The Introduction: A First Look at the Writing Style of Toni Morrison

"124 was spiteful. Full of baby's venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children. For years each put up with the spite in his own way, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were its only victims. The grandmother, Baby Suggs, was dead, and the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old--as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny hand prints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard). Neither boy waited to see more; another kettleful of chickpeas smoking in a heap on the floor; soda crackers crumbled and strewn in a line next to the door-sill. Nor did they wait for one of the relief periods: the weeks, months even, when nothing was disturbed. No. Each one fled at once--the moment the house committed what was for them the one insult not to be borne or witnessed a second time. Within two months, in the dead of winter, leaving their grandmother, Baby Suggs; Sethe, their mother; and their little sister, Denver, all by themselves in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. It didn't have a number then, because Cincinnati didn't stretch that far. In fact, Ohio had been calling itself a state only seventy years when first one brother and then the next stuffed quilt packing into his hat, snatched up his shoes, and crept away from the lively spite the house felt for them" (page 3)

This is the opening paragraph to Toni Morrison's prize winning book Beloved. Right away, the reader is snatched into the home at 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinatti, Ohio. With no forewarning, the reader is brought into the story, not expecting the conflicts to be shown, although not clear, within the first page of the novel. Everything is a mystery; there are so many questions: Why is 124 (which we shall presume to be a house upon the first reading) so spiteful and so full of baby's venom? Why would a baby even have venom? What did Howard and Buglar run away from exactly? Where is the proper introduction? Why can't my questions be answered already?

Evoking questions from the reader so early in the novel achieves one of Morrison's many purposes. As stated in the foreword of the book she "wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the book's population--just as the characters were snatched from one place to another, from any place to any other, without preparation or defense" (xviii).With just that, no preparation or defense, Morrison takes us into the home of Sethe, a runaway slave made to live in a house haunted by the spirit of her dead daughter and  ridden with the regret for settling for just the word 'Beloved' on the child's tombstone.

With incomplete sentences, several instances of misplaced punctuation, and an unorthodox introduction, Morrison seldom follows any of the conventional rules for novel writing. The prose is characterized by shorts phrases like "Full of baby's venom" and "Twenty years. A life time" (page 28), placed in paragraphs to fool readers to believe they are perfectly suitable sentences. It is also composed of what were formerly two words and have now been written as one, of which include 'whitewoman', 'Redmen', and 'coloredpeople'. Morrision's stylistic prose suggest that the mere adjectives of the individuals engulf them entirely and become their identities. This characteristic suits the time period of which the story takes place, because in the days of slavery and racial discrimination, a man could be no more than his color to the world.

The writing style of Toni Morrison is simple, but deviant from that of comparable contemporary writers. She leaves no time for readers to become acquainted with her characters and, without any written sign of hesitation, introduces them to the strange circumstances of the plot and her peculiar prose. What at first appears to be a simplistic form of writing is actually a more complex, premeditated style. The prose of Beloved is parallel to the dialect of its characters and the structure of the plot (such as the absence of a more ordinary introduction) correlates with the occurrences of the characters' lives. Real life seldom happens in an organized fashion and Morrison's prose likewise does not follow any standards.


Slowly but surely, I am getting used to Morrison's odd style. I will admit I did have to reread these first 33 pages in order to fully comprehend the action in the plot.  For example, upon my first reading I missed the eagerness in Paul D's eyes when Sethe invited him to stay. I also misunderstood the description of the scars on Sethe's back, which although referred to as a chokecherry tree are just a bit of dead skin caused by a beating. I can't wait to see if Paul D will prove Baby Suggs old saying true, that "a man ain't nothing but a man" (page 26), or if he will be an exception and actually stick around 124. Seeing as the house is haunted by a dead baby, I highly doubt he will prove anyone wrong.