Through the concept of the home, Morrison shows that if we estrange one element of our lives, then we have estranged our identity from ourselves.
Life is not a state, but a process. Beloved's role in Morrison's book, as a manifestation of a slave history and a personal history, underscores the fluidity of life: she transitions from a corporal child, to a ghost child and then to a resurrected spirit. The narrative structure of the book, too, emphasizes the seamless transitions each character must make to create a life: mentally hurdling from present, to a scarring past and then to a prospective future. Morrison concludes, at a fundamental level, that lives are not sustainable in isolation from these elements: past, present and future.
The home, likewise, is not self-sufficient. It depends on the lively interface between all the "spaces" of one's existence – the past, present, the future, but also race, violence, trauma, the surrounding community, and love. Just as the characters and narrative transition from one state to another, the homes in Beloved too phase-shift. And these shifts happen with moments of apocalypse. When Sethe kills her own child, she destroys the open, boisterous role 124 Bluestone played in facilitating the interaction between all the elements of her life. The walls of the house literally stymie her interaction with the community, and thus metaphorically serve as boundary between her and her diverse, multifarious life. Three models of the home were developed inBeloved: the Sweet Home slave plantation, the Clearing and 124 Bluestone.
§ Sweet Home. The devastation wrought by slavery is the destruction of the human identity. As a slave, Paul D was stripped of his manhood: the Schoolteacher put a bit in his mouth, preventing him from engaging in the most human process of spoken word. The chickens on the farm retained more identity than he did, with a bit in his mouth, domesticated and emasculated, " 'Mister [the chicken], he looked sofree.
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...
