Reflection on Beloved

Toni Morrison’s novel, like so many classics of literature, conjoin history, myth, hopes, sufferings, pains of loss and desires for a better life. All of these we share as human beings in our struggle to make a life of meaning. What feeds the imagination most, it seems, is an openness to new ways of thinking and seeing, often what is most familiar. Morrison’s novel let’s us see with a new set of lenses what we thought we knew.

In this course we will explore our own responses to many of the above qualities and situations as well as others that may be part of our individual heritage as well as shared by the larger culture we are enmeshed in daily. Perhaps most importantly are the values we hold as a race and as a culture and whether these values allow room for the marginalized, the oppressed, those who are just barely getting by in life and seeking avenues for renewal.

Beloved will be our lodestar in this exploration. We will pay close attention to the non-linearity of the novel’s plot. It shifts easily between present to future to past and weaves the time of things’ occurrences into mythic time, which is far richer than linear time. We will also recognize that her method of plot creation is closer to our daily lives than we realize.

Unless each of us finds sources to let us see more, to know more, even to suffer into knowledge we had not entertained before, we tend to remain stuck in the cliches and stereotypes that can web us into a small worldview.

Conversation with others engaged with the same story broadens and deepens all of our perspectives and encourage us to be more compassionate with ourselves and one another. Please consider joining us in this rich novel that has disturbed many in its historical honesty and enriched all who enter its cosmos. 

Join Dennis Patrick Slattery in his six-class Jung Platform course on Beloved. He will guide us into the depth of Morrison’s language, revealing the layers she described as “the heart of the story in the minds of the slaves themselves.” To learn more and sign up, click HERE.