Ethics in Literature: A Reading Group February 4, 2013

Leader Dr. Anne Klaeysen will host a discussion on...

Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1988, Beloved tells the story of Sethe, who has escaped from slavery but is haunted by its heritage. This chronicle of slavery and its aftermath is set in rural Ohio several years after the Civil War and is inspired by the life of Margaret Garner, who temporarily escaped slavery during 1856 in Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio. A posse arrived to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue slaves across state borders. Margaret killed her two-year-old daughter rather than allow her to be recaptured. Morrison revisited Garner's story in 2005 when she wrote a libretto for the opera Margaret Garner. As Morrison described it, “If Beloved is about forgetting, Margaret Garner is about remembering."

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