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...

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...

Many relationships in life consist of a balancing act between people in opposing roles: submissive and dominant. Sometimes, like with a parent and their child, the dominant person is there to prevent the submissive one from making bad choices so...

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,...

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...

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...

Toni Morrison through her novel, Beloved (1987), attempts to reacquaint the readers with the history of American slavery by choosing to present it through the African-American community’s experience rather than the white American perspective. The...

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...

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...

From telling scary stories to teaching multiplication tables, a mother takes on a myriad of roles. Yet, as a mother fully devotes herself to her child, she loses connection with other facets of herself. The consumption of maternity subjects the...

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...

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...

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...

Privilege alters perspective. In her text Beloved, Toni Morrison explores the role that white privilege plays on a character’s ability to fight for social justice. While Morrison’s character, Mr. Bodwin, demonstrates positive intentions in his...

Written in 1812, the last line of each verse of the Star Spangled Banner, which later became the National Anthem for the United States of America in 1931, reads “O’er the land of the free and the home of the brave!” (Francis Scott Key) It could be...

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...

Give Toni Morrison a stake in the creation of user experience writing because she made every single word she wrote count. She opens Beloved in the simplest three words, “124 was spiteful.” Right off the bat, she personifies a number and leaves a...

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Morrison interestingly creates a chilling, gothic narrative through strategic use of the supernatural and return of the dead elucidating the history of African American slavery in the United States during the 1860’s....

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...

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...

Each human being struggles with the fall from innocence into experience. But parents struggle with this a second time in a more complex way--they must choose, based on their experiences and wisdom, what is best for their children. Should they...

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...

John Steinbeck believes that all works of what he refers to as “honest” writing, are grounded in themes of empathy. However, being able to understand others is not only indicative of a good story, but also a good author. For example, some of the...

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...