Storytelling: Fictional Narratives, Imaginary People, and the Reader's Real Life

Background Information

There are many resources available for a standard biography of Toni Morrison, so this short section will focus on the pertinent parts of her background that specifically inform the creation of this novel. As the focus of this curriculum unit is the theme of storytelling, that idea will also serve as the central touchstone biographically.

Toni Morrison, a pen name, was born as Chloe Anthony Wofford in 1931 in Lorain, Ohio; the year of her birth is an important fact because "Morrison was twenty-three years old when the 1954 school desegregation decision in Brown v. Board of Education was handed down; she was thirty-seven...when the Civil Rights Act was passed. Thus, the activism, violence, and radical changes of the civil rights era formed the backdrop of almost her entire young adulthood." ¹ This history could not fail to inform her writing and, indeed, her novels grapple with many different aspects of the African American experience, even those that she did not personally live through, like the Middle Passage and slavery in Beloved. One critic claims that "Morrison's most revolutionary—and most defining—act has been to write for black readers about black people...[S]he has credited the complexity and originality of African American life by working within its intricate and rich system of meaning, language, and art." ² She achieves this through the representation of dialect, symbols, and a sense of authenticity in her fiction.

Morrison's grandparents were sharecroppers in Alabama; they became part of the Great Migration of African Americans from the South to the North when they moved first to Kentucky, and then settled in Ohio. They brought with them not only their personal experiences, but also the oral tradition of storytelling or "the black vernacular tradition," which was passed down to their children and grandchildren. ³ Morrison has repeatedly highlighted the importance of these stories, most recently in an April 2012 article: "At night her parents told R-rated ghost stories, like one about a murdered wife who returned home holding her own severed head. The following evening, the kids had to retell the tales with variations: Maybe it was snowing, or there was blood dripping from the head." ⁴ This immediately brings to mind the passage in Beloved of the childish but disturbing stories that Sethe's children tell each other about their own mother, from Denver's point of view: "[S]he remembered...the pleasure they had sitting clustered on the white stairs—she between the knees of Howard or Buglar—while they made up die-witch! stories with proven ways of killing [Sethe] dead." ⁵ This presents an interesting contrast of familial comfort, found in the physical closeness of the siblings and the unity resulting from the storytelling, and the unsettling plotline of murdering their mother. At this point in the novel, the reader is unaware why making up stories of Sethe's death would bring "pleasure" to the children, although there is an interesting connection to the idea of "proven ways of killing her dead." The children are aware they live with the ghost of their murdered sister, so death itself is not an end but simply a different kind of existence. The specific phrasing calls to mind the idea of ending a person in both body and spirit—when they "kill" Sethe in these stories, she cannot return to haunt them.

Morrison was in a unique position to marry the oral tradition of stories with the canon of Western literature because of her family's decision to move north in order to provide her with better access to education and, historically speaking, the increase in available avenues for black writers as the twentieth century progressed. "[F]rom a very early age, she had a deep connection to the Western literary tradition even while she maintained her grounding in the black vernacular tradition." ⁶ She went on to graduate from both Howard and Cornell and says she became a writer when "I realized there was a book that I wanted very much to read that really hadn't been written." ⁷ This is a powerful statement in context of the novel Beloved because I am not aware of a work that approaches its handling of morality, trauma, and the dangers of memory in such an eloquent and literary manner, while still being accessible to students.

In the quarter-century since the publication of Beloved, the novel has developed its own story to tell. While the novel won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction in 1988, it was not without controversy. The novel failed to win the National Book Award for that year, prompting a large group of renowned, self-identified "black writers" to publish a protest in the New York Times Book Review. This group, including such figures as Maya Angelou, Lucille Clifton, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "here assert ourselves against such oversight and harmful whimsy" and claim that "the legitimate need for our own critical voice in relation to our own literature...no longer be denied." ⁸ In 2006, a group of writers and critics polled by the New York Times voted that Beloved was the best work of literature of the last twenty-five years. ⁹

Finally, the novel has a story to tell as a banned or challenged text and a teacher should be aware of that history before assigning it in the classroom. The same year that Morrison's novel was voted to be the best work of fiction, it was also on the top of the American Library Association's list of most challenged books for "complaints [of] offensive language, sexual content, [and] unsuited to age group." ¹⁰ Having taught the novel, I know from experience that there are sections that must be handled cautiously. Prior to any classroom discussion of a delicate passage—for example, the references to human-bestial intercourse in the first chapter—I remind my students that the novel contains adult themes that require us to be sophisticated, mature readers, and that our language and tone must reflect that. ¹¹