Beloved's Re-Vision of Tragedy: A Novel by Toni Morrison

Occasionally, a work of art comes along that forces its audience to reevaluate its understanding of the definitions of genre. A genre so broadly correspondent to human experience and passionately expressive of the deepest of human fears and desires as tragedy has understandably undergone many significant attempts at articulation, definition, and expression. Nietzsche's writings toward a re-definition of tragedy, iconoclastically tearing down centuries of Aristotle's influence, placed our understanding of the tragic vision in a radical new light seemingly more open to contemporary artists. Yet even Nietzsche's mythic vision failed to anticipate the intense psychological, social, philosophical, and cultural phenomena of the twentieth century. Tragedy is a particularly viable mode for the diversity of contemporary literary expression. One work of art which encounters and alters traditional understandings of the tragic is Toni Morrison's 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel Beloved, a drama of terrible beauty and anguished grace in which a runaway slave is forced to decide between two equally damning choices. Toni Morrison's Beloved offers a re-vision of traditional expressions of the tragic impulse, particularly as defined by Aristotle and redefined by Nietzsche, reincorporating the tragic vision as a contemporary artistic mode particularly expressive of the African-American experience.