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Beloved, By Toni Morrison

438 Words2 Pages

Many people often refer to the past as something that is dead and gone, believing that it can no longer affect them; however, Toni Morrison’s Novel, Beloved, is about the ghost of slavery that remains present, taunting the black community. The title Beloved derives from a conversation St. Paul Epistle was having with the Romans to argue that the Gentiles where Jews and Children of God stating, “I will call them my people, which are not my people, and her beloved, which was not beloved.” Slaves were a commodity and significant to the economic growth in the United States, yet they were viewed as subhuman, being treated like animals instead of people. The title Beloved signifies the anguish and pain African Americans have endured. Although slaves were useful and convenient, love is not a word masters used express to their feelings towards the enslaved. They loved the ability of the man, but not the man himself. …show more content…

The home Seth and her daughter Denver lived in was 124 Bluestone Road, also referred to as 124. This home is significant throughout the story because the home is along the path of the Underground Railroad being a safe haven in voyage to Canada. 124 was a way station for news, sanction and comradeship for the colored people of Cincinnati. The setting of the story is especially important to the plot because although slaves were intending to escape the horrors of slavery, the emotional bondage lingered. Boone County, Kentucky on a plantation known as Sweet Home also has relevance to Beloved. Sweet Home or plantations that enslaved blacks, are the place where the emotional trauma for slaves occurred. The use of both settings acknowledge how the past has the ability to effect the

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Toni Morrison theorized that “With typically eighteenth-century reticence [Olaudah Equiano] records his singular and representative life for one purpose; to change things,” (512). He wanted to challenge the way people viewed slavery. History explains the gruesome and disturbing past that the African slaves experienced in terms of being owned, abused, and controlled under barbaric behaviors of white men. Due to the devastating and unthinkable actions committed to the African slaves, they were unable to share their mistreatment with the world and their voice was forced to stay silent. In literary works, people are able to become a voice throughout history, and because African slaves were kept quiet, they did not get the change to share with the

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The lives of everyone were impacted during the time of slavery. African Americans faced daily obstacles in their lives while being considered as property. In the excerpt from “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” published by Harriet Jacobs, and the interview “Charity Anderson Mobile, Alabama” the story of Charity Anderson, both reflections from former slaves, reveal opposing points of view of their unjust lives as slaves by their treatment while considered slaves, and their differing levels of education. Not all slaves were treated the same, even though many shed blood on the plantations of their masters. Treatment differed on the master, and treatment was not cruel all the time.

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Toni Morrison’s novel Song of Solomon is an examination on the importance of self-identity in African-American society and the effects of a name. Names and labels are used to describe and symbolize people, places, and things, serving as a brief definition of the subject. Toni Morrison uses this definition in order to analyze the effects redefining or naming had on African Americans heritage and culture after their emancipation. Throughout the story, the central protagonist Macon Dead III or Milkman, searches his family’s history to reclaim his past and recreate himself. America’s history of slavery and it’s lasting effects have allowed African-American society and cultural identity to be dictated by the white majority.

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Everywhere the war was discussed, fought, analyzed, re-analyzed, cheered and damned, the enslaved were there or thereabout. As Ward makes clear, like the institution that imprisoned them, the enslaved were an integral part of life in the South, an inextricable component of all the southern institutions—public and private. Intimately linked to the soldiers, sailors, and politicians of all ranks, the enslaved were a constant presence, witnessing much of everything that was said or read aloud. And, once fed into the infamous “slave grapevine,” the black community learned about the discussions taking place in the “Big House,” in the corridors of power, and around military campfires. Never the mere objects about which two mighty, white armies fought, seen through the eyes of the bondmen and women, the Civil War becomes in some ways a different war.

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Slaves faced struggle, despair, and torture while working on Southern plantations. Often these slaves would sing songs not to comfort themselves, but to express their disdain of reality. While online articles and videos offer a glimpse of the past, these songs will be analysed as they are presented in two books - Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass and The Souls of Black Folk - by Frederick Douglass, an ardent abolitionist, and civil rights activist W.E.B. Du Bois, respectively. Although the aforementioned are both Black Americans, slave songs were conferred differently in their respective books; this is related to the author’s personal experience, intention, and living period.

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Loving, protecting one’s family, and keeping family close, transcends race and culture. Although the brutal system of slavery routinely threatens enslaved people like Jacobs, their idea of a bonded family is. Jail, sales, or death constantly tore apart enslaved families. Jacobs’ experiences of being separated from her Children and forced to comply with the owner’s demands highlight the devastating impact that slavery had on family relationships. Yet, through all of Jacob’s struggles and hardships, she shows the resilience and strength of her spirit.

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In Cat’s Cradle and “Confido” by Kurt Vonnegut, both stories seek to convey how innovations can often have a negative impact on families and society. It is shown in Cat’s Cradle that the world ends due to one innovation. In “Confido”, the innovation created affects behaviors in a family. It is important that people use science and technology for appropriate matters because it can cause harm to society.

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From this, derives a bond with the reader that pushes their understanding of the evil nature of slavery that society deemed appropriate therefore enhancing their understanding of history. While only glossed over in most classroom settings of the twenty-first century, students often neglect the sad but true reality that the backbone of slavery, was the dehumanization of an entire race of people. To create a group of individuals known for their extreme oppression derived from slavery, required plantation owner’s of the South to constantly embedded certain values into the lives of their slaves. To talk back means to be whipped.

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The United States successfully instilled in its inhabitants the notion that black people were not even people, creating and upholding the society where slaves were held at the bottom of the social hierarchy. Because Beloved focuses on the differences between the social status of black people before and after the civil war it is necessary to have a thorough understanding of the systems of oppression in place before the war which aided in the control of slaves by placing them at the bottom of any social

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In Beloved, Morrison expresses the impact that slavery has on the black community. We come to know about the past events when Paul D and Sethe communicates about their commonly shared past at Sweet Home. The owners of Sweet Home were Mr. and Mrs. Garner, who dealt with their slaves respectfully. Despite that the slaves at Sweet Home did not have legal or social rights, the Garners allowed them many liberties like to select wives, handle weapons, learn how to read and even buy a mother’s freedom. Still Mr. Garner was a disappointing person as he was a slave owner.

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In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D each attempt to cope with their horrific pasts amidst a world haunted by the horrors of slavery. Paradoxically, these memories of despair often accompany intense feelings of motherly love, desire, and hope. Throughout the novel, the color red symbolizes this dichotomy through representing both the past memories of violence, hatred, and death associated with slavery along with the feelings of love, desire, and hope for a better future. After horrific oppression and brutality at Sweet Home plantation and the prison at Alfred, Georgia, Paul D carries a “tobacco tin lodged in his chest” concealing his memories and emotions from his slave life (Morrison 133).

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The South was disallowed from seceding, which angered them a great amount. Taking their anger out on their former slaves, they continued to treat them horrifically. The black community felt defeated. Sometimes driven by racism to turning on each other, tensions existed between African-Americans as well. With a goal of explaining these tensions and educating readers on the difficult issues that slavery created, Toni Morrison wrote Beloved.

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Slaves faced extreme brutality and Morrison focuses on rape and sexual assault as the most terrifying form of abuse. It is because of this abuse that Morrison’s characters are trapped in their pasts, unable to move on from the psychological damages that they have endured. “Morrison revises the conventional slave narrative by insisting on the primacy of sexual assault over other experiences of brutality” (Barnett 420). For telling Mrs. Garner what they had done, she was badly beaten by them, leaving a “chokecherry tree” (16) on her back. But that was not the overriding issue.

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The characters in Beloved, especially Sethe and Paul D are both dehumanized during the slavery experiences by the inhumanity of the white people, their responses to the experience differ due to their different role. Sethe were trapped in the past because the ghost of the dead baby in the house was the representation of Sethe’s past life that she couldnot forget. She accepted the ghost as she accepted the past. But Sethe began to see the future after she confronted her through the appearance of her dead baby as a woman who came to her house. For Sethe, the future existed only after she could explain why she killed her own daughter.

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