Beloved, by Toni Morrison
Despite the rather un-enticing front cover of this particular edition, 'Beloved' was a colourful, characterful, compelling book. Indeed it won a Pulitzer Prize, and Morrison also holds a Nobel prize for literature - so I suppose it's hardly surprising that it was very well-crafted and very thought-provoking, delving into some very important themes in a very sensitive and very clever way.
'Beloved' centres around a black woman called Sethe, who lives with her daughter Denver in a small house. Sethe has been emancipated from slavery, but in spite of her 'freedom' she is still haunted by painful memories of the terrible things that happened to her when she lived as a slave at Sweet Home farm. Even more significantly, she is literally haunted by the ghost of her baby daughter, who died without a name and whose gravestone is engraved with one word - Beloved.
The first thing that interested me was the way in which Morrison wrote about the ghost. At the start of the novel, the ghost is a spirit that makes creaking noises on the stairs and occasionally moves objects or touches the house's living occupants - and yet, while this description has all the hallmarks of a creepy fantasy-genre ghost story, it didn't feel like that when I was reading it. Even though the characters live in a literal haunted house, it is treated and written about as a simple fact of life, nothing out of the ordinary. Just as casually as you might say they lived in a house with red bricks, so Morrison tells us they lived in a house with a ghost in it.
I think this is down to the fact that the supernatural and the afterlife and this kind of 'magic' was prevalent in black American culture. I found similar ideas in some of Zora Neale Hurston's short stories, which were set in a not dissimilar Southern African-American folk community (albeit much later) - I recall one particular tale exploring the supernatural powers of the black characters, which made a laughing stock of the white characters who just didn't get it. And I think Morrison is dealing with a similar theme here. She is quoted as saying "When I write, I don't translate for white readers." - and indeed everything about this book builds an authentic, characterful, black setting. The way the ghost is written about is just one example, but it's also in the characters' dialectal voices and colloquial nicknames, and in the flashbacks and songs that feel like oral folk storytelling. Coming to the book as a white reader, I found it really insightful and immersive.
But the ghost does not remain an invisible spirit for very long. It soon materialises in a far from ghostlike form, as a human woman who appears outside the house one day claiming not to remember where she came from. She calls herself Beloved.
Now I found this character intriguing. Was she really the baby Beloved, returned from the dead in another form? She could well have been. But I also found myself wondering whether she was even real, or whether she was a symbol, a literary construct, a metaphor? This could also, definitely, have been the case. Either way, there was something unsettlingly symbolic about Beloved; her appearance seemed to unlock memories in multiple characters (both Sethe and Paul D), and also, the longer she stayed with Sethe and Denver, the stronger and healthier and more human she grew, and the more Sethe began to sicken and age and fade away.
So whether Beloved was a real character who was also symbolic, or whether she was purely a metaphorical construct, it seemed to me either way that she could be seen as symbolising the characters' pain, or perhaps their guilt, or even more broadly, their pasts. Beloved encroached on the present and haunted Sethe and wouldn't let her go, until their roles were fully reversed - Beloved was no longer buried and invisible, but was holding a worn-down Sethe completely under her power. This parallels chillingly with Sethe's past - it was buried and hidden away, but surfaced even in the present day, and haunted her and clung to her until she could almost bear its power no longer.
My favourite thinking-point on this book, though, is very broad: I find it really interesting that Morrison chose to even use a ghost in the first place. The ghost of Beloved is a facilitator in this novel; it facilitates Sethe and Paul D's painful memories of the awful enslavement they both suffered, it highlights the terrible crimes Sethe committed as a result of her enslavement (raising dark and chilling debates about morality and justification of actions), it opens up the theme of maternal love which pervades the whole novel. So enslavement, morality, and love. All explored through the use of a ghost.
I think Morrison is making a point about the ultimate endurance of those three things - enslavement, morality, and love - and their ability to haunt someone. And this forms the basis of her overall messages with this novel: that the fire of a mother's love can never be extinguished, that some moral dilemmas can never be solved, and that emancipation from slavery is not the same thing as true emotional freedom.
In conclusion, I thought this was an extremely powerful novel, which ultimately spread a very important message about the horrors of slavery, but managed to be imbued with a lively sense of character and community too. I said a few paragraphs ago that it didn't have the air of a ghost story. But it is undoubtedly now haunting me.