Beloved Essays

College

Beloved

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...

College

Beloved

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...

11th Grade

Beloved

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...

12th Grade

Beloved

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...

College

Beloved

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...

12th Grade

Beloved

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...

12th Grade

Beloved

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...

11th Grade

Beloved

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...

College

Beloved

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved deals heavily with the theme of trauma. The numerous traumas of the novel are explored mainly through instances of haunting, whether this be mental in the form of dissociation and recurring memories or physical...

11th Grade

Beloved

“In all great works of fiction, regardless of the grim reality they present, there is an affirmation of life against the transience of that life, an essential defiance. [...] Every great work of art [...] is a celebration, an act of...

College

Beloved

When grappling with the concept of home within Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, one should first constitute what does not make a home. Paul D encapsulates the irony of the plantation name at Sweet Home when he describes that “it wasn’t sweet and it...

12th Grade

Beloved

Toni Morrison decided that if she were to write stories with white characters, as she had been asked to, she would not give their perspective any dominance or privilege over that of the black characters. The voices of white characters have...

College

Beloved

The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, despite their vastly different settings, both emphasize the effect of community on an individual. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, set in Boston in 1642, the rigidly Puritan society criminalizes a young...

10th Grade

Beloved

In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved she tells the story of an escaped slave and her desperate attempts to lead a somewhat normal life after her horrific experiences at her former plantation, Sweet Home. The protagonist, Sethe, at the threat of being...