'Beloved': The Role of Space and Race in Toni Morrison’s Revolutionary Novel

This dissertation aims to deeply analyze the ways in which the element of space strongly influences Toni Morrison’s greatest literary success, Beloved. Since its publication in 1987, the novel has received the attention of an extremely large number of scholars who have produced an equally large amount of research. However, an aspect of the book appears to have been overlooked, that of the spatial dimension. Indeed, it seems that the critical work on the space of Beloved mainly concerns the analysis of two significant locations of the novel, those of 124 Bluestone and the Sweet Home plantation. Through the employment of critical textbooks and essays on Beloved and on space, this work, instead, presents how the dimension of space is strictly bound to that of the mind and the race of those who inhabit it. This thesis, indeed, deals with how space can change according to how it is perceived by the people in it and with how the space depicted in Beloved is not only physical but also psychological. Finally, this work proposes that it is through the spaces in which the community operates that the psychological space can be potentially healed.