Essays on Beloved

In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison conveys her strong feelings about slavery by depicting the emotional impact slavery has had on individuals. Using characters such as Mr. Garner and Schoolteacher as enablers, Morrison is able to illustrate not only how detrimental slavery can be to...

In 1873 slavery had been abolished in Cincinnati, Ohio for ten years. This is the setting in which Toni Morrison places the characters for her powerfully moving novel, Beloved. After the Emancipation Proclamation and after the Civil War, Sethe, the mother who murdered her child...

Much like a ghost, Beloved’s Sethe is caught in limbo between her past and future. She constantly struggles between the remembrances triggered by Beloved and the opportunities afforded by Paul D. Having never matured into the present, Sethe finds consolation in Beloved, who personifies both...

Remembrance of historical events shifts over time, as details are purposefully excluded, occurrences go undocumented, and oral tales change with each retelling. Some historical institutions, such as slavery, are so traumatic and affected so many people that individual stories get lost when discussing these institutions...

Trauma is a ghost, and memories can be haunting. Each has the ability to drive a person to madness, or to inspire a certain enlightened strength in him. The capacity of someone to act with resilience, despite the severity of his detriment, determines the ways...

In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, there is a certain ambiguity surrounding the nature of the titular character. On the surface, she appears to be a reborn and grown up version of the child who was murdered by Sethe in an intended act of merciful infanticide....

There are many symbols woven throughout Beloved, by Toni Morrison. Among those is Paul D’s tobacco tin box, which is a figurative replacement for his heart. Being a slave at Sweet Home and a prisoner at a camp in Alfred, Georgia, Paul D certainly faces...

Toni Morrison through her novel, Beloved (1987), attempts to reacquaint the readers with the history of American slavery by choosing to present it through the African-American community’s experience rather than the white American perspective. The narrative of Sethe who is based on a real life...

Communities are complicated. Each one is more than just a group of people living together in one place: they are supposed to offer their members a sense of belonging and acceptance, yet often ostracize those who are different. Often, they embody and magnify the human...

Toni Morrison uses tree imagery throughout her novel “Beloved”. For most of the characters in the novel, trees bring both good and bad recollections of their lives. Trees symbolize the energy from which the characters gain comfort and freedom, yet they also convey the past...

In a novel about racism and slavery, one can not pay too much attention to the matter of colors. In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, however, the issue of color is not confined to discussions on race. Blood, ribbon, even roosters, all vividly colored, spot the scenery...

The main characters in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” are former slaves; their main struggle, after having been stripped of their humanity and identity by the white men who owned them, is to reclaim self-ownership and form identities independent of those forced upon them by their owners...

Toni Morrison uses the color red in multiple ways in her novel Beloved. On one hand red is a symbol of vibrancy and life, often revealing life in unexpected places. It also symbolizes pain and death, though death does not signify absence in a book...

Those born into slavery were instantly separated from their mothers and families, denied the right to know their own age or birthdays, sold in auction like cattle, and above all else were seen as property rather than human beings. Through the use of animal imagery,...

Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved contains many secondary characters, of which one of the most significant is the character of Sixo. Though the novel is based in post-Reconstruction America, much of the content is in the form of memories of ex-slaves. It is in these memories...

When Sixo provides an explanation for shooting shoat on Mr Garner’s property, this is schoolteacher’s immediate and uncompromising reaction to the slave’s attempt at self-justification. In the eyes of the white man, the slaves (‘the defined’) are not entitled to the privilege of giving, or...

In Beloved, characters experience egregious violations of their human rights that create situations that the English language cannot truly capture. The author, Toni Morrison attempts to communicate the meaning of some indescribable emotions and actions with catachresis, a literary device where a writer uses the...

When Paul D, Denver and Sethe first come upon Beloved resting against a tree after emerging from the water, the three cannot understand the past or present of the girl in front of them. Rather than interpret her odd actions, each of them looks to...

In an essay entitled “Writing, Race, and the Difference it Makes,” Henry Louis Gates, Jr. discusses the way in which over the course of history, a binary has existed between whiteness and writing, blackness and silence. Summarizing this tradition, he writes, “Human beings wrote books....

Power is the ability to overcome and influence the behavior towards an internal personal struggle. Stereotypes are the oversimplified idea of a specific gender, class, or race. A demonstration of the aspect of power in the female protagonists can be found in Toni Morrison’s novels,...

From telling scary stories to teaching multiplication tables, a mother takes on a myriad of roles. Yet, as a mother fully devotes herself to her child, she loses connection with other facets of herself. The consumption of maternity subjects the mother to a tenuous identity....

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Beloved herself is an enigma that nobody seems capable of explaining. From a “pool of red and undulating light” (p.8) her state transforms from the supernatural to that of flesh and blood. But why has she returned? Out of love? Spite?...

Written almost two hundred years apart, William Godwin’s Caleb Williams and Toni Morrison’s Beloved convey stories in which the characters attempt to find freedom by fleeing from unfair oppression and the haunting remnants of oppression. Caleb Williams, the titular protagonist of Godwin’s novel, attempts to...

That Toni Morrison’s ‘Beloved’ is stylistically diverse cannot be doubted: Morrison’s novel appears straightforward at first glance, opening with blank verse in a standard prose narration, but over the course of the story the style varies to contain differing levels of imagery and metaphor, as...