately 40 percent of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States.

It received the seventh annual Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award in 1988, given to a novelist who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes - his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity."

Critical reception
The publication of Beloved in 1987 resulted in the greatest acclaim yet for Morrison. Although nominated for the National Book Award, it did not win, and forty-eight African-American writers and critics signed a letter of protest, which was published in The New York Times. Yet Beloved did receive the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988, as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award, the Melcher Book Award, the Lyndhurst Foundation Award, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award. Despite its popularity and status as one of Morrison’s most accomplished novels, Beloved has never been universally hailed as a success. Some reviewers have excoriated the novel for what they consider its excessive sentimentality and sensationalistic depiction of the horrors of slavery, including its characterization of the slave trade as a Holocaust-like genocide. Others, while concurring that Beloved is at times overwritten, have lauded the novel as a profound and extraordinary act of imagination. Noting the work’s mythic dimensions and political focus, these commentators have treated the novel as an exploration of family, trauma, and the repression of memory as well as an attempt to restore the historical record and give voice to the collective memory of African Americans. Indeed, critics and Morrison herself have indicated that the controversial epitaph to Beloved, “sixty million and more”, is drawn from a number of studies on the African slave trade which estimate that approximately half of each ship’s “cargo” perished in transit to America. Scholars have additionally debated the nature of the character Beloved, arguing whether she is actually a ghost or a real person. Numerous reviews, assuming Beloved to be a supernatural incarnation of Sethe’s daughter, have subsequently faulted Beloved as an unconvincing and confusing ghost story. Elizabeth E. House, however, has argued that Beloved is not a ghost, and the novel is actually a story of two probable instances of mistaken identity. Beloved is haunted by the loss of her African parents and thus comes to believe that Sethe is her mother. Sethe longs for her dead daughter and is rather easily convinced that Beloved is the child she has lost. Such an interpretation, House contends, clears up many puzzling aspects of the novel and emphasizes Morrison’s concern with familial ties.

Since the late 1970s, there has indeed been a strong focus on Morrison’s representation of African American experience and history. The idea that writing acts as a means of healing or recovery is a strain in many of these studies. Timothy Powell, for instance, argues that Morrison’s recovery of a black logos rewrites blackness as “affirmation, presence, and good”, while Theodore O. Mason, Jr., suggests that Morrison’s stories unite communities. Many critics explore memory, or what Beloved ’s Sethe calls “rememory,” in this light. Susan Bowers places Morrison in a “long tradition of African American apocalyptic writing” that looks back in time, “unveiling” the horrors of the past in order to “transform” them. Several critics have interpreted Morrison’s representations of trauma and memory through a psychoanalytic framework. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy explores how “primal scenes” in Morrison’s novels are “an opportunity and affective agency for self-discovery through memory” and “rememory”. As Jill Matus argues, however, Morrison’s representations of trauma are “never simply curative”: in raising the ghosts of the past in order to banish or memorialize them, the texts potentially “provoke readers to the vicarious experience of trauma and act as a means of transmission”. Ann Snitow’s reaction to Beloved neatly illustrates how Morrison criticism began to evolve and move toward new modes of interpretation. In her 1987 review of Beloved, Snitow argues that Beloved, the ghost at the center of the narrative, is “too light” and “hollow”, rendering the entire novel “airless”. Snitow changed her position after reading criticism that interpreted Beloved in a different way, seeing something more complicated and burdened than a literal ghost, something requiring different forms of creative expression and critical interpretation. The conflicts at work here are ideological as well as critical: they concern the definition and evaluation of American and African American literature, the relationship between art and politics, and the tension between recognition and appropriation.

In defining Morrison’s texts as African American literature, critics have become more attentive to historical and social context and to the way Morrison’s fiction engages with specific places and moments in time. As Jennings observes, many of Morrison’s novels are set in isolated black communities where African practices and belief systems are not marginalized by a dominant white culture but rather remain active, if perhaps subconscious, forces shaping the community. Matus comments that Morrison’s later novels “have been even more thoroughly focused on specific historical moments”; “through their engagement with the history of slavery and early twentieth-century Harlem, [they] have imagined and memorialized aspects of black history that have been forgotten or inadequately remembered”.