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een Men and Women 36
4.2 The Reconciled Community 39
Conclusion 41
Abstract 44
摘要 45
Works Cited 46
Acknowledgements 1
Publications 2

Introduction
Toni Morrison, born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on Feburary 18, 1931, is a Nobel Literature Prize and Pulitzer Prize winning American writer. Beloved (1987) is Toni Morrison’s fifth novel and has always been the interest of Morrison critics. By the time of the publication of Beloved, Morrison had four previous successful novels, The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), and Tar Baby (1981) to her credit and enjoyed wide national and international fame. However, only one of her previous works, Song of Solomon (1977) matched the glowing public and critic response Beloved received.
The novel is adopted from an actual event about a slave mother, Margaret Garner, who killed her own child to save her child from the fate of slave, which she considered worse than death. Morrison comments her action in the forward of Beloved as this: “[S]he was certainly single-minded and, judging by her comments, she had the intellect, the ferocity, and the willingness to risk everything for what was to her the necessity of freedom.” (Morrison ⅷ) Garner’s story inspired her in the writing of the Beloved.
Set in 1873, the novel is about a former slave, Sethe, who killed her “crawling-already” baby girl when she was tracked by her slave owner 18 years ago. She had escaped form Kentucky to Ohio sending her three children, two boys and the un-named baby girl ahead to her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, in the house called 124 Bluestone. During her solitary escape, she gave birth to a girl, Denver. She was sentenced to jail for the destruction of property after killing the girl Beloved (the name Sethe gave on the headstone of her grave). Then the house was haunted by the girl’s ghost, driving the two boys leaving home at 13 and leading to Baby Suggs’ death. But Sethe continues to live in that house with Denver for many more years in solitude. The arrival of Paul D, another former slave in the plantation called Sweet Home where Sethe previously lived, changes the situation. First he violently rids the house of the ghost, but soon after, an unknown young woman called herself Beloved appeares and becomes a member of the family. Sethe regards Beloved as the reincarnation of the child she has killed and suffered physical and psychological deterioration. Eventually the murder is revealed to Denver and Paul D. Paul D. is shocked by Sehte’s depth of love for her child and leaves her. Reunited with Beloved as Sethe considers, she devotes herself completely in loving Beloved, consuming herself day by day. Seeing her mother devoured by the twisting love and fearing her death, Denver seeks help from the black women in the community and found courage to make life plans when she finally steps out of the yard which has protected and confined her for all these years. Paul D. returns to Sethe after he embraces his past and wantsto live the rest of his life with her.
The novel contains lots of cultural and literary interpretations for its richness and depth. Traditionally, its relation to slave narrative is often discussed. As Morrison writes in her essay entitled “The Site of Memory”, which includes many interesting aspects in her writing of Beloved, slave narrative is the “print origins of black literature,” and “[L]iteracy was a way of assuming and pr