Beloved
Toni Morrison (1987)
“A ghost story about a mother who killed her baby daughter to spare her from slavery — and what happens when the dead come back.”
Character Analysis
A woman of tremendous intelligence and endurance who cannot love herself without terror because everything she has loved has been taken or threatened. The act in the shed is the novel's unresolvable center: an act of love that is also an act of violence, an act of protection that is also an act that cannot be undone. Morrison refuses to settle whether Sethe was right or wrong. She shows us Sethe as she is: whole, damaged, surviving, unreachable, present.
AAVE-inflected syntax that is also deeply precise and intelligent — she notices everything, names things with startling accuracy, but operates in a community's grammar rather than an academy's