Toni Morrison's Beloved Book

A volume in Bloom's Modern Critical Intepretations, this contains fourteen critical articles on Beloved, which I just finished for the library's February book discussion. It is a tribute to Morrison's complex and multi-layered novel that each of these interpretations finds something completely different in the book.

The interpretations of the title character Beloved are especially diverse; of course we know who she is literally -- Sethe's murdered daughter -- but she is obviously something more. What else is it that she symbolizes? Answers here include the embodiment of Sethe's guilt feelings, the Freudian return of the repressed, the longing of slaves for their mothers, the African ancestors, all the victims of slavery, memory, history or the past in general. Is she evil, a succubus or vampire figure; neutral, an infantile "pre-Oedipal" personality seeking love; or positive, a catalyst for the confrontation of Sethe, Paul and Denver with their memories and hence of their ultimate redemption?

Is the novel about the nature of history, the legacy of slavery, a Freudian or religious ritual overcoming of trauma, an analysis of sexual politics or a critique of liberalism? Is it an apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic novel? Are its roots in African oral/aural literature, slave narratives, or modernist writers like Joyce, Woolf and Faulkner?

Probably it can be read in all these ways, and all of them find some support in Morrison's own descriptions of the writing of the book. I seldom get much out of critics, but despite some academic jargon, this collection actually added to my appreciation of the novel.