Feminists have discussed the concept of the home as the earliest school of social justice, a place where people foment their egalitarian values. Communitarians, on the other hand, have envisaged the home as the realm of personal solace where people equip themselves with the skills to belong as prosperous members of a society. Both understandings emphasize the role of the home as a repository for the hopes and dreams and fears of its inhabitants. Thehome is less a physical edifice than it is a spiritual one. It is constructed not with wood and tools and concrete, but with the sum of the emotional strength of its indwellers; it is not a geographical location, but a "space" for the mind and body to gather strength, rest and formulate strategy. In this way, "home" is not a utopian or dystopian "destination," but a very literal extension of the self – a personal history that catalogues the triumphs and follies and hate and love of the past. Without a home, one is stranded without a past, and – with no history – without an identity.
Unlike the thousands of immigrants who have traveled toAmerica to forge for themselves a new home, imported Africans were forced into America as property. They were stripped from a livable past and shackled into a foreign, unlivable future. The story of the American slave is thus the story of the African's search for a home in a hateful land. In Toni Morrison's Beloved, each generation hopes to find a better home despite a malignant world: Sethe's mother traveled from the slave ship to the plantation, Sethe from the plantation to Cincinnati, Beloved from Cincinnati to death, and Denver from a strange, haunted land of ghosts and despair to her community at large. To Morrison, the various "spaces" of the Sethe's life constitute a broader understanding of her "self." Each of the three understandings of what a home might be, as developed in Beloved – the Sweet Home plantation, the Clearing and 124 Bluestone Cincinnati – fails because it prevents the dynamic interaction of all the elements of life: one's spaces of interaction, one's past, present and hopeful future.
Beloved was written. This complies with the concept that anything written is literature. ... Much of Beloved is told from the perspective of freed slaves. ... Especially the passage in which Sethe takes her babies out to the shed in order to kill them rather than have them grow up at Sweet Home (148-149). ... Beloved exemplifies the anguish and fright of the slaves before and after freedom. ...
Motherhood & Beloved Out of all the different themes explored by Morrison in Beloved, motherhood shows the most omnipresence. ... I can see this as a love so great that for Sethe, death was better than a life in hell that her children would await back at sweet home. ... Denver cried when Beloved disappeared in the cold house. However, Denver was not crying because Beloved disappeared, per se. ... Additionally, because she had no concept of identity, she failed to view her children as independent beings. ...
beloved "It is the ultimate gesture of a loving mother. ... I wasn't going back there[Sweet Home]. ... Sethe's concept of loving and protecting her children becomes synonymous with her killing Beloved and attempting to kill the rest. ... The concept that Sethe equates her life and self-worth with her connection to her children is most graphically illustrated in her mad ravings to the reincarnation of "Beloved". ... The black community played a major role in Beloved, especially with th...
" Throughout the ages, our species's survival has depended upon the concept of togetherness. ... Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Morrison's Beloved are similarly in the fact that both portray how community plays a key role in a families functionality in society. Looking at the novel Beloved from a chronological standpoint, the story truly begins with Sethe's time on the Sweet Home Plantation. The characters' time at Sweet Home was anything but sweet, but they made the best of a dysfunctional situation. ... Faulkner's As I Lay Dying and Morrison's Beloved ...
It is in this manner that Toni Morrison uses numbers in Beloved. ... Howard and Buglar "[ran] away by the time they were thirteen years old" (3), the traditional age of manhood in many cultures, the age at which a Jewish boy becomes a Bar Mitzvah and a medieval boy would leave home for an apprenticeship. ... There are thirty women that arrive to remove Beloved. ... Eventually, Beloved replaces him. ... The Pauls at Sweet Home were three brothers. ...
Cry, The Beloved Country by Alan Paton, is set in the tense and fragile society of South Africa. ... Stephen Kumalo returns home to Ndotsheni and he begins to focus on mending the broken tribe. His return home completes the circular structure of the novel. ... He wants to establish new concepts that will cause the town to strive in the future. ... Cry, The Beloved Country tells of the struggle of society to unite in South Africa. ...
The repression of the characters within "Beloved" is a key motive of the style that Toni Morrison uses. ... The repression of Sethe through the black community's rejection, and then her final acceptance creates the concept of "tension and release" within the novel's composition. ... In "Beloved", this is essential. ... At the climax, Sethe is "released" from such events through the power of music, while such "tension" is created through her escape from Sweet Home. ... Beloved turned to look at Sethe. ...
The two fathers of this beautiful child "have a much closer partnership with each other and a stronger bond of friendship than parents have, because the children of their partnership are more beautiful and more immortal." (209c, my emphasis) Though the lover is initially inspired by his beloved's physical as well as mental beauty, the emphasis of the homoerotic relationship Diotima describes is not on the sexual gratification of the lover, but rather on the perpetuation of the lover's virtue and wisdom through teaching the beloved. Indeed, a step on the ascent to the ultimate form ...
These gondolier figures embody the concept of transportation of either spiritual or physical will that later becomes the underlining theme of Aschenbach's transformation. ... Aschenbach becomes fully obsessed with Tadzio, "he no longer wished for anything else than to pursue the beloved object that inflamed him, to dream about him when he was absent and to speak amorous phrases" (47). ... Aschenbach toys with the idea of telling Tadzio's mother so that she and her family, including Tadzio could leave Venice and return home where they would be safe. ... In his final days, Aschenba...
