Unforgettable and Heart-Wrenching: A Review of Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”

ByPeter Joeseph 'Briefcase Maker' Kalafatis
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Toni Morrison begins Beloved with an address and a temperament. The address is 124, a house on Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, and the temperament arrives in the first two sentences.

“124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.”

(Source: SparkNotes, Beloved quotes.)

Alfred A. Knopf published the novel on September 16, 1987. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988, and in 2006 it finished first in a New York Times Book Review poll that asked writers and critics to name the best American fiction of the previous 25 years. It also resists summary, which may be why readers keep arguing about it. What follows covers the author, the real case behind the book, its themes, its reception, and the 1998 film.

The Author and the Book’s Publication History

Morrison was born Chloe Ardelia Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, on February 18, 1931. She grew up in a working-class family, and her father’s stories from the African American tradition later fed into her writing. She took a bachelor’s degree in English at Howard University in 1953 and a master’s in American literature at Cornell in 1955, then taught briefly before moving into publishing, where she became the first Black woman senior editor in Random House’s fiction department. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, came out in 1970 (National Endowment for the Arts; Nobel Prize).

Later came a long academic post. Morrison held the Robert F. Goheen Chair in the Humanities at Princeton University from 1989 until she retired in 2006, and President Barack Obama presented her with the Presidential Medal of Freedom on May 29, 2012. She died in New York on August 5, 2019, at 88 (Wikipedia).

The idea for Beloved reached her at the editing desk. In 1974, while compiling The Black Book, a Random House collection on Black history and culture, she found an 1856 newspaper article titled “A Visit to the Slave Mother who Killed Her Child.” Wikipedia’s entry on the novel adds that the image of the title character rising out of water came from a vision Morrison had at her boathouse on the Hudson River.

The finished book is dedicated to “Sixty Million and more,” which Wikipedia reads as a reference to the Africans and their descendants who died because of the Atlantic slave trade.

Margaret Garner and the Case Behind the Book

Spoiler note: this section and the next describe the novel’s central event, which the book itself makes known early.

In January 1856, Margaret Garner crossed the frozen Ohio River from Kentucky with her husband, Robert, and seventeen other people. Pursuers surrounded the Cincinnati house where the group had taken shelter. Rather than see her children returned to slavery, Garner killed her daughter with a butcher knife and tried to kill her other children and herself before she was overpowered. Robert fired shots, wounded an officer, and was dragged out of the house. The trial ran two weeks. The commissioner ruled the fugitives were legally slaves and called the matter a question of property. Ohio later obtained a warrant to re-arrest and extradite her, but her owner, A.K. Gaines, had left the area and could not be found; he eventually sent the Garners to his brother’s plantation in Arkansas. Margaret Garner died in slavery in 1858, of typhoid fever. Robert Garner lived to the end of the Civil War and was interviewed by a Cincinnati Chronicle reporter in 1870 (Lehigh University’s Toni Morrison project).

Morrison kept the act and changed nearly everything around it. Sethe, like Garner, escapes slavery in Kentucky and kills her child in Ohio when slave catchers close in (SparkNotes). Past that point the novel is not a historical retelling and departs from Garner’s story at several turns. The NEA’s Big Read page records Morrison saying that staying with the characters’ interior lives puts authority back in the hands of the enslaved rather than the slaveholder. Against a legal ruling that treated Garner and her children as property, that is a pointed choice.

Frozen Ohio River at dawn with broken ice plates and bare sycamores

What Happens at 124 Bluestone Road

The story is set in Cincinnati in 1873, during Reconstruction, and it moves between that present and flashbacks to slavery. Sethe, formerly enslaved, lives at 124 Bluestone Road with her daughter Denver. The house is haunted by a poltergeist that Sethe believes is her dead daughter. Paul D, another survivor of the Sweet Home farm, arrives and upsets the household. Then a young woman named Beloved appears and draws Sethe into a painful reckoning with her past.

The book runs in three parts: eighteen chapters, then seven, then three.

Themes: Haunting, Motherhood and Freedom

Inside the story, the haunting is literal. The house has a resident presence, and the people in it treat that as a fact of daily life. It also does the work of memory. In a scene Denver recalls in chapter three, Sethe describes a place where something terrible happened as still existing, so that anyone who stands there can find it happening again (SparkNotes). Morrison herself described a haunting as something both longed for and feared (NEA Big Read).

Motherhood is where the book puts its hardest question. Morrison framed it as a reversal: what if motherhood were the highest act of freedom, not its opposite? Sethe’s choice in Ohio is the test of that question, and the novel declines to make it easy for her or for the reader.

She also said her characters are not bigger than life but as big as life (NEA Big Read), a remark that suits a book whose largest events happen inside a single household.

The epigraph, from the King James Bible, supplies the title and sets the terms for what follows:

“I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.”

(Epigraph: Romans 9:25, as given in Wikipedia’s article on the novel.)

Belonging, then, is the second thread. Who counts as a person, who counts as family, and who has the right to claim a self are questions the characters answer with their bodies and their silences more than with speeches.

Empty nineteenth-century farmhouse kitchen with a cast-iron stove and a single chair pulled out

Reception, Awards and the 2006 Poll

Beloved was a critical success and a bestseller for 25 weeks, although some critics, Stanley Crouch among them, panned it (Wikipedia). It was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award but lost to Paco’s Story. That loss drew a public protest: on January 24, 1988, 48 Black writers and critics, Maya Angelou among them, published a statement in the New York Times saying Morrison had not yet received the national recognition her work deserved.

The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction followed in 1988 (Pulitzer Prizes), along with the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award. In 1993 Morrison received the Nobel Prize in Literature, becoming the first Black woman to win it. The Nobel committee credited novels “characterized by visionary force and poetic import” that give life to “an essential aspect of American reality” (NobelPrize.org).

Then came the poll. In 2006, New York Times Book Review editor Sam Tanenhaus asked a couple of hundred prominent writers, critics and editors to name the single best work of American fiction published from 1980 through 2005. Of the 124 who answered, 15 picked Beloved. Don DeLillo’s Underworld came second with 11 (Wikipedia).

Watch: Morrison on Writing Beloved

Fresh Air’s 1987 interview with Morrison, posted on the program’s YouTube channel:

The 1998 Film and Other Adaptations

Jonathan Demme directed the film version, released on October 8, 1998. Oprah Winfrey produced it and played Sethe, with Danny Glover as Paul D, Kimberly Elise as Denver, and Thandiwe Newton, credited then as Thandie Newton, as Beloved. Wikipedia’s article on the film says Winfrey bought the rights in 1987, the year the novel appeared. The running time is 172 minutes.

The commercial result was poor. Wikipedia lists an $80 million budget against a gross of about $22.9 million, and notes one Oscar nomination, for Colleen Atwood’s costume design. Reviews were divided rather than hostile: 72 percent positive on Rotten Tomatoes, 58 out of 100 on Metacritic, and three and a half stars from Roger Ebert (Wikipedia, Beloved (1998 film)). A ten-episode BBC Radio 4 adaptation by Patricia Cumper followed in 2016, and the 2019 documentary Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, the year Morrison died.

Worn unmarked cloth-bound book open on a plank table beside an unlit oil lantern

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Beloved based on a true story?
Partly. Morrison built Sethe’s central act on the 1856 case of Margaret Garner, who escaped from Kentucky into Ohio and killed her daughter rather than see her returned to slavery. The novel is not a historical retelling and departs from Garner’s story at several points.

When and where is it set?
Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873, during Reconstruction, with flashbacks to the Sweet Home farm and to slavery before emancipation.

Where does the title come from?
The word sits in the book’s epigraph, Romans 9:25 in the King James Bible, which reads “and her beloved, which was not beloved.” It is also the name of the young woman who turns up at 124 Bluestone Road.

What awards did it win?
The Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award, both in 1988. Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993 for her body of work, not for this book alone.

Has it been filmed?
Yes. Jonathan Demme’s 1998 film starred Oprah Winfrey as Sethe. A BBC Radio 4 series followed in 2016.

Where to Read It

Beloved (Vintage International paperback) (affiliate link). This is the edition linked from the buy button at the top of the page.

Further Reading

Bookishelf, a book blog built on WordPress, reviewed the novel in April 2020 and called it “a beautiful, haunting story.” Its reviewer reads Morrison as giving voice to the ghosts of slavery’s history and turning Margaret Garner’s case into a book about pain, redemption and community. For the real history, Lehigh University’s page on Garner is the place to start.

Sources

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