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Beloved
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A novel following Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman haunted, in both a figurative and a literal, ghost-driven sense, by the infant daughter she killed rather than see returned to slavery. Loosely inspired by the real historical case of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who killed her own child in 1856 rather than allow her recapture, the novel refuses a linear telling of its central trauma, circling and withholding it across a fragmented, nonlinear structure that formally enacts the difficulty of speaking the unspeakable. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1988.
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Widely discussed as a landmark of postmodern historiographic metafiction.
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Gothic Fiction, Genres Scholarship reads Beloved through Gothic convention (the haunted house at 124 Bluestone Road, the returned dead) applied to the history of American slavery, a Feminine or Southern Gothic rather than the novel's primary classification.
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