Medea as slave. On Toni Morrison's Beloved

Abstract

The essay proposes a lecture of Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, keeping the focus on the evident resemblance that exists between the story written by the contemporary author and the classical myth of Medea, and highlighting the distinctions of each one. The comparison between the two protagonists has already been drawn, more than once, and it is not the first time that a novel, whose protagonist is a woman who has killed her own offspring is compared to the mythical Greek personage. Women’s appeal to the horrible infanticide as a reaction to a tragic situation has been recurrent throughout history and throughout stories. And it is in the dialectic between reality and fiction that it is possible to notice the first big different among the two narratives. While Medea is a mythical character, Sethe – the character created by Toni Morrison – is a fiction based on a real person, on Margaret Garner, who has really killed her daughter, and because of this gesture became an important and almost mythical personage in the struggle of North American abolitionists. The second difference to be highlighted lies in the motivation of the act around which the story revolves: Self-love, in one case; maternal love in another. The third and last ma- jor outstanding distinction is directly linked to the first, that is, to the dialectic between fiction and reality. For coming from a story that really happened, the character of Toni Morrison has to face the reaction to her murderous act in the so-called real world, serve sentence in jail and suffer for it in her life. The deus ex-machina solution is reserved for mythical heroines. If there is a god able to save Sethe, it is a quite phenomenal one and goes by the name of Eros.