Key themes
- The living wound of slavery
- Memory that cannot be escaped
- Motherhood and its impossible choices
About this book
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
Published in 1987 and winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, Beloved is dedicated to the 'sixty million and more' who died as a result of the transatlantic slave trade.
Discussion questions
- Sethe's act — the killing of her baby daughter — is the moral and emotional centre of the novel. How does Morrison frame this act — as love, as insanity, as both?
- Beloved is literally a ghost, but she also functions as embodied trauma. What does it mean that the haunting becomes physical, personified — why isn't it enough for the past to haunt metaphorically?
- Paul D cannot speak directly about his own suffering for much of the novel. How does Morrison represent the difficulty of giving language to extreme trauma?
- The community of Black women who eventually exorcise Beloved play a crucial role. What is Morrison saying about collective memory, community solidarity and what it takes to survive?
- The novel ends with the repeated injunction 'This is not a story to pass on.' How do you read this contradiction — the novel has passed the story on — what is Morrison doing with this paradox?
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