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Sep 25, 2023 · We finally find out what happened to Maude: When they were both preteen girls, Brynn and Maude had an argument that got physical. Brynn bashed Maude on the head with a rock and killed her. No...
- Anna Menta
- 2 min
- Introduction
- Author Biography
- Plot Summary
- Characters
- Media Adaptations
- Themes
- Topica For Further Study
- Style
- Historical Context
- Critical Overview
After publishing four novels, Toni Morrison had already established herself as one of the most popular and successful black female writers of her time. With the publication of her fifth novel, Beloved, however, critics worldwide recognized that here was an author with a depth and brilliance that made her work universal. In this tale set in Reconstr...
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. Growing up during the Depression, Morrison witnessed the struggle of her parents, George and Ramah Wills Wofford, as they worked multiple jobs to support their four children. In the face of hard and often demeaning work, her parents held on to a sense of pride and s...
Part I
In Beloved, Morrison chronicles the hardships Sethe and her family endure before, during, and after the American Civil War. The novel opens with a description of the "spiteful" atmosphere of 124 Bluestone Road in rural Ohio in 1873, where Sethe, her daughter Denver, and a troublesome spirit live. They are soon joined by two others: Paul D., who knew Sethe from their years as slaves on a Kentucky plantation, and a strange woman who calls herself Beloved. All quickly become caught up in conflic...
Part II
Stamp feels "uneasy" ever since he told Paul about "the Misery." Since that time, Sethe and Denver have been ostracized from the black community, due partly to the infanticide, but also to Sethe's proud refusal to ask for help. When Stamp tries to visit Sethe, he hears "loud, urgent [voices], all speaking at once" coming from the house. He determines they are the voices of the suffering ghosts of blacks who have been killed by whites. No one comes to the door when Stamp knocks on it. After Pa...
Part III
At first Sethe, Denver, and Beloved played together, happily cut off from the rest of the world, but "then the mood changed and the arguments began." Sethe and Beloved close out Denver when both determine that Beloved is Sethe's lost daughter. Their battles revolve around Beloved's recounting of the anguish she has experienced and Sethe's pleas for forgiveness and accounts of what she has suffered for her children. Denver notes, however, that Sethe's inability to leave the subject alone sugge...
Beloved
There are several signs that seem to indicate that the mysterious stranger who suddenly turns up at 124 Bluestone is the spirit of Sethe's daughter returned in flesh. She has "new skin, lineless and smooth," is the same age Sethe's baby would have been had she lived, and her name is "Beloved," the same word carved on the baby's gravestone. She has little memory of where she has been or why she is here, but somehow knows to ask Sethe "where your diamonds?" and "your woman she never fix up your...
Edward Bodwin
Edward Bodwin is one of the abolitionist siblings who assist Baby Suggs when she first arrives in Cincinnati. "He's somebody never turned us down," Stamp Paid says, and it is primarily Bod-win's efforts that save Sethe from the gallows after she murders her daughter. He also helps Sethe find a job after she is released from prison. Bod-win's most distinguishing features are his snow-white hair and his dark velvety mustache, an interesting combination of black and white that leads his enemies...
Miss Bodwin
Miss Bodwin is one of the abolitionist siblings who provide Baby Suggs with a house and a job after she is freed from Sweet Home. She is described as "the whitewoman who loved [Baby Suggs]," and her kindness extends to Sethe and her daughter after Baby Suggs's death.
After a decade of working to bring the novel to the screen, producer-star Oprah Winfrey finally brought out a film version of Beloved in 1998. Directed and co-produced by Oscar-winner Jonathan Demm...An unabridged audio recording of Beloved by the author is available from Random House Audio; an abridged version read by actress Lynn Whitfieldis also available from Random House Audio.Race and Racism
"You got two feet, not four," Paul D tells Sethe when she reveals her secret to him, and the dehumanizing effect of slavery is a primary theme of Beloved. According to the schoolteacher, slaves are just another type of animal: not only does he list their "animal characteristics," he considers them "creatures" to be "handled," similar to dogs or cattle. In some ways, they are not even worth as much as animals: "Unlike a snake or a bear," he thinks while pursuing the runaways, "a dead nigger co...
Freedom
For people treated no better than animals, freedom can be a difficult concept to grasp. When Halle buys his mother's freedom, for instance, Baby Suggs thinks that he "gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing." When she steps across the Ohio River, however, "she could not believe that Halle knew what she didn't; that Halle, who had never drawn one free breath, knew there was nothing like it in this world." While under the schoolteacher's bit, Paul D sees Mister, the rooster, and thinks, "M...
Motherhood
One of the cruelest effects of slavery is how it severs bonds of love, particularly those between mother and child. Sethe still feels the pain of separation from her mother, while Baby Suggs has lost all but one of her eight children. One reaction to this loss of love is to deny it; as Ella says, "If anybody was to ask me I'd say 'Don't love nothing.'" After having her first three children sold away and a fourth fathered by the man who sold them, Baby Suggs "could not love [that child] and th...
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850 changed the way free states were required to deal with fugitive slaves, leading to Sethe's terrible response to her capture. Research the history of the legal status...In preparing to write Beloved, Toni Morrison read several slave narratives—autobiographies by freed slaves. What was missing from these narratives, said the author, was a portrayal of the inner liv...In Beloved, Amy Denver has also escaped from a situation where she faced beatings and forced labor. Research the history of indentured servitude in America. Who was subject to such contracts? In wh...Read some African-American ghost stories, such as the folktales in Patricia McKissack's The Dark Thirty or Virginia Hamilton's The People Could Fly and Her Stories. What elements do they have in co...Narration/Point of View
For the most part, Beloveduses a third-person narrator—one who tells the story by describing the action of other people ("he said," "they did"). Because the narration describes what various characters are thinking and doing, it can also be classified as omniscient ("all-knowing") narration. This third-person narration remains fairly constant throughout the novel, but the point of view (or perspective) from which the story is told changes from section to section. In the first chapter alone, fo...
Flashback
A flashback is a literary device used to present action that occurred before the beginning of the story. In Beloved, the narrator structures the story in such a way that past events are related as a way of explaining the present. In the first paragraph, for instance, the narrator says that "by 1873, Sethe and her daughter were [the ghost's] only victims." This sets the main action in 1873, but the paragraphs that follow explain how Baby Suggs and the two boys escaped the ghost prior to that d...
Idiom
Idiom refers to a word construction or verbal expression that is closely associated with a given language or dialect. For example, the English expression "a piece of cake" is sometimes used to describe a task that is easily done. In Beloved, Morrison makes use of idiom to help re-create the sense of a specific community, that of African Americansin Reconstruction Ohio. When the characters use words like "ain't" and "reckon" and phrases like "sit down a spell," it helps place their characters...
The Fugitive Slave Law of 1850
One of the central events of the novel—Sethe's attack on her children—is described as "her rough response to the Fugitive Bill." Prior to 1850, U.S. law permitted slave owners to attempt to recover escaped slaves, but state authorities were under no obligation to assist them. Many Northerners saw aiding and protecting fugitive slaves as one way to combat the evil of slavery. Escaped slaves who settled in free states were therefore relatively safe from capture, since their abolitionist communi...
The Rise of the Ku Klux Klan
Even after the abolition of slavery ended the threat of being returned to servitude, African Americans still found their rights and even lives in danger. Many white Southerners found Reconstruction Act of 1867—the Republican government's plan for returning the South to the Union—difficult to swallow. This act replaced the mostly all-white state governments created after the war with five military districts. Each district had 20,000 troops, commanded by a Union general. Southern states were fo...
Toni Morrison and the Post-Aesthetic Movement
Mirroring their increased presence in politics, African Americans also became highly visible as writers during the 1960s. Harlem Renaissance writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston had been prominent in the 1920s, while Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison achieved both literary and popular acclaim in the 1940s and 1950s. Many of these works were popular because of the way they were able to interpret the black experience for a white audience. In the 1960s and 1970s, however, writer...
While Morrison had earned a considerable critical reputation with her first four novels, many initial reviews of Beloved showed no hesitation in acclaiming it the masterpiece of a supremely gifted writer. Margaret Atwood, for instance, called the work "another triumph" and added in her New York Times Book Review article that "Morrison's versatility...
People also ask
What happened to Denver's daughter in the clearing?
What happens to Sethe when Beloved disappears?
Did Kaitlyn Dever leave Last Man Standing?
What would Denver have been if Sethe hadn't isolated the family?
Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like "it didn't have to happen often, because Beloved seldom looked right at her, or when she did, Denver could tell that her own face was just the place those eyes stopped while the mind behind it walked on.
Quick answer: The significance of Beloved's relationship with Sethe, Denver, and Paul D. is that she allows them to come to terms with some aspect of their past or themselves. Sethe must reckon...
May 21, 2021 · When Last Man Standing was picked up by Fox following the ABC cancellation, fans were ever so grateful that Kaitlyn Dever didn't join former stars Molly Ephraim and Flynn Morrison in exiting the...
- Nick Venable
Study with Quizlet and memorize flashcards containing terms like what was the first thing denver heard after not hearing anything, who was denver's secret company until paul d came, according to Denver, who threw beloved out and more.
Nov 17, 2014 · When Denver saw her mother deteriorating under the clutches of Beloved she did what she had to do, she gathered her courage and went to Lady Jones, she left the house that she hadn’t left in years, she endured the looks people gave her in order to get what her and her family needed, food.
