![]() ![]() It’s a serious novel and a work of art, and it deserves to be accorded the highest respect. But Beloved isn’t solely a work of protest and advocacy, as Morrison herself has insisted, nor solely a symbol for the progress and virtue of the prestige-granting institutions in American letters. (“Only Shakespeare rivals her in the number of senior theses devoted to her work,” Harvard English professor Barbara Johnson has said.) Were it simply a matter of social redress, we could all go home now, the Dead White Males having been forced to cocktail with a Living Black Woman. These books have become something more than mere literature they’re homework, with an afterlife guaranteed by their place (or in the case of Huck Finn, its embattled absence) on the high-school and college syllabus. ![]() Like two other American novels devoted to race, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird, Beloved exists wholly beyond its own artistic merits and demerits. ![]()
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