In fact, the house and the ghost of the infant Beloved are so closely tied to each other that the house itself is described as evincing human emotions like spite.
#SOUTHERN GOTHIC LITERATURE ELEMENTS FULL#
Full of a baby’s venom.” Sethe’s home, 124 Bluestone Road, is a haunted house in the most literal sense: the ghost of Sethe’s first daughter makes herself known by throwing objects around and causing other disruptions.
The novel opens with the lines “124 was spiteful. Beloved follows a number of Gothic literary conventions, the most immediately obvious of which is its focus on setting. The novel centers on a former slave named Sethe who is haunted by the presence of the young daughter she murdered in order to spare her from the horrors of slavery. Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is the one that rocketed her to fame, and it is also her most explicitly Gothic work. And in her works, Morrison takes on one of the largest specters that haunts American history: slavery. Rather, at its heart, the Gothic is about being haunted by the past. She avoids the pitfall that many writers today fall into of viewing the Gothic merely as a collection of tropes-the haunted castle, the brooding love interest, the wide-eyed naif. She is also one of the few to successfully take a genre rooted in eighteenth-century Europe and make it fully modern and American. Therefore, it is simultaneously fitting and subversive that Toni Morrison should use the Gothic mode to write about the experiences of African-American women. But it was also originally a genre of empire-written by white British authors who cast people of color as the villains and viewed foreign lands as places of dangerous magic and unknown evil. The Gothic has always been a genre of the margins-written by and about the othered and oppressed, featuring taboo topics and ugly truths. She was also one of the leading figures of the modern Gothic. She is celebrated for her unflinching portrayals of the African-American experience and for works that center the voices of black women.
Toni Morrison passed away on August 5, following an impressive career that spanned half a century. Last week, we lost one of the strongest literary voices of our era.
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