Writing a novel about slavery in the U.S. would seem to be a fail-safe endeavor. The audience for such a book is already converted: the evil of owning men, women and children as chattel is shamefully obvious to everyone, and the heroes and villains are easy to tell apart. But it is precisely the contemporary consensus on human bondage that makes serious fiction on this subject so rare and so difficult to achieve. Imaginative literature at its best does not reinforce received opinions but disturbs them, puts them to the test of experience relived. And what is obvious to readers now -- that slavery was a moral abomination -- did not appear as unchallenged truth to everyone embroiled in its practice then. Those who possessed and those who were possessed struggled, like most people at all times, everywhere, to get through their days; neither history nor the exigencies of survival allowed them much time for meditation or outrage. To portray the texture of such lives, a novelist must be willing to forgo reflective indignation and let the characters and details speak for themselves.
To a remarkable extent, Beloved does just that. Toni Morrison, the author of four previous novels including the acclaimed Song of Solomon (1977), certainly displays slavery in all its cruelty and loathsomeness, but she does so from an intriguing, unsettling perspective. Her heroine is Sethe, who has run away from her Kentucky master and settled with her mother-in-law on the outskirts of Cincinnati. The details of Sethe's break for freedom are appropriately heroic. Pregnant with her fourth child and apparently abandoned at the last moment by her husband and fellow slave Halle, she nonetheless manages to send her three children ahead of her in a wagon bound for Ohio and then arrives there herself in 1855, after giving birth to her daughter Denver on the way.
When Paul D, another slave from the Sweet Home farm in Kentucky, fetches up at Sethe's address 18 years later, he finds evidence of defeat rather than triumph. Sethe's two oldest children, both boys, have run away. The youngest, the girl Denver, seems hostile and reclusive. The third child, also a girl, is long since dead, but her spirit disruptively haunts Sethe's house.
Evidently something terrible has happened here, and much of Beloved is devoted to a painstaking unraveling of this mystery. Sethe is an unwilling participant in the process, since she has everything to forget and believes that "the future was a matter of keeping the past at bay." She cannot quite manage this, since she is afflicted with "a brain greedy for news nobody could live with in a world happy to provide it." The arrival of Paul D brings reminders of the life she fled, but it also seems to promise happier times ahead; he frightens the noisy, disembodied specter off the premises and moves in. But soon Sethe must take in another, more upsetting guest, a young woman who materializes one afternoon in the yard and who calls herself Beloved. It is the name Sethe gave years ago to the daughter whom she murdered with a handsaw.