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Beloved

LILIANE WEISSBERG (ESSAY DATE 1996)

SOURCE: Weissberg, Liliane. "Gothic Spaces: The Political Aspects of Toni Morrison's Beloved." In Modern Gothic: A Reader, edited and with an introduction by Victor Sage and Allan Lloyd Smith, pp. 104-20. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1996.

In the following essay, Weissberg traces Morrison's utilization of the Gothic house as a structure of confinement in Beloved.

There is a blue house that sits on this river between two bridges. One is the George Washington that my bus has just crossed from the Manhattan side, and the other is the Tappan Zee that it's heading toward. My destination is that blue house, my objective is to tape a dialogue between myself and another black American writer, and I stepped on this bus seven years ago when I opened a slim volume entitled The Bluest Eye. Where does the first line of any novel—like any...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Primary Sources
   1. Toni Morrison (Essay Date 1987)
4. General Commentary
   1. Katherine Piller Beutel (Essay Date 1997–98)
5. Title Commentary
   1. Beloved
6. Further Reading

1. Toni Morrison