Beloved

A detailed Summary of Beloved

While encountering Toni Morrison's novel Beloved for the first time, many readers experience extreme difficulty following the text. We know that 124 Bluestone Road is said to be haunted, but "haunted" is a word much thrown around in literature; one can be said to have "haunted eyes", for example, or to speak in a "haunted" manner. In this context, it simply means, "charged with meaning," or perhaps "imbued with a sense of doom." Morrison means both these things, but much more as well, in her description of Sethe's house and the experiences of the family who lives there. Precisely what Morrison does mean by the haunting of Bluestone Road and how said haunting can be seen in different ways and with different readings is the subject of this essay. By questioning the essence and truth of the haunting in the story one can see that not only is the issue of haunting and ghosts central to understanding the novel, but deeper still, it is an issue crucial to understanding the women of the work and their remembrance of the past that is indeed responsible for the haunting of their house.

To begin with, there are three possible ways we can view Sethe's "haunting," and they will be presented in the order in which they most cl

But possibly the most productive way of looking at the novel is to see the paranormal phenomenon going on in Sethe's home- of which the appearance of the woman Beloved is but one manifestation- as physical projections of the anguish of Sethe's spirit, and even more, the anguish of what other women like Sethe have suffered. In other words, Beloved is not a mortal being, but she is a mutually accepted figment of a collective imagination.

In other words, the only way the residents of 124 Bluestone (Sethe in particular) could functionally integrate the traumatic memories of what had happened to them into their collective consciousness is to transform those horrors into something they could retell; Morrison calls this "re-memory". In the novel's untitled epilogue, Morrison tells us that "This is not a story to pass on" -- at least, not in its literal form. It is, rather, an experience, just like the mysterious footprints behind 124 which will fit either a child or an adult, whoever chooses to place his own feet into them.

In looking at remembrance (the deliberate evocation of the past) a bit deeper we can see that it becomes especially problematic when the past in question, particularly as it pertains to slavery, becomes subsumed in the collective unconscious because it is too painful to confront directly.

Morrison's house of women understands this intuitively because they have, all their lives, been double participants in the myths of their own existence, both as black people and as women. Although Beloved's rage seems to be directed against men (she tries to get rid of both Paul D. and Mr. Bodwin, just as she has tried to get rid of her brothers) she allows them to share in her existence because she feels she can use its horror to drive them away. Morrison clearly does not believe that man would have the capacity of integrating a dark spirit like Beloved into their psyches in the same way

Some common words found in the essay are:
Beloved Sethe, Bluestone Road, Bluestone Sethe, Morrison Beloved, Paul Bodwin, Beloved Morrison, Toni Morrison's, Precisely Morrison, , child's headstone, bluestone road, woman beloved, story straight, experts supernatural, real ghost, 124 bluestone, looking novel,

Approximate Word count = 1293
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page double spaced)

Category: English