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Beloved Author Background Toni Morrison Born: Chloe Ardelia Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio Educated: Howard University and Cornell University, USA Book Groups @ Blue Mountains Library Died: August 5, 2019, at Montefiore Medical Centre, New York Toni Morrison is a Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning novelist, editor and professor. Her novels are known for their epic themes, exquisite language and richly detailed African American characters who are central to their narratives. Among her best-known novels are The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Beloved, Jazz, Love and A Mercy. Morrison has earned a plethora of literary accolades and honorary degrees, also receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2012. Morrison was the second eldest of four children of George and Ramah Wofford, a welder, and a domestic worker. She later credited her parents with instilling in her a love of reading, music and folklore along with the qualities of clarity and perspective. Morrison majored in English with a Classics minor and completed her Master’s thesis on the works of Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner. Morrison taught English at Howard University and worked at Random House as an editor. She and husband architect Harold Morrison had two sons and separated in 1964. Morrison joined a writing group at the University in the early 1960’s and began writing her first novel The Bluest Eye which was published in 1970. Morrison became a professor at Princeton University in 1989 and continued to produce great works. In recognition of her contributions to her field, she received the 1993 Nobel Prize in Literature, making her the first African American woman to be selected for the award. Source: biography.com Beloved Book Summary Book Groups @ Blue Mountains Library Beloved (1987) explores love and the supernatural. Inspired by real-world figure Margaret Garner, main character Sethe, a former slave, is haunted by her decision to kill her children rather than see them become enslaved. Three of her children survived, but her infant daughter died at her hand. As the novel opens, Sethe, in her late thirties, is living with her 18-year- old daughter, Denver, in a house that the neighbours avoid because it is haunted. The time is the early 1870s, right after the first wrenching dislocations of the civil war and its aftermath. Sethe and Denver live in an uneasy truce with the ghost until the arrival of Paul D, one of Sethe's fellow slaves on her former plantation in Kentucky. Paul exorcises the ghost, but then a mysterious female stranger shows up. She is 20 years old and strangely unmarked - she has no lines in her palms, for example, and her feet and clothing show no signs of hard travelling. She calls herself "Beloved ", and Sethe and Denver are happy to take her in. For this spellbinding work, Morrison won several literary awards, including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Ten years later, the book was turned into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey, Thandie Newton and Danny Glover. Sources: Jane Smiley, The Guardian, Australia edition, biography.com Beloved Discussion Questions Book Groups @ Blue Mountains Library 1. Consider the extent to which slavery dehumanizes individuals by stripping them of their identity, destroying their ability to conceive of the self. Consider, especially, Paul and how he can't determine whether the screams he hears are his or someone else's. How do the other characters reflect self-alienation? 2. Discuss the different roles of the community in betraying and protecting the house at 124. What larger issue might Morrison be suggesting here about community? 3. What does Beloved's appearance represent? What about her behaviour? Why does she finally disappear—what drives her departure? And why is the book's title named for her? 4. Talk about the choice Sethe made regarding her children when Schoolteacher arrives to take them all back to Sweet Home. Can her actions be justified—are her actions rational or irrational? 5. What does the narrator mean by the warning at the end: “this is not a story to pass on." Is he right...or not? Continued overleaf Beloved Discussion Questions (continued) Book Groups @ Blue Mountains Library 6. What would this story be like if Sethe and her kids weren't African American? Could the story even exist? 7. How does this novel compare to other novels about slavery and its effects? 8. Morrison's epic story of the effects of slavery is a giant jigsaw puzzle, a jumble of time and space, a mosaic of narrators, episodes and styles. What is gained by the absence of a coherent, conventional plot line? 9. At first glance, Sethe appears to be the meaty, central character. But it is daughter Denver who travels the furthest from start to finish. How does Denver come of age in the novel? And how do the circumstances of her birth predict her ultimate fate? 10. The question of identity for those once enslaved runs throughout the novel. To survive, most of the characters are compelled or are forced to change their names. Baby Suggs was once Jenny Whitlow, the slave Joshua becomes the free man Stamp Paid, even Sethe calls herself Lu when she escapes Sweet Home. How does Sethe's search for identity parallel her struggle to survive Beloved? Does Sethe ever find her true self? Sources: Durham County Library, BookCompanion website, LitLovers website Beloved Reviews Book Groups @ Blue Mountains Library Beloved is one of the few American novels that take every natural el- ement of the novel form and exploit it thoroughly, but in balance with all the other elements. The result is that it is dense but not long, dramatic but not melodramatic, particular and universal, shocking but reassuring, new but at the same time closely connected to the tradition of the novel, and likely to mould or change a reader's sense of the world. Jane Smiley, The Guardian, Australia edition Beloved is Toni Morrison's fifth novel, and another triumph. Indeed, Ms. Morrison's versatility and technical and emotional range appear to know no bounds. If there were any doubts about her stature as a pre-eminent American novelist, of her own or any other generation, Beloved will put them to rest. In three words or less, it's a hair-raiser. Slavery is ... presented to us as a paradigm of how most people behave when they are given absolute power over other people. The first effect, of course, is that they start believing in their own superiority and justifying their actions by it. The second effect is that they make a cult of the inferiority of those they subjugate. It's no coincidence that the first of the deadly sins, from which all the others were supposed to stem, is Pride, a sin of which Sethe is, incidentally, also accused. Beloved is written in an antiminimalist prose that is by turns rich, graceful, eccentric, rough, lyrical, sinuous, colloquial and very much to the point. Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Continued overleaf Beloved Reviews (continued) Book Groups @ Blue Mountains Library A lot of this story is just so heartbreaking and painful that it cannot be put into words. But the words that Morrison uses are powerful, and she writes like no other I have read. I will be reading more of her work in the very near future, but for now, I will be just sitting with this one and letting it sink in. Morrison reads the audio for this one, and it is fabulous to have her in your ear. bookswithjams website Morrison made me think about slavery in a way I never thought of before. We’ve all heard the horror stories of the injustice slavery was.… And yes, they all portray slave life as it was, a horror, but none of them demonstrated the lasting effects of it the way Morrison did in Beloved. For the first time I really thought about how inescapable it is for those who were lucky enough to flee from it, or how family ties are utterly destroyed in way you wouldn’t imagine, or even how we as a country choose to treat it today as part of our history. I thought it was horrifying but incredibly enlightening. readingturtleduck blog Beloved is a book not to be missed, as it is truly a work of art, and while it may make people uncomfortable, and it may not be a book that everyone can stomach, it is an important read about the trauma of slavery. ... Stunning, painful, and heart wrenching. Beloved is a true classic, one that inspires conversation and feeling. luvtoread website .

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