{"id":123,"date":"2024-05-03T03:35:31","date_gmt":"2024-05-03T03:35:31","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/?p=123"},"modified":"2024-05-03T19:13:02","modified_gmt":"2024-05-03T19:13:02","slug":"toni-morrison-beloved-1987","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/toni-morrison-beloved-1987\/","title":{"rendered":"Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trigger warnings follow the book review.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

How should we categorize <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i>? Its opening pages designate it as a paranormal novel. Sethe, a woman who escaped enslavement on the terrifying Sweet Home plantation, lives with her teenage daughter, Denver, in their Cincinnati house. However, their home <\/span>also <\/span><\/i>hosts a vengeful presence: the ghost of Sethe\u2019s infant daughter. Like a magician flourishing her best tricks, the spirit draws from the classics of ghostly activity. Mirrors shatter. Handprints appear in cakes. And, in the baby\u2019s strongest expression of rage, the house shakes. But early on, Paul D\u2013a man who was enslaved alongside Sethe and with whom she develops a complicated romance\u2013arrives and seemingly banishes the ghost. Mere chapters later, <\/span>Beloved <\/span><\/i>again veers into the paranormal, but with a flesh-and-blood twist. A woman appears at Sethe\u2019s house, whose name\u2013Beloved\u2013mirrors the epitaph on Sethe\u2019s daughter\u2019s tombstone, and who is chillingly adept at bonding with Denver, chasing Paul D away, emotionally manipulating Sethe, and overindulging her sense of abandonment and anger\u2026<\/span><\/p>\n

However, crime is also at <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i>\u2019s forefront. The clearest \u201ccrime\u201d is Sethe\u2019s daughter\u2019s death, an event whose heinousness is revealed later and that (literally) haunts the principal characters. But the inherently criminal institution of slavery underpins <\/span>Beloved <\/span><\/i>as well. It is steeped both in the crimes the institution justifies in its perpetrators\u2019 minds, and in the often-horrific efforts of the enslaved to escape. <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i>\u2019s nonlinearity, which enables flashbacks into Sethe and Paul D\u2019s past sufferings, only furthers this emphasis on how slavery weighs down characters\u2019 lives. Although they are physically \u201cfree,\u201d their memories are always on the verge of grinding them into the dust.<\/span><\/p>\n

Obviously, <\/span>Beloved <\/span><\/i>isn\u2019t a \u201clight\u201d novel. There are some confusing elements\u2013such as its stream-of-consciousness passages delving into the minds of Sethe, Denver, and Beloved and blending them in a haunting mixture\u2013that might spook readers. But they\u2019re missing out if they let such a feature influence their choice to read it. Really, there are other parts that shine brightly enough to prove reading <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i> is worth the risk of getting lost in the weeds.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

For me, <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i>\u2019s greatest allure is its lush prose. It makes the book startlingly vivid, but this sharpness makes it harder to escape the horrors battering the characters. Morrison is admirably relentless in bombarding readers with grim imagery and opulent language in ways that make the book terribly beautiful; Sethe refers to Sweet Home as \u201cfire and brimstone hidden in lacy groves,\u201d and this descriptor fits Morrison\u2019s writing too. I adore her prose for its multilayered meaning\u2013where Morrison could\u2019ve used simplistic \u201cbird\u201d language, she opts for \u201chawks\u201d and \u201chummingbirds\u201d to convey characters\u2019 feelings about Sethe\u2019s daughter\u2019s death\u2013and fear it for its stifling sensory assault. I also enjoyed <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i>\u2019s fresh approach to the supernatural. While many characters in supernatural novels refuse to address the presence of the spectral, it is instead a fact of life for <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i>\u2019s protagonists. No time is wasted on persuading characters of the supernatural\u2019s existence, which improves the book\u2019s narrative rhythm.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

However, these assets don’t entirely remedy <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i>\u2019s inconsistent pacing, which is my biggest stumbling block. The book\u2019s first half plods forward: Beloved worms her way into Sethe and Denver\u2019s relationship, and the outings the trio enjoys unspool in a thoroughly plotted fashion. Yet by <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i>\u2019s conclusion, the plot proceeds at breakneck speed. The reader experiences the rapid collapse of these relationships in glancing, skimming descriptions, and the \u201cproblem\u201d of Beloved is resolved in a few pages. Visually represented, this novel\u2019s structure would be a sketch whose front half is intricately drawn, only to devolve into hasty scribbles. However, the book\u2019s nonlinearity slightly conceals this unevenness by interspersing flashbacks and other characters\u2019 stories among the triad\u2019s narrative: this breaks up the Sethe-Beloved-Denver narrative, making it harder to catch how quickly the women\u2019s bonds disintegrate. Consequently, this issue doesn\u2019t utterly mar <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i>\u2019s beauty. Morrison also has rhetorical reasons for pacing the book unevenly. I didn\u2019t <\/span>enjoy <\/span><\/i>the pacing, but it\u2019s important to recognize it is deliberate technique, not authorial fallacy.<\/span><\/p>\n

So I ask again: how do we categorize <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i>? I believe <\/span>Beloved <\/span><\/i>isn\u2019t a novel that can be pigeonholed. It is a novel about the paranormal and crime, yes. But it is also about mothers and daughters and fractured relationships that either can\u2019t heal or heal like broken bones set wrong. <\/span>Beloved<\/span><\/i> isn\u2019t a book you \u201cenjoy\u201d for pleasure, but a book you can respect for its striking prose and unflinching descriptions. It is a necessary concoction readers must appreciate for what it does for them internally, even as they must also acknowledge its bitterness.<\/span><\/p>\n

Rating: 4.5 of 5 stars. A hauntingly beautiful, if unevenly paced, book.<\/span><\/p>\n

Trigger warnings: Child death, implied rape, bestiality<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trigger warnings follow the book review. How should we categorize Beloved? Its opening pages designate it as a paranormal novel. Sethe, a woman who escaped enslavement on the terrifying Sweet Home plantation, lives with her teenage daughter, Denver, in their Cincinnati house. However, their home also hosts a vengeful presence: the ghost of Sethe\u2019s infant … Continue reading Toni Morrison, Beloved (1987)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4983,"featured_media":241,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,8],"tags":[6,12,5,60,17],"class_list":["post-123","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-southern-crime","category-spring-24","tag-gothic","tag-historical-fiction","tag-literary-fiction","tag-magical-realism","tag-toni-morrison"],"acf":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/2426\/2024\/04\/Screen-Shot-2024-04-25-at-2.44.13-PM-e1714093144560.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4983"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=123"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/123\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/241"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=123"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=123"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ctlsites.uga.edu\/ugareadscrime\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=123"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}