Blog Post on Beloved

Write a 1-2 paragraph response to Morrison's use of the slave narrative in Beloved. How does she rewrite/ revise the formula adopted by Douglass? What similarities/ differences do you see between the narrative of Douglass's life and Morrison's novel?

Toni Morrison, Margaret Garner, and Beloved

Next week, we'll begin talking about Toni Morrison's seminal 1988 novel, Beloved. Beloved is a book rich with Cincinnati history. It fictionalizes the life of runaway slave Margaret Garner into a magisterial narrative about love, human rights, and our ability to truly "own" the lives we lead. Some of you might be familiar with the story of Garner. She was a slave on a plantation in Kentucky during the 1850s and escaped from her masters with her young children by night from Covington across the Ohio River into the Union enclave of Cincinnati. When slave-catchers reached the home where she and her children were hiding, Garner killed one of her children and attempted to kill the others rather than allow them to be returned to a life of slavery. An America already at odds over the issue of slavery was captivated by the story of Garner and her subsequent trial, which posed fundamental questions about liberty, personhood, and the law. When Junot Diaz was asked by Newsweek to name the 5 books of fiction that were most important to him, he placed Beloved at the top of the list, saying that "[y]ou can't understand the Americas without this novel about the haunting that is our past."

Thomas Saterwaite Noble, "The Modern Medea" (1867)--painting based on Margaret Garner

Toni Morrison based Beloved loosely on the Garner narrative. She also wrote the libretto for an opera on the subject of the runaway slave's life, entitled Margaret Garner. Beloved and Margaret Garner are just two examples of Morrison's interest in tracing the history of black life in America. She is one of the most important authors of the twentieth century and a major force in popularizing African American fiction, both as a writer and editor of other writers work during her time in the publishing industry. Beloved won the Pulitzer Prize, but many other novels by Morrison were justly celebrated--from The Bluest Eye and Song of Solomon, two earlier works, to Paradise and the recently-released A Mercy. She is also famous for her many works of literary and social criticism, including Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. In 1993, Morrison received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Twentieth Century Slave Narratives

In class, we are reading 19th century slave narrative, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, one of the most celebrated memoirs detailing slavery from the inside in the United States. However, it's equally important to remember that there were a number of former slaves still alive in the United States well into the twentieth century--many of whom told their stories via oral narratives. For some fascinating stories about what it was like to live as a slave in this country, please check out these narratives collected by members of the WPA (Works Progress Administration) during the late 1930s. Keep these stories in mind as we read Douglass and, later, Morrison's Beloved.

Frederick Douglass and the Slave Narrative in America

Born in 1818, Frederick Douglass spent the early years of his life as a slave. After escaping from slavery, he became one of the most renowned spokespeople not only for the cause of abolitionism, but also for that of women's suffrage. The narrative of Douglass's life, which we will spend this week of class discussing, is an important document in both African American and ethnic American literary history. The many tropes Douglass employs in his autobiographical narrative have outlived the work's important political message and become a means of talking about race, history, and agency in American identity proper. How might we read Douglass' story alongside those of turn-of-the-century immigrant writers, such as Anzia Yezierska or Sui Sin Far? How has Douglass' writing influenced subsequent African American and ethnic American literature?

Welcome to Topics in Ethnic American Literature

For many years, critics have argued about the definition of both ethnicity and ethnic American fiction. In this class, we will attempt to place literature written by a variety of "ethnic" authors into a comparative context. We have spent our first week reading short stories by turn-of-the-century immigrant authors, such as Sui Sin Far and Abraham Cahan. Next, we will turn our attention to the slave narrative, and ask whether the slave narrative can be considered an example of ethnic fiction or whether we need to read African American narrative apart from the stories of other so-called ethnic writers. How are race and ethnicity intertwined in our culture? If we compare stories across racial and ethnic lines, do we erase the very important differences between the history of slavery and immigration in America? We will begin by reading Frederick Douglass' slave narrative and see how Toni Morrison has worked to revise and re-envision the slave narrative in her magisterial novel Beloved. In the coming weeks, we will seek to create a working definition of ethnic American literature and think about the myriad ways in which ethnicity plays into our daily lives and our conceptions of American national identity.