Beloved received the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award, which is named for an editor of Publishers Weekly. In accepting the award on October 12, 1988, Morrison said that "[t]here is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby" honoring the memory of the human beings forced into slavery and brought to the United States.[24] "There's no small bench by the road," she continued. "And because such a place doesn't exist (that I know of), the book had to."[24] Inspired by her remarks, the Toni Morrison Society began to install benches at significant sites in the history of slavery in America.[25] The New York Times reported that the first 'bench by the road' was dedicated on July 26, 2008, on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the place of entry for some 40% of the enslaved Africans brought to the United States. Morrison said she was extremely moved by the memorial.[24][26] In 2017, the 21st bench was placed at the Library of Congress. It is dedicated to Daniel Alexander Payne Murray (1852–1925), the first African-American assistant librarian of Congress.[27]
The novel received the seventh annual Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award in 1988, given to a novelist who "most faithfully and forcefully reflects Robert Kennedy's purposes—his concern for the poor and the powerless, his struggle for honest and even-handed justice, his conviction that a decent society must assure all young people a fair chance, and his faith that a free democracy can act to remedy disparities of power and opportunity."[28]
Critical reception
The publication of Beloved in 1987 resulted in the greatest acclaim yet for Morrison. Although nominated for the National Book Award, it did not win, and 48 African-American writers and critics—including Maya Angelou, Amiri Baraka, Jayne Cortez, Angela Davis, Ernest J. Gaines, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Rosa Guy, June Jordan, Paule Marshall, Louise Meriwether, Eugene Redmond, Sonia Sanchez, Quincy Troupe, John Edgar Wideman, and John A. Williams—signed a letter of protest that was published in The New York Times Book Review on January 24, 1988.[29][30] Yet later in 1988 Beloved did receive the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction,[31] as well as the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Book Award, the Melcher Book Award, the Lyndhurst Foundation Award, and the Elmer Holmes Bobst Award.[32]
Commentators have described Beloved as an exploration of notions of family, trauma, the repression of memory, the restoration of the historical record and an attempt to give voice to the collective memory of African Americans. Indeed, critics and Morrison herself have indicated that the controversial epigraph to Beloved, "60 million and more", is drawn from a number of studies on the African slave trade, which estimate that approximately half of each ship's "cargo" perished in transit to America.[33][34]
Scholars have additionally debated the nature of the character Beloved, arguing whether she is actually a ghost or a real person. Reviewers, assuming Beloved to be a supernatural incarnation of Sethe's daughter, have faulted Beloved as a confusing ghost story; Elizabeth B. House, however, has argued that Beloved is not a ghost, and the novel is actually a story of two probable instances of mistaken identity.[35] Beloved is haunted by the loss of her African parents, and thus comes to believe that Sethe is her mother. Sethe longs for her dead daughter and is rather easily convinced that Beloved is the child she has lost. Such an interpretation, House contends, clears up many puzzling aspects of the novel and emphasizes Morrison's concern with familial ties.[32]
Since the late 1970s, the focus on Morrison's representation of African-American experience and history has been strong. The idea that writing acts as a means of healing or recovery is a strain in many of these studies. Timothy Powell, for instance, argues that Morrison's recovery of a Black logos rewrites blackness as "affirmation, presence, and good",[36] while Theodore O. Mason, Jr., suggests that Morrison's stories unite communities.[37]
Many critics explore memory, or what Beloved’s Sethe calls "rememory", in this light. Susan Bowers places Morrison in a "long tradition of African American apocalyptic writing" that looks back in time, "unveiling" the horrors of the past in order to "transform" them.[38] Several critics have interpreted Morrison's representations of trauma and memory through a psychoanalytic framework. Ashraf H. A. Rushdy explores how "primal scenes" in Morrison's novels are "an opportunity and affective agency for self-discovery through memory" and "rememory".[39] As Jill Matus argues, however, Morrison's representations of trauma are "never simply curative": in raising the ghosts of the past to banish or memorialize them, the texts potentially "provoke readers to the vicarious experience of trauma and act as a means of transmission".[40] Ann Snitow's reaction to Beloved neatly illustrates how Morrison criticism began to evolve and move toward new modes of interpretation. In her 1987 review of Beloved, Snitow argues that Beloved, the ghost at the center of the narrative, is "too light" and "hollow", rendering the entire novel "airless". Snitow changed her position after reading criticism that interpreted Beloved in a different way, seeing something more complicated and burdened than a literal ghost, something requiring different forms of creative expression and critical interpretation. The conflicts at work here are ideological, as well as critical; they concern the definition and evaluation of American and African-American literature, the relationship between art and politics, and the tension between recognition and appropriation.[41]
In defining Morrison's texts as African-American literature, critics have become more attentive to historical and social context and to the way Morrison's fiction engages with specific places and moments in time. As Jennings observes, many of Morrison's novels are set in isolated Black communities where African practices and belief systems are not marginalized by a dominant White culture, but rather remain active, if perhaps subconscious, forces shaping the community.[42] Matus comments that Morrison's later novels "have been even more thoroughly focused on specific historical moments"; "through their engagement with the history of slavery and early twentieth-century Harlem, [they] have imagined and memorialized aspects of black history that have been forgotten or inadequately remembered".[40]
On November 5, 2019, the BBC News listed Beloved on its list of the 100 most inspiring novels.[43]
Banning and controversy
Beloved has been banned in many U.S. schools, including at least eleven during the 2021–2022 academic year. Common reasons for censorship include bestiality, infanticide, sex, and violence.[44]
In 2007, twenty years after its 1987 publication, the novel was abruptly abandoned by an AP English class at Eastern High School in Louisville, Kentucky, at the order of the school's principal. The class had nearly reached the end of the book when a parent complained about language on page 13.[45] Upon being informed that the book was being immediately banned, the English teacher who was teaching the book argued to the school’s Site Based Decision Making Council that a college level English literature course should be taught. With the help of like-minded teachers and an outpouring from Eastern’s alumni, the ban was soon lifted, and the book continues to be taught at the high school today.
In Virginia, Beloved was considered for removal from the Fairfax County senior English reading list due to a parent's 2017 complaint that "the book includes scenes of violent sex, including a gang rape, and was too graphic and extreme for teenagers".[46] Parental concern about Beloved's content inspired the Beloved Bill, legislation that would have required Virginia public schools to notify parents of any "sexually explicit content" and provide an alternative assignment if requested.[47][48] The bill was vetoed by Governor Terry McAuliffe. When McAuliffe ran again for the governor's office in 2021, a major event in the election was his statement during a debate that, "Yeah, I stopped the bill that—I don't think parents should be telling schools what they should teach." His opponent, Glenn Youngkin, seized on the remark, and produced a television commercial in which a parent recounted her effort to get the book banned. The commercial did not mention the title, author, or subject of the book, but focused on the "explicit material" in the unnamed work.[49][50]
Student activist group Voters of Tomorrow announced plans in February 2022 to distribute banned books to students in Texas and Virginia, including Beloved.[51][52] Parents in the Katy Independent School District responded to the book distributions by filing a request to review Beloved, resulting in the book's removal from school libraries and restriction to 11th and 12th Grade students. Students and parents spoke against banning the book during the public forum segment of the district's board meetings.[53][54] The ACLU of Texas delivered a letter to school board members and the superintendent in April 2022 claiming that the district's book removal of Beloved and other titles violated the First Amendment, the Texas Constitution, and the district's own policies.[55]
Trilogy
Beloved is the first of three novels about love and African-American history, sometimes called the Beloved Trilogy.[56] Morrison said they are intended to be read together, explaining: "The conceptual connection is the search for the beloved – the part of the self that is you, and loves you, and is always there for you."The second novel in the trilogy, Jazz, came out in 1992. The third novel Paradise, about citizens of an all-Black town, came out in 1997.
