![]() ![]() ![]() Part history, part ghost story, part historical fiction, the novel also seek to understand the impact of slavery, both on the psychology of individuals and on the larger patterns of culture and history. 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 had it lived. ![]() In Beloved, Morrison explores themes of love, family, and self-possession in a world where slavery has only recently become a thing of the past. In the novel, the protagonist's near-recapture follows the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, part of the Compromise of 1850, which stated that escaped slaves, as property, could be tracked down across state lines and retrieved by their old masters. Morrison based her novel on a real-life incident, in which an escaped slave woman who faced recapture killed her children rather than allow them to be taken back into slavery. ![]() Mythic in scope, Beloved is an attempt to grapple with the legacy of slavery. Its reception by critics was overwhelming, and the book is widely considered Morrison's greatest novel to date. Published in 1987 as Morrison was enjoying increasing popularity and success, Beloved became a best seller and received the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for fiction. ![]()
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