SOURCE: "Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved," in Studies in American Fiction, Vol. 17, No. 2, Autumn, 1989, pp. 157-67.

Horvitz is a critic and psychiatric social worker. In the essay below, she provides a thematic analysis of Beloved, noting Morrison's focus on bonding, bondage, alienation, loss, memory, and mother-daughter relationships.

Toni Morrison's fifth novel, Beloved (1987), explores the insidious degradation imposed upon all slaves, even when they were owned by, in Harriet Beecher Stowe's term, "a man of humanity." The novel is also about matrilineal ancestry and the relationships among enslaved, freed, alive, and dead mothers and daughters. Equally it is about the meaning of time and memory and how remembering either destroys or saves a future. Written in an anti-minimalist, lyrical style in which biblical myths, folklore, and literary realism overlap, the text is so grounded in historical reality that it could be used to teach American history classes...