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Loss Of Life Exposed In Toni Morrison's Beloved

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Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved remains a story that narrates the horrifying effects of slavery and the continuous journey ex-slaves endure as they grudgingly attempt to accept their past. The story centers on the sudden reincarnation of a woman named Beloved and the unthinkable circumstances that surround her death. Within the central story lies a minor story of Sethe’s living daughter Denver and the struggles she faces when attempting to come to terms with the traumatic events of her childhood. Forced to mature quickly due to potentially losing her mother, Denver transforms from a naïve, scared teenager to a courageous, confident woman willing to sacrifice her own comfort and to endure the world beyond 124. With the presence and influences of Paul D and Beloved, Denver develops into a responsible, poised woman capable of putting her mother’s needs first and of accepting her own opinions. …show more content…

At the beginning of the novel, Denver displays herself as a fragile, emotionally damaged girl who refuses to leave the familiarity of her home due to an innocent question and an irrational fear of the outside world. Having experienced the loss of many family members and endured the wrath of a baby ghost, Denver greatly pities upon herself, believing that her life remains so damaged by the past that isolation from the community remains the best way to deal with her struggles. Rather than overcoming her struggles in a positive manner, she instead sees these events as reasons to further isolate herself. She proves to be intelligent, learning to spell and count at Lady Jones’ home, but very weak emotionally. She became too scared “to ask her brothers or anyone else Nelson Lord’s

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In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the author often utilizes many different writing techniques to emphasize the story’s main idea that one cannot let past mistakes dictate one’s life and future. Morrison’s application of nonlinear exposition in Beloved helps convey the novel’s main theme by allowing the reader to witness Sethe’s journey to self-acceptance through her personal flashbacks and Paul D.’s point of view. From the beginning, the author incorporates a flashback to illustrate how Sethe is burdened with guilt from killing her baby daughter. Morrison makes it clear to the reader that Beloved is constantly on Sethe’s mind.

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A key feminine quality for women in general around this time period was their capacity for being a mother. Throughout the story, Beloved is one of the many memories that haunts Sethe which she tries to repress in vain because she attempted to murder her own child in order to save them from the same physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that she endured during her time working at Sweet Home. However, Morrison depicts this as an act of kindness. Sethe 's character is given a connection to the audience for her motherly instincts, but also a way for the audience to reflect on the fact that her attempted murders were out of motherly love and protection. Placing Sethe in the scope of many women of the time who had lived without the harshness of slavery are forced to confront the weight of a decision that they never had to make nor most likely ever will.

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Toni Morrison presents her novel Beloved, chronicling a woman 's struggle in a post-slavery America. The novel contains several literary devices in order to properly convey its meaning and themes. Throughout the novel, symbolism is used heavily to imply certain themes and motifs. In Morrison 's Beloved, the symbol of milk is utilized in the novel in order to represent motherhood, shame, and nurturing, revealing the deprivation of identity and the dehumanization of slaves that slavery caused.

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Cruelty is defined as brutal pain and suffering caused from one person to another in exchange for desires and needs or pleasure. Society depicts cruelty as a norm violation and an inhumane act yet people have enough ego to use cruelty to get what they want. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, cruelty sets as a stimulator for 60 million voices lost in slavery to advocate for their pain and suffering. Toni Morrison’s character, Beloved, plays two roles; one as the ghost of slavery and another as a resurrected daughter of Sethe.

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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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Analysis of Toni Morrison's Beloved The book Beloved by Toni Morrison is a very interesting but peculiar book. The book flashes back from the present, past, and future, so often, you really have to pay attention or you will get lost. The book overviews slave's life, but goes into detail about one slave, Sethe. Toni Morrison, of Beloved creates a magic-realistic story based on the life of Margaret Garner, who escaped slavery just like the main character. Between Sethe and Beloved, there is always a dramatic situation occurring.

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At the end of the novel, she finally takes care of Sethe rather than fully relying on her for physical nurturing and inner happiness. Denver ultimately matures enough to stop relying on her mother for total emotional support, to care for someone besides herself, and to “have [her] own [opinion]” (314). Though she lost her physical strength and size due to starvation, she gained mental clarity and emotional growth through accepting that she needs the presence of others to help her. The threat of losing her only companion proves more important than her irrational fear of the outside world; in procuring her own opportunities, she gains a newfound sense of confidence that allows her to stop relying on Sethe for happiness. Morrison inexplicitly provides Denver’s transformation as a symbol of ongoing hope for previous and current slaves.

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Denver therefore bears the brunt of Sethe’s communal alienation. Only an infant when her sister is killed by her mother, Denver is sheltered from reality. Never having endured the life of a slave, Denver undergoes a secondary oppression at the hands of the matriarchal characters in her family. Denver’s forced isolation leads to a naïveté that has troubling consequences on the development of her own individuality: having been made a pariah by a community yet only learning the reason for her alienation at a later age leads to Denver’s inability to cope with reality and her subsequent withdrawal into the safety of isolation. Despite representing Sethe’s life after slavery, Sethe’s inability to both forgive and release herself from her guilt sees her desperate attempts to veil it with a love for Denver that Paul D claims is “too thick” (Morrison, 2007: 203).

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Each writer has his or her own special style of writing, some sort of technique that sets them apart from everyone else. Toni Morrison excels at scrambling the events the order in which the reader is presented information. This style of writing creates a tougher book to read, but also a more rewarding reading experience. In "Beloved", by Toni Morrison, Morrison uses nonlinear exposition to create a sense of chaos through out the book, provide her audience with multiple points of view, and provide context for the current or upcoming events. It is apparent to the reader early in the book that the family is borderline insane.

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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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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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