Beloved & Toni Morrison
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Toni Morrison was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her novel Beloved, a novel whose popularity and worth earned her the Nobel Prize in literature the first ever awarded to a black female author. Born in the small town of Larain, Ohio, in 1931, to George and Ramah Willis Wofford, Morrison’s birth name is Chloe Anthony Wofford (Gates and Appiah ix). Morrison describes the actions of her central character in Beloved, as: the ultimate love of a mother; the outrageous claim of a slave. In this statement we find an expression of the general themes of Morrison’s mainly naturalistic works. One of these is the burden of the past or history (i.e. slavery and being black in a predominantly white controlled society). Another is the effect on the individual and society from distinctions of race, gender and class. A further theme still is the power of love, be it positive or negative it is a powerful transforming presence in her characters and novels, one through which many find redemption and freedom. Morrison studied humanities at Howard and Cornell Universities. She pursued an academic career at Texas Southern University and Yale. She has had a chair at Princeton University since 1989. During these years she has also worked as an editor at Random House, a literary critic, and she has written and given many l
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he only way to endure and survive is to forgive and forget and move on with hope and promise. He knows they both owe it to themselves to have a decent life and to find love. As he tells her “Sethe, me and you, we got more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow” (Morrison 273). We see that Paul D. is capable of shucking off the burdens of the past and his history as a slave, while Sethe remains incapable of achieving it without help.
All of her life Sethe needed permission or approval from the dominant slave owner to do anything at all. To the slave owner she was nothing more than a piece of cattle, able to be used, exploited, and abused at the owner’s whim. The negative self-image Sethe internalizes from this experience causes her to commit the murder of her baby, but it has been so powerful and abusive she would rather her child die than ever know such an oppressed existence. Unfortunately, Sethe has inadvertently channeled her rage at white oppression onto her own child. After Sethe kills a white man with an ice-pick, the real source of her oppression and internalized rage and self-loathing is finally killed. In committing this act, Sethe destroys the grip white oppression has over her past, her present
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Approximate Word count = 2616
Approximate Pages = 10 (250 words per page)
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