"Can Your Past Harm Your Future?"
... still haunts us today (classic note.com, 03). The movie “Beloved” is definitely worth watching, but not until after the novel has been read. Beloved is the ghost of Sethe’s murdered child, returned for unclear reasons, embodied as a full-grown woman at the age that the baby would have been if it had lived. Part history, part ghost story, and part historical fiction, the novel also seeks to understand the impact of slavery, both on the psychology of individuals and on the larger patterns of culture and history (classic note.com, 03). The institution of slavery destroyed much of the heritage of the Africans brought to America. In the movie and in the book, the past is a burden that Sethe is desperately and willfully trying to forget (spark notes.com, 03). But for Sethe, the protagonist of the novel, memories of slavery are inescapable. They continue to haunt her, literally, in the spirit of her deceased daughter. Eighteen years earlier, Sethe had murdered this daughter in order to save her from a life of slavery (Beloved, 87). From Sethe’s experience, we must confront and understand the “ghosts” of the past. Contemporary American readers must confront the history of slavery in order to address its legacy, which manifests itself in ongoing racial discrimination and discord (sparknotes.com, 03). Morrison once said, “she wanted to help create a canon of black work, noting that black writers too often have to pander to a white audience when they should be able to concentrate on the business of writing instead” (spark notes.com, 03). Many readers believe Morrison’s novels go a long way toward the establishment of her envisioned tradition. The poetic, elegant style of her writing in Beloved panders to no one. Morrison challenges...