Use of Feminine Gothic in Beloved Toni Morrison's novel Beloved is a slave narrative, but it encompasses much more than just slavery. Unlike many slave narratives that focus on male perceptions of slavery, Morrison's novel portrays slavery from a female point of view. The main characters are Sethe, her daughter Denver and the mysterious Beloved. At the beginning of the novel, Sethe and her daughter live alone in 124, a house haunted by the ghost of Sethe's first daughter. Sethe's two older sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away when they were thirteen. Soon after the children run away, Baby Suggs, Denver's grandmother, dies. The novel focuses on Sethe's past, in particular, the death of her first daughter. This event dominates the book and the action of the novel revolves around this terrible incident, Toni Morrison uses characteristics of the female gothic novel such as motherhood, living in enclosed spaces and doubling of characters, along with. dilemmas involving memory and repression, to address the issue of slavery. Beloved illustrates the notion of the gothic mother through the character of Sethe. Her motherly love turns into a horrific image of mercy, which many find difficult to understand at the time, slaves were considered property. They were raised as if they were horses, with their young torn away, often at birth, and no chance of having a family. Many children were "permanently separated from all other family members, [and] did not know if or when they would ever see their mother again" (King 527). Sethe describes her childhood experience with the woman she knew as her mother and is typical of the experience... middle of paper... millions of lives and Morrison gives those lives names and faces. The narrative form is an effective tool for bringing the reality of slavery and all its misery into everyday life. Works Cited Goddu, Teresa A. Gothic America. New York: Columbia UP, 1997. King, Wilma. “Inside the Professional Family: Slave Children in the Antebellum South.” The Historian 59.3 (1997): 523-540. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin Group, 1987. Samuels, Wilfred and Clenora Hudson-Weems. Ed. Toni Morrison. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1990. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The coherence of Gothic conventions. New York: Methuen, 1976. Smith, Valerie. “Circumference of the Topic: History and Narrative in Beloved.” Tony Morrison. Henry Gates, Jr. and K. A. Appiah. Ed. New York: Amistad Press, 1993.