But I was about a third into the book before that realization came. I thought the only person who was legitimate, who could decide whether was a good thing or not, was the dead girl.

I couldn’t decide, and nobody else seemed able. The slave system says she wasn’t, that her child was just another piece of goods.

Other people, the abolitionist in particular, wanted her tried for murder, and that would suggest that she was a mother responsible for her child. Some people wanted her returned to the plantation because she was property. Who could say that her efforts to kill her children under those particular circumstances were wrong? They couldn’t decide even the courts couldn’t. But the big question, it turned out, was who was in the position to judge what had done. I said at the beginning the house was full of poison or venom, but I thought that was just the haunting. I wasn’t at all sure in Beloved that I would have a character called Beloved. The writing is discovery of what that really means. 'Sometimes you hear things or see things or write things, and you don’t know where they came from but they’re very important and they don’t disappear. Below, Morrison shares an epiphany she had about Sethe’s actions that changed the course of the novel. The book revolves around an escaped slave named Sethe, who kills her infant daughter, Beloved, to spare her capture by Sethe’s former masters. And yet, Morrison’s views on her own triumphs and shortcomings were eye-opening, and shone a light on the inner workings of her creative genius.Īs you wait for the magazine, we wanted to share this unpublished excerpt, where we strayed from the topic of failure to discuss how her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved (1987) bloomed into shape. One of our interview subjects was Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison, whose miles-long list of awards would suggest she knows as much about failure as Einstein did about stupidity. We asked artists, art critics, and creative entrepreneurs about their definition of failure, and whether stumbles-either real or imagined-had ever proved beneficial to their work. Later this week, we’ll be releasing our latest issue of NEA Arts, which will focus on the concept of creative failure.

Toni morrison on beloved