A Feminist Study of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Abstract

This research explores how Toni Morrison's Beloved rewrites the story of Black female identity, maternity, and resistance in the aftermath of slavery. Also, it provides an interdisciplinary feminist perspective inspired by Black feminist theory as well as classical feminist theory, especially the writings of Simone de Beauvoir, Judith Butler, Audre Lorde, Bell Hooks, and Patricia Hill Collins. Morrison questions systems of oppression. This paper is inspired by the real-life narrative of Margaret Garner, Beloved offers a terrible picture of the psychological and societal wounds of Black women. Through characters like Sethe, Denver, and Baby Suggs, Morrison uses non-linear storytelling, polyphonic voices, and symbolic elements, especially the ghost figure of Beloved, to emphasize trauma, silence, and memory as central factors for identity struggle, So, articulating how motherhood becomes a site of both vulnerability and political resistance. This paper contends that Morrison not only reveals the historical facts of slavery but also performs a literary act of recovery providing Black women's voices, agency, and healing a forum. The intersectional feminist perspective presents the novel as a radical criticism of both racial and patriarchal dominance, therefore contributing significantly to feminist literary debate.