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Feminism In Toni Morrison's Beloved

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In the 21st century, there has never been quite a more polarizing depiction of the psychological strain of slavery than in Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved. Sure, Alex Haley’s Roots was one of the first contemporary pieces of literature to highlight the atrocities of the time, but, it’s almost rudimentary in comparison. Continuing with her usual trope of tragic black female protagonists, Morrison ups the ante by implementing themes such as magical realism, destruction of identity, mental illness, and the importance of community solidarity. Loosely based on true events, Beloved is a raw, thought provoking account of life in post-slavery America for not only the protagonist, but for many black women of the time. The novel begins in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1873. Sethe, a former slave, has been living at 124 Bluestone Road with her last remaining child, Denver. The house used to be inhabited by Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law and Howard and Buglar, her two sons. After Suggs’ death, the two boys were driven out of the house by a violent spirit who the women believe to be Sethe’s dead daughter. The presence is a constant reminder of her horrible past, when she murdered her in infancy 18 years prior as …show more content…

Banumathi, Sethe’s strength and desire to move on from the demons of her past highlights the traditional resilience of black women over the years. She displayed a mother’s love in it’s rawest form, believing murdering her child was more beneficial than a life of enslavement. Sethe is very much a victim of misogyny, sexual abuse, and abandonment, all being qualities in which feminism wishes to diminish. The physical manifestation of Beloved is, in a sense, a final test of her ability to overcome. Whether she was able to forgive herself, let go of the past, and live the rest of her life in peace is open ended and up to the

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Creative non-fiction has ever-growing popularity with a style that recounts a historical event through narrative. It captivates readers with a purpose to entertain the audience through prose as opposed to other forms of non-fiction. Sometimes creative non-fiction pieces enlighten readers about topics that they would otherwise avoid such as seen in numerous written works about slavery. Slavery is a controversial topic as it is associated with a darker part of American memory. However, some authors during their time wanted their audience to bear witness to the atrocity with tales based on true stories.

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By telling the story of Margaret Garner, Morrison is not only illuminating the reader about the life of the slave but of the white ideology of the time as

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Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is a multiply narrated story of having to come to terms with the past to be able to move forward. Set after the Civil War in 1870s, the novel centers on the experiences of the family of Baby Suggs, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D and on how they try to confront their past with the arrival of Beloved. Two narrative perspectives are main, that of the third-person omniscient and of the third person limited, and there is also a perspective of the first-person. The novel’s narrators shift constantly and most of the times without notifying at all, and these narratives of limited perspectives of different characters help us understand the interiority, the sufferings and memories, of several different characters better and in their diversity.

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Names have always held power in literature; whether it is the defeated giant Polyphemus cursing Odysseus due to him pridefully announcing his name or how the true name of the Hebrew god was considered so potent that the word was forbidden. In fact, names were given power in tales dating all the way back to the 24th century B.C.E. when the goddess Isis became as strong as the sun god Ra after tricking him into revealing his true name. And in Toni Morrison’s Beloved, names have a much stronger cultural significance; and in the case of the character known as “Beloved”, her name is essentially her whole existence. Morrison shows the true power a name holds in African American literature through the character known as “Beloved”, as her role in the story becomes defined by the name she is given and changes in the final moments of the chapter.

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1. Beloved, the novel by African-American writer Toni Morrison is a collection of memories of the characters presented in the novel. Most characters in the novel are living with repressed painful memories and hence they are not able to move ahead in their lives and are somewhere stuck. The novel, in a way, becomes a guide for people with painful memories because it is in a way providing solutions to get rid of those memories and move ahead in life. The novel is divided into three parts; each part becomes a step in the healing ritual of painful repressed memories.

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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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Many of her readers have felt uncomfortable with Beloved because of the severe content it has on some of the aspects of slavery (Dell 44). The people who have been in favor of banning Beloved wanted to protect students from reading subject that may be difficult to understand (Sova Social Grounds 74). In the year 1995 parents of students at St. Johns County School wanted the book to ban because of its explicit details in the book (72). Beloved was challenged at Coeur d’Alene School because parents thought permission should be granted before their children read the book (“Beloved, Toni Morrison” par. 4). In 2007, Beloved was removed form a senior AP English class in Eastern High School because of inappropriate subjects (par. 5).

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African-American author Toni Morrison 's book, Beloved, describes a black culture born out of a dehumanising period of slavery just after the Civil War. Culture is a means of how a group collectively believe, act, and interact on a daily basis. Those who have studied her work refer to Morrison 's narrative tales as “literature…that addresses the sacred and as an allegorical representation of black experience” (Baker-Fletcher 1993: 2). Although African Americans had a difficult time establishing their own culture during the period of slavery when they were considered less than human, Morrison believes that black culture has been built on the horrors of the past and it is this history that has shaped contemporary black culture in a positive way. Through the use of linguistic devices, her representation of black women, imagery and symbolic features, and the theme of interracial relations, Morrison illustrates that black culture that is resilient, vibrant, independent, and determined.

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Tragedy―a timeless phenomenon. Sometimes used in fiction to entertain, yet sometimes induces great suffering for real people. The genre of Greek tragedy is a staple of Ancient Greek culture, and its influence continues to be seen in fiction today. In Beloved, Toni Morrison tackles the story of African Americans post-Civil War. Traditionally, and stereotypically, people today perceive the end of the Civil War as a concrete turning point for the lives of African Americans at the time, as if their quality of life improved immediately after the war.

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CHAPTER-V THE HEALING POWER OF FOLK CULTURE Images of women healing ill or injured women, or of women healing themselves, have become one of the central tropes in contemporary African American women’s novels. Authors such as Gayl Jones, Alice Walker, Toni Cade Bambara, and Toni Morrison utilise the trope of healing to measure past and present oppressions of women of color and to discuss what can and what cannot be healed, forgotten and forgiven. Much focus is put on how healing could be accomplished. Some hurt, they say, is so distant that it cannot be reached; other hurt goes so deep that there may be no possibility of healing... some pain can only be healed through a reconnection to the African American community and culture (Gunilla T. Kester 114)

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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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Morrison 's masterpiece Beloved, is dedicated and refers to the number of blacks who were killed as captives in Africa or on slave ships and, therefore, never made it into slavery. Through non-western eyes, Morrison allows the reader to re-vision and understand African-American history by re-telling history through the lives of former African slaves, because the “violence within the African American community can only be understood in a context in which ... the white power continue[s] to violate African American lives.” ( Kader Aki, 1) The novel re-conceptualizes American history and is concerned with historical transmission which continues into the present.

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Unlike other contemporary novels coupling slavery and racism, ‘A Mercy’ of Toni Morrison (2008) depicts the situation when slavery is deprived of its racial situation. In other words, by separating race from slavery, the novel gives audience a chance to see “what it might have been like to be a slave but without being raced” (Neary, 2008); and a chance to wonder whether it is the color itself or the colonial society dominated by patriarchal and imperial powers the reason for slavery in the final decade of the seventeenth century. The plot of the novel is constructed on scattered piecemeal narratives of traditionally ignored perspectives: white lower-class women, white servants, an abandoned white girl, and a black female slave. The physical

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In addition to that, the black community isolated Sethe because she did something that the community considered wrong. Black feminism will be the approach utilized here to see the oppression of woman of color because it includes sexism, classism and racism. Since the female characters are very dominant in the novel, a black feminist approach should be very effective and it enables one to see how the female characters deal with the past and live with it in the present, what motherhood mean to the female characters, and how much the past influences the female characters who lives in the present. The end of the novel reveals the forgiveness and the acceptance not only of the black community toward Sethe’s choice (killing her daughter) but also of the white people (the Bodwins) who accepted Denver to work for them. This reconciliation shows that the courage and the will to get rid off from the past to live side by side peacefully and to move toward the future together.

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