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The Meaning Of Words In Toni Morrison's Beloved

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In the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison you often see a use of words that convey a deeper meaning. “Oh yes. Oh yes, yes, yes. Someday you be walking down the road and you hear something or see something going on...No matter what.” This quote depicts the her dear past and the underlying events leading up the this feeling. Sethe’s life for the past years have not been the best and the quote signifies the her journey and feeling of it all. Sethe has lived in constant uncertainty in a house haunted by her firstborn. Common during this time Sethe’s mother-in-law lived with her. This has a big impact on Sethe’s outlook about things. Baby Suggs prior to her death sank into deep depression. She was exhausted of life, the slavery and the lost of eight
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An American is sexually assaulted every 107 seconds. Furthermore, these victims are then 3 times more likely to suffer depression and 6 times more likely to suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder (“Rape, Abuse, and Incest National Network Statistics,” n.d.). Likewise, in the novel Beloved, the perpetrators, leave their victims physically and emotionally damaged. The perpetrators Beloved and the community, portray various acts of cruelty such as their inhumane treatment towards Paul D. and Sethe. These actions showcase how cruelty ultimately demoralizes the characters.

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Throughout the story, Sethe’s regret is seen at many different levels, but towards the end Paul D. examines how Sethe’s guilt and depression have consumed her. Paul D. notices that Sethe has not bathed telling her, “‘you don’t smell right’” and soon realizes that she has stopped trying to survive (Morrison 272). When the story is told from Sethe’s point of view it is quite easy for the reader to understand and empathize with Sethe’s emotions. However, Morrison changes the point of view to show the reader how harboring some emotions for too long can be detrimental to a person’s mental health. Paul D. witnesses how Sethe’s emotions have completely taken control of her life and desperately tries to make Sethe realize her self-worth.

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But she glides through life remembering the past and trying to get through everyday to care for her daughter that I think seems to be the same. Because of Sethe’s past, plus what happened with her daughter, it is probably hard to notice the colors of life that make life better and more special. In the beginning of this page, she

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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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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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Always. Never be another like her” (299). Even those who had not gone to her services still knew about the services and still considered them something to talk about years later. Baby Suggs’ services were how she was identified in many aspects of life and those services were still talked about years after they happened. Baby Suggs left a lasting imprint on all those she met and she was nice to.

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She is starting a new life of her own and becoming a “person without a past” (108). This shows that her previous life can easily be forgotten with no hard feelings and she is expressing that forgetting her past is for the better. Moreover, her development to becoming self-sufficient, an option she

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Instead of facing her trauma to solve her issue, Sethe continues to use the avoidance tactic and becomes more devoted to preventing her children from being enslaved “no matter what.” After Sethe discovers her dead daughter, however, she starts to struggle with conflicting emotions about her situation. On one hand, she is willing to do anything to inhibit her children from becoming enslaved. On the other hand, she starts to feel guilty for killing her daughter, even though she had good intentions. Despite that, due to Sethe’s immense fear of Sweet Home, she avoids the memories of her murdering Beloved by proving her love to

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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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