Beloved by Toni Morrison: A Summary of the Story, Characters and Themes
What Beloved is about
Toni Morrison published Beloved in 1987. It is set in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873, in the years after the American Civil War, and it follows people who were once enslaved and are now legally free but nowhere near finished with the past.
Sethe lives at 124 Bluestone Road with her eighteen-year-old daughter, Denver. The house is haunted. Mother and daughter believe the spirit is Sethe's youngest daughter, who died as a baby. Sethe's two sons, Howard and Buglar, ran away before they turned thirteen, and Sethe blames the ghost. Baby Suggs, mother of Sethe's husband Halle, died soon after the boys left, eight years before the novel opens. Denver is shy, friendless and barely leaves the house.
Then Paul D arrives. He was enslaved alongside Sethe, Halle and Baby Suggs at a plantation called Sweet Home. He drives the spirit out of the house, which earns Denver's contempt, since the ghost was her only company. He also persuades Sethe and Denver to go out to a carnival, the first time they have left together in years. When they come home, a young woman is sitting outside. She calls herself Beloved.
Paul D is suspicious. Sethe is charmed. Denver begins to care for the sickly stranger and to believe she is the sister who died. From there the book moves steadily backwards, into Sweet Home, into Sethe's escape, and into the single act that cut her off from her neighbours.
The main characters
Sethe is the centre of the novel. She is a formerly enslaved mother of four who escaped and reached her children in Cincinnati, and who defines love as something that must be total. Her line "thin love is no love" is the argument she makes for everything she has done.
Denver is the daughter who stayed. She has grown up inside a haunted house with a mother the community avoids, knowing something terrible happened without fully understanding it. Her slow movement outwards, towards work and towards other people, is the quiet spine of the book.
Paul D carries his own history of Sweet Home and of a chain gang, including sexual violence done to him and the other men there. He tries to make an ordinary life with Sethe and finds he cannot hold it steady.
Beloved is the young woman who appears outside 124 and will not leave. She grows demanding, then enormous, until Sethe's whole life bends around her.
Around them stand Baby Suggs, who held a kind of standing in the community before she died, and Stamp Paid, who hands Paul D the newspaper clipping that explains everything. Behind all of them is Schoolteacher, the vicious manager at Sweet Home, and the four horsemen who came to 124 to take Sethe and her children back into slavery.
The themes
Morrison said she wanted to show the limits placed on enslaved women and to give that history a physical form that literature had not provided. Beloved is that form. The novel treats memory as something solid enough to sit down at your table and eat your food.
Freedom in this book is legal but not complete. Everyone at 124 is out of bondage and still governed by it. Motherhood is the hardest theme. Sethe's choice in the woodshed is presented as love taken to its furthest point, and the novel refuses to settle the question of whether that makes it right. Paul D tells her that her love is "too thick" and that she has "two feet, not four." She does not accept it.
Community matters too. The neighbours turned away from Sethe partly out of envy of Baby Suggs and partly out of horror at what Sethe did. The cost of that isolation is measured across years, and the way back runs through other people rather than through private penance.
How it ends (spoilers)
Sethe tells Paul D what happened. When the four horsemen came, she took her children to the woodshed intending to kill them rather than let them be returned to Sweet Home, and she killed her infant daughter. She was "trying to put my babies where they would be safe." The headstone read only BELOVED, which is all she could pay for.
Convinced that Beloved is that daughter returned, Sethe gives her everything, loses her job and begins to waste away while Beloved swells into the shape of a pregnant woman. Denver finally goes to the Black community for help. The local women come to exorcise Beloved. At the same moment the white landlord, Mr Bodwin, arrives to collect Denver for a new job, and Sethe, mistaking him for Schoolteacher, attacks him with an ice pick. The women hold her back. Beloved disappears.
Denver joins the working community. Paul D returns to a bedridden Sethe, who says Beloved was her "best thing." He tells her she is her own best thing. She answers, "Me? Me?" In time, everyone who knew Beloved forgets her.
Why it still matters
The novel won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988 and was a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award. A survey of writers and critics run by The New York Times named it the best work of American fiction published between 1981 and 2006. A film version followed in 1998, starring Oprah Winfrey.
Its hold comes from what Morrison does with interiority. The novel insists on the inner lives of formerly enslaved people, on their reasoning, their grief and their arguments with each other, rather than treating them as figures in a historical record. That is why it is still taught, still argued over, and still difficult in the way it was meant to be.
