Beloved’s Critical History as Told by Toni Morrison

Regardless of the fact that a cottage industry of readers regularly dub Beloved Morrison’s masterpiece, its author wastes few words in reconfirming the book. If the forewords written for Sula (2004) and Paradise (2014) take up the most pages of the seven novels reprinted with a Morrison introduction, Beloved’s 2004 foreword ranks among the shorter of the Vintage reprints. We might ascribe her brevity in part to Morrison’s increasing comfort with the abundance and diversity of scholarship on her oeuvre, particularly after the 1985 publication of the first monograph devoted to her in its entirety—Bessie W. Jones and Audrey L. Vinson’s The World of Toni Morrison: Explorations of Literary Criticism.

Concerned prior to the publication of Song of Solomon in 1977 that comparisons made between herself and white male canonical writers were tantamount to imposing an adverse methodology on her efforts, Morrison maintains in a 1983 interview with Nellie McKay: “I am not like James Joyce; I am not like Thomas Hardy; I am not like Faulkner” (Taylor-Guthrie 152). By the time Morrison writes Beloved and delineates the process of doing so in a 2004 Vintage foreword, she appears to be far more satisfied that profoundly serious and honestly nuanced criticism of her novels and those by other black women writers was being made possible by the development of a critical tradition rooted in black culture. As Nancy J. Peterson points out, “given the profusion of such scholarship by even the mid-80s, it is no wonder Morrison took the opportunity to comment upon the (in)appropriateness of some of these approaches” (6).

In “Rootedness: The Ancestor as Foundation” (1984), Morrison remarks: “My general disappointment in some of the criticism that my work has received has nothing to do with approval. It has something to do with the vocabulary used in order to describe these things. I don’t like to find my books condemned as bad or praised as good, when that condemnation or that praise is based on criteria from other paradigms. I would much prefer that they were dismissed or embraced based on the success of their accomplishment within the culture out of which I write” (Mari Evans 342).