One thematic point underlying her writing in Beloved is her preoccupation with community, and the need to write in a way which has a political purpose:-
If anything she does, in the way of writing novels or whatever....isn't about the village or the community or about people, then it isn't about anything. She is not interested in indulging herself in some private exercise of her imagination.... which is to say, the work must be political.
Toni Morrison, and other black women writers, have been trying to develop a new type of novel, one which represents the hopes, aspirations, and historical memories of black women. Black women struggle under a double burden: that of racial prejudice and that of a male-centred society. While black men may have created a literature about the former, it has been left to black women to analyse the whole of the latter situation.
My sense of the novel is that it has always functioned for the class or the group that wrote it. When the industrial revolution began, there emerged a new class of people, who in large measure had no art form to tell them how to behave in this new situation. So they produced an art form: we call it the novel of manners, an art form designed to tell people something they didn't know.....So that early works such as 'Pamela' by Richardson and Jane Austen...provided social rules and explained behavior. They were didactic in that sense.
For a long time, the art form that was healing for Black people was music....That music is no longer exclusively ours....so another form has to take its place. It seems to me that the novel is needed by African Americans now in a way that it was not needed before --Parents don't sit around and tell their children those classical, mythological, archetypal stories that we heard years ago.... One way of getting out new information is the novel. I regard it as a way to accomplish certain very strong functions.
