Beloved (For Further Study)

For Further Study

• Marilyn Judith Atlas, "Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Reviewers," in Midwestern Miscellany, Vol. XVII, 1990, pp. 45-57.

  A thorough survey of critical response to the novel prior to its winning the Pulitzer Prize. The critic suggests that the difficulties critics have had in interpreting the novel lie in its sensitive subject matter and complex design.

• Bernard W. Bell, "Beloved: A Womanist Neo-Slave Narrative; or Multivocal Remembrances of Things Past," in African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 7-15.

  Discusses Beloved as an exploration of the "double consciousness" of Black Americans.

• Eileen T. Bender, "Repossessing Uncle Tom's Cabin: Toni Morrison's Beloved," in Cultural Power/Cultural Literacy: Selected Papers from the Fourteenth Annual Florida State University Conference on Literature and Film, edited by Bonnie Braendlin, Florida State University Press, 1991, pp. 129-42.

  Argues that Beloved is Morrison's meditated reaction against the sentimental stereotypes of Harriet Beecher Stowe's famous novel. According to Bender, Morrison's novel represents a "new act of emancipation for a culture still enslaved by false impressions and factitious accounts."

• Patrick Bryce Bjork, "Beloved: The Paradox of a Past and Present Self and Place," in his Novels of Toni Morrison: The Search for Self and Place within the Community, Peter Lang Publishing, 1992, pp. 141-62.

  Examines the contradictions of personal identity and memory in Morrison's novel.

• Marilyn R. Chandler, "Housekeeping and Beloved: When Women Come Home," in her Dwelling in the Text: Houses in American Fiction, University of California Press, 1991, pp. 291-318.

  Analyzes Beloved and Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping "under the rubric of house and home as ideas in relation to which women in every generation and in every situation have had to 'work out their salvation' and define their identities."

• Marsha Jean Darling, "Ties That Bind," in Women's Review of Books, Vol. V, No. 6, March, 1988, pp. 4-5.

  Praises Beloved as a masterpiece of historical fiction which "challenges, seduces, cajoles and enjoins us to visualize, contemplate, to know, feel and comprehend the realities of the material world of nineteenth-century Black women and men."

• Christina Davis, "Beloved: A Question of Identity," in Présence Africaine, No. 145, 1988, pp. 151-56.

  Extols Morrison's gift for giving expression to the subjective consciousness of Sethe, a slave whose voice "is clear, its pain full of anguish, its beauty unbearable, its truth stunning."

• Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, "Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women's Individuation in Toni Morrison's Beloved," in African American Review, Vol. 26, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 51-59.

  Argues that Beloved "develops the idea that maternal bonds can stunt or even obviate a woman's individuation or sense of self," and that "the conclusion of the book effects a resolution of the tension between history and nature which underlies the movement of the work as a whole."

• John N. Duvall, "Authentic Ghost Stories: Uncle Tom's Cabin, Absalom, Absalom!, and Beloved," in Faulkner Journal, Vol. IV, Nos. 1 and 2, Fall, 1988 – Spring, 1989, pp. 83-97.

  Compares the ghost story elements in novels by Morrison, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and William Faulkner.

• Karen E. Fields, "To Embrace Dead Strangers: Toni Morrison's Beloved," in Mother Puzzles: Daughters and Mothers in Contemporary American Literature, edited by Mickey Pearlman, Greenwood Press, 1989, pp. 159-69.

  Calls the novel a profound "meditation on the nature of love," examining how the characters use relationships to attempt to create order out of chaos.

• Anne E. Goldman, "'I Made the Ink': (Literary) Production and Reproduction in Dessa Rose and Beloved," in Feminist Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, Summer, 1990, pp. 313-30.

  Argues that Beloved and Sherley Anne Williams's Dessa Rose "comment implicitly on the gap between mainstream critical theories and modern literary practice" by their construction of strong heroines who integrate themselves through writing, in contrast to the narrative fragmentation of postmodern fiction.

• Trudier Harris, "Of Mother Love and Demons," in Callaloo, Vol. 11, No. 2, Spring, 1988, pp. 387-89.

  Analyzes Morrison's treatment of the "mother love" theme in Beloved. Harris argues that in "exorcising" Beloved "the women favor the living over the dead, mother love over childish punishment of parents, reality over the legend of which they have become a part."

• Karla F. C. Holloway, "Beloved: A Spiritual," in Callaloo, Vol. 13, No. 3, Summer, 1990, pp. 516-25.

  Critiques Beloved as a mythic revisioning within an African-American literary tradition.

• Carl D. Malmgren, "Mixed Genres and the Logic of Slavery in Toni Morrison's Beloved," in Critique, Vol. XXXVI, No. 2, Winter, 1995, pp. 96-106.

  Notes Beloved's incorporation of elements from various genres, including the ghost story and historical novel, and argues that "[it] is the institution of slavery that supplies the logic underwriting the novel, the thematic glue that unifies this multifaceted text."

• Barbara Hill Rigney, "'A Story to Pass On': Ghosts and the Significance of History in Toni Morrison's Beloved," in Haunting the House of Fiction: Feminist Perspectives on Ghost Stories by American Women, edited by Lynette Carpenter and Wendy K. Kolmar, University of Tennessee Press, 1991, pp. 229-35.

  Explains the meaning of history in Beloved as "the reality of slavery. The 'rememories' are a gross catalogue of atrocities, gross sexual indignities, a denial of human rights on every level."

• Mervyn Rothstein, "Toni Morrison, in Her New Novel, Defends Women," in New York Times, August 26, 1987, p. C17.

  Interview with Morrison about the genesis of Beloved.

• Danille Taylor-Guthrie, editor, Conversations with Toni Morrison, University Press of Mississippi, 1994.

  A collection of interviews with the author, including one with Gail Caldwell on the writing of Beloved.