Toni Morrison and the Gothic

Last week, we lost one of the strongest literary voices of our era. Toni Morrison passed away on August 5, following an impressive career that spanned half a century. She is celebrated for her unflinching portrayals of the African-American experience and for works that center the voices of black women. She was also one of the leading figures of the modern Gothic.

The Gothic has always been a genre of the margins—written by and about the othered and oppressed, featuring taboo topics and ugly truths. 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. Therefore, it is simultaneously fitting and subversive that Toni Morrison should use the Gothic mode to write about the experiences of African-American women. She is also one of the few to successfully take a genre rooted in eighteenth-century Europe and make it fully modern and American. 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. Rather, at its heart, the Gothic is about being haunted by the past. And in her works, Morrison takes on one of the largest specters that haunts American history: slavery.

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is the one that rocketed her to fame, and it is also her most explicitly Gothic work. 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. Beloved follows a number of Gothic literary conventions, the most immediately obvious of which is its focus on setting. The novel opens with the lines “124 was spiteful. 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. 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. In making the house and the ghost synonymous, the house is anthropomorphized and enabled to play an active role in the action of the story. Like many other settings in Gothic literature, the house also serves as a physical representation of past sins. As the site where Sethe killed her daughter, the house is a constant reminder of that moment, and Sethe finds herself no more able to leave the house behind than she is able to leave behind the past.

But Beloved is far more complex than a simple haunted house story, as is made clear by the arrival of Beloved in the flesh. The sudden appearance of mysterious strangers or distant relatives is a common Gothic trope. But when Sethe arrives home one day to find a young woman on her doorstep, it soon becomes clear that this woman is no stranger. She calls herself Beloved and has an intimate knowledge of Sethe’s history, which leads Sethe to believe that she is a physical incarnation of her murdered daughter. This version of Beloved is a supernatural femme fatale—an undead malevolent force appearing in the guise of a beautiful woman. She seduces Paul D. and wields a powerful sexuality that complicates our understanding of her as the dead child. She also has a powerful hold over Sethe, whose guilt drives her to pour everything she has into pleasing and caring for Beloved, neglecting even her own need to eat. In this way, Beloved resembles a classic Gothic monster: the vampire—consuming the life force of others.

More than its setting or its supernatural elements, what makes Beloved a Gothic work is its fixation on the past. Though Beloved’s death occurs eighteen years before the start of the story, that moment saturates every page of the novel. So, too, does Sethe’s past life as a slave on the plantation Sweet Home. Though Sethe tries to repress her memories, they resurface as flashbacks so powerful that she feels like she is reliving them. Sethe warns her youngest daughter Denver that the past is “going to always be there waiting for you.” Much like Beloved was waiting on their front step—a physical manifestation of the past ready to integrate itself into the present. Only when Sethe, Paul D, and the black community around them are able to confront the past are they able to exorcise the spirit of Beloved and begin to build a new future.

In Beloved, Toni Morrison used the trappings of Gothic fiction to discuss the real-life horrors of slavery and racism. Its horror rests not merely in the depiction of ghosts and undead seductresses, but in how these things represent genuine trauma that our nation is still struggling with today. With one book, she redefined the American Gothic and paved the way for many other African-American writers of horror to develop these themes even further. Morrison has left a powerful literary legacy, and her voice will be missed.

Feel free to share your thoughts on Toni Morrison and her works in the comments.