Toni Morrison's Beloved
To accompany our Study Day on Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Saturday 18 January 2020, below is some further information on Toni Morrison (1931-2019) and her writing.
American writer Toni Morrison was born in Ohio in 1931, and died in 2019. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988 and the Nobel Prize in 1993. In 2012, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom.
On Margaret Garner
Beloved is based partly upon the true story of Margaret Garner (1834-1856). Here is her story, as outlined on the Cincinnati History Library and Archives website:
Margaret Garner was born [in 1834] on the plantation of John Pollard Gaines in Boone County, Kentucky to a slave named Priscilla. She married another slave from a nearby plantation, Robert Garner. In 1849 John P. Gaines sold his plantation, including the slaves, to his brother Archibald Gaines.
In January of 1856, Margaret and her husband decided to flee along with their four children, his parents and a number of other slaves. Their path was to Covington, across the Ohio River to Cincinnati, and then on to Canada. At Cincinnati, the fugitive slaves split up for fear of being captured. Some of the party did make it to Canada. The Garners, however, did not.
At Cincinnati, they went to the home of relatives of Margaret’s for assistance in getting further north. Margaret’s relatives had earlier obtained their release from slavery from their masters. While at the home, Archibald Gaines and U.S. Marshalls surrounded the cabin to capture the fugitive slaves. While Robert was trying to defend them with a pistol, Margaret, not wanting to return to slavery, slit the throat of her two-year old daughter, Mary, then stabbed her other children and herself. While her daughter died immediately, Margaret and her other children were only wounded. The entire family were taken into custody and imprisoned.
A long trial ensued, in fact it has been called ‘longest’ fugitive slave case. Because of the sensationalism of the case it was followed almost daily in the newspapers. Margaret hoped to be tried on charges of murder in a free state. That way she would be treated as a free person and her children would be considered free as well. The decision after two weeks was that this was not a murder case but a fugitive slave case. She and her family were viewed as ‘property’. The family was returned to slavery.
Following a collision with another steamboat, Margaret and her infant daughter Cilla were thrown overboard. Margaret was saved but the child drowned. While it has been said that following her rescue Margaret expressed joy that her daughter drowned rather than be returned to slavery and there were those who even speculated she assisted in the drowning of her infant daughter, her husband in a interview after her death said she never tried again to harm her children, but that she had often expressed the idea that it would be ‘better for them to be put out of the world than live in slavery’. Margaret herself died in slavery in Mississippi in 1858 of typhoid fever.
Further information about the history of Margaret Garner will be provided at the Study Day.
Toni Morrison, Essay on race, remembering, and history
In this essay, Morrison reflects on how ‘the pitched battle between remembering and forgetting’ powered her novels, especially Beloved.
'I suspect my dependency on memory as trustworthy ignition is more anxious than it is for most fiction writers – not because I write (or want to) autobiographically, but because I am keenly aware of the fact that I write in a wholly racialised society that can and does hobble the imagination. Labels about centrality, marginality, minority, gestures of appropriated and appropriating cultures and literary heritages, pressures to take a position – all these surface when I am read or critiqued and when I compose. It is both an intolerable and inevitable condition. I am asked bizarre questions inconceivable if put to other writers: Do you think you will ever write about white people? Isn’t it awful to be called a black writer?
I wanted my imagination as unencumbered as possible and as responsible as possible. I wanted to carve out a world both culture specific and “race-free”. All of which presented itself to me as a project full of paradox and contradiction. Western or European writers believe or can choose to believe their work is naturally “race-free” or “race transcendent”. Whether it is or not is another question – the fact is the problem has not worried them. They can take it for granted that it is because Others are “raced” – whites are not. Or so the conventional wisdom goes. The truth, of course, is that we are all “raced”. Wanting that same sovereignty, I had to originate my own fictional projects in a manner I hoped would liberate me, the work and my ability to do it. I had three choices: to ignore race or try to altogether and write about the second world war or domestic strife without referencing race. But that would erase one, although not the only, most impinging fact of my existence and my intelligence. Two, I could become a cool “objective” observer writing about race conflict and/or harmony. There, however, I would be forced to surrender the centre of the stage to received ideas of centrality and the subject would always and forever be race. Or, three, I could strike out for new territory: to find a way to free my imagination of the impositions and limitations of race and explore the consequences of its centrality in the world and in the lives of the people I was hungry to write about.'
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The full essay is published in the Guardian, 8 August 2019.
Source: Toni Morrison, Mouth Full of Blood: Essays, Speeches, Meditations (Chatto & Windus, 2019).
Study Day on Beloved, 18 January 2019.
Novels by Toni Morrison
The Bluest Eye, 1970
Sula, 1973
Song of Solomon, 1977
Tar Baby, 1981
Beloved, 1987
Jazz, 1992
Paradise, 1998
Love, 2003
Literary Criticism and Social Criticism by Toni Morrison
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (Harvard University Press, 1992)
The Nobel Lecture in Literature, 1993 (Chatto and Windus, 1994)
The Dancing Mind: Speech upon Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)
Birth of a Nation’hood: Gaze, Script, and Spectacle in the O. J. Simpson Case, with Claudia Brodsky Lacour (Pantheon Books, 1997)
Opera libretto by Toni Morrison
Margaret Garner, music by Richard Danielpour, commissioned and produced by the Detroit, Cincinnati, and Philadelphia Opera Houses which premiered at the Detroit Opera in May 2005 (available on the website of the North Carolina Opera House).
From the NPR website on the opera Margaret Garner: Toni Morrison commented that Margaret Garner’s history is ‘not a story about race. It's more about the internal struggles that result from the institution of slavery. “The interest is not the fact of slavery, but of what happens internally, emotionally, psychologically, when you are in fact enslaved and what you do you do to try to transcend that circumstance. And that really is what Margaret Garner reveals”.’
Literary Criticism
Paul McDonald, Reading Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Literature Insight (Humanities EBooks, 2013)
Justine Tally, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison (Cambridge University Press, 2007)
Justine Tally, Toni Morrison's Beloved: Origins (Routledge, 2009)
