Toni Morrison Essays

10th Grade

Beloved

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...

College

Beloved

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...

11th Grade

Beloved

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,...

College

Beloved

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...

12th Grade

Beloved

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...

12th Grade

Beloved

For centuries, nature in literature has been used as a means to reflect both our society and humanity. Both Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Christina Rossetti’s selected poems use nature as both a tool of oppression and a support, challenging the...

College

Beloved

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...

College

Beloved

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...

College

Beloved

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...

11th Grade

Beloved

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...

College

Beloved

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...

12th Grade

Beloved

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...

12th Grade

Beloved

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...

11th Grade

Beloved

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...

Bluest Eye

Among Toni Morrison's works, "images of music pervade her work, but so also does a musical quality of language, a sound and rhythm that permeate and radiate in every novel" (Rigney 8). This rhythmic style of writing is particularly evident in The...