Beloved Toni Morrison

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...

Both Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 play A Raisin in the Sun and Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved are works that deal predominately with race, but feature vastly different subject matter. Beloved features a group of people haunted by the memory of...

To consider the different aspects of motherhood as written by Morrison in her 1987 novel Beloved, inspired by the story of an African-American slave, Margaret Garner; we must first examine the assumptions made in the figure of an ‘ideal mother’ in...

As each novel and investigation into the human mind and spirit has demonstrated, we are creatures who crave honor and respect, the two key tenets to having dignity. Without dignity, we are nothing. Without respect, we fall to a lesser state - a...

Privilege alters perspective. In her text Beloved, Toni Morrison explores the role that white privilege plays on a character’s ability to fight for social justice. While Morrison’s character, Mr. Bodwin, demonstrates positive intentions in his...

Written in 1812, the last line of each verse of the Star Spangled Banner, which later became the National Anthem for the United States of America in 1931, reads “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!” (Francis Scott Key) It could be...

It seems strange that of all the characters in Beloved, that Nicole Coonradt would focus on the white woman. Amy Denver is not a woman that is terribly prominent in the narrative and in fact, it’s extremely easy to forget her in the interaction...

Give Toni Morrison a stake in the creation of user experience writing because she made every single word she wrote count. She opens Beloved in the simplest three words, “124 was spiteful.” Right off the bat, she personifies a number and leaves a...

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Morrison interestingly creates a chilling, gothic narrative through strategic use of the supernatural and return of the dead elucidating the history of African American slavery in the United States during the 1860’s....

Much of what happened to black slaves during the middle and late 19th century has been swept under the carpet, and Toni Morrison was fully aware of this. Her book, Beloved, seeks to bring many of those horrors to light so that a modern day reader...

In her novel, Beloved, set in the post- Civil War United States, Toni Morrison creates a story of “rememory” from Sethe, a woman who escaped slavery and kills her newborn daughter to free her from such fate. As the freed - by escaping or buying...

Each human being struggles with the fall from innocence into experience. But parents struggle with this a second time in a more complex way--they must choose, based on their experiences and wisdom, what is best for their children. Should they...

It is a universal desire to crave knowledge about where you come from. To not only want to know what preceded you, but how you, well, became you. It is no coincidence that people who are adopted seek to find their biological parents, or why...

John Steinbeck believes that all works of what he refers to as “honest” writing, are grounded in themes of empathy. However, being able to understand others is not only indicative of a good story, but also a good author. For example, some of the...

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved deals heavily with the theme of trauma. The numerous traumas of the novel are explored mainly through instances of haunting, whether this be mental in the form of dissociation and recurring memories or physical...

Hypermasculinity is prevalent in Joe Trace and Paul D. Both of these characters assert unhealthy dominance in their lives, and especially in their relationships with women. They each have past trauma that will lead to their diminished sense of...

“In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. [...] Every great work of art [...] is a celebration, an act of...

When grappling with the concept of home within Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, one should first constitute what does not make a home. Paul D encapsulates the irony of the plantation name at Sweet Home when he describes that “it wasn’t sweet and it...

Toni Morrison explores the legacy of slavery and the price for freedom and motherly love within her novel Beloved through her main character, Sethe. For Sethe, her vision of freedom equals the ability to love her children as much as she wants...

Toni Morrison decided that if she were to write stories with white characters, as she had been asked to, she would not give their perspective any dominance or privilege over that of the black characters. The voices of white characters have...

Sethe, Paul D, and other former slave characters of Toni Morrison’s Beloved display clear signs of post traumatic stress coming from their experience in slavery and the events that resulted. For the audiences of her novel, slavery is an...

The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, despite their vastly different settings, both emphasize the effect of community on an individual. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, set in Boston in 1642, the rigidly Puritan society criminalizes a young...

In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved she tells the story of an escaped slave and her desperate attempts to lead a somewhat normal life after her horrific experiences at her former plantation, Sweet Home. The protagonist, Sethe, at the threat of being...