Toni Morrison’s Beloved is a difficult read. Difficult, at first, for mundane reasons. Names you don’t know how to pronounce (Sethe, Halle). Irritating, non-standard diction (whitepeople, blackpeople). A narrative structure that jumps without transition from character to character, time to time, location to location, leaving you to catch up as best you can. A general lack of clarity, for the first few chapters, on who the characters are and how they are related to one another.
Tempted to put the book aside, I pressed on. They didn’t give Ms. Morrison a Pulitzer and a Nobel for nothing, after all.
And suddenly, halfway through, it all began to make sense (except for the unpronounceable names and odd diction, which continued to trip me up to the very last page). Beloved is a ghost story. And the character of Beloved, the infant daughter Sethe murdered to keep her from falling into the hands of Schoolteacher, Sethe’s former owner, is only the proximate ghost. The real ghost of Toni Morrison’s novel is the history of slavery in America. It’s a good ghost story. It is also a shocking, disturbing look at the horrific part of our history we try to forget.
Beloved, of course, has been subjected to challenge after challenge, mainly from parents’ groups trying to have the book removed from high school libraries and reading lists:
Challenged at the St. Johns County Schools in St. Augustine, Fla. (1995). Retained on the Round Rock, Texas Independent High School reading list (1996) after a challenge that the book was too violent. Challenged by a member of the Madawaska, Maine School Committee (1997) because of the book’s language. The 1987 Pulitzer Prize winning novel has been required reading for the advanced placement English class for six years. Challenged in the Sarasota County, Fla. schools (1998) because of sexual material. Source: Source: 2007 Banned Books Resource Guide by Robert P. Doyle. [link]
Beloved contains incest, rape, pedophilia, graphic sex, extreme violence, sexual abuse, physical/emotional abuse, infanticide, and an extensive amount of profanity. The first two chapters contain five references to sex with cows in addition to other types of sex. [link]
They cite violence and sex, but I suspect the real reason behind continuing challenges to Beloved is that it confronts us with our sins.
When authorities banned Uncle Tom’s Cabin they weren’t shy about stating their reason: the book espoused abolition and made whites look bad. When parents’ groups challenged The Color Purple and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, white and black parents alike were frank about disliking the authors’ negative depictions of their own races. With Beloved, however, book banners hide behind sex and violence.
Americans never set up a truth and reconciliation commission on slavery. We don’t want to hear the truth about slavery, we don’t want to reconcile with our shameful past. Toni Morrison forces us to confront those aspects of slavery none of us, white or black, want to face: the brutality, the rapes, the taking of children, the impossibility of marriage and family life, the killing of slaves for sport, the feelings of utter helplessness experienced by escaped slaves even decades after they’d gained their freedom, the impossibility of trust or reconciliation between the races.
And that is the true difficulty this novel presents to readers: the mirror it puts up to our own nature. This novel will disturb you. It is a necessary novel. It is a brilliant novel.
Note: thus endeth my official banned books project, started in September 2009. My self-imposed goal, to read previously-unread books on a “top 50” list of challenged and banned books in the USA, was a limited one. Hundreds and hundreds of books have been, and continue to be, challenged and banned. I will continue to read and review banned books, and track book banning news from around the USA.