Beloved

1
Beloved

• Toni Morrison

2
Historical background

• Slavery - triangular trade
• U.S. Constitution
• Compromise of 1850
• Fugitive Slave Act / Dred Scott Decision
• 1860 election
• Ku Klux Klan

3
Forward to Beloved

• The historical Margaret Garner is fascinating,
  but, to a novelist, confining. Too little
  imaginative space there for my purposes. (XVII)
• the order and quietude of everyday life would
  be violently disrupted by the chaos of the needy
  dead that the herculean effort to forget would
  be threatened by memory so desperate to stay
  alive. (XIX)

4
Morrison and Her Work

• Morrison discusses her reason for writing
  Beloved http//youtu.be/RP6umkgMRq4

5
Is this a

• Ghost story?
• Didactic novel?
• Historical fiction?
• Margaret Garner

6
Putting Beloved in Perspective

• Morrison discusses The White Gaze
  http//youtu.be/j5QnD_9YZD4

7
Morrisons Writing Style

• Stream of consciousness
• Figurative language (kennings, motifs, paradoxes,
  archetypes, metaphor)
• P.O.V. (Authorattitude tone)
• Symbolism
• Non-linear (think purpose)
• Shifting narrative perspectives
• Diction

8
Slavery and America

• 'Nowhere in the annals of history has a people
  experienced such a long and traumatic ordeal as
  Africans during the Atlantic slave trade. Over
  the nearly four centuries of the slave - which
  continued until the end of the Civil War -
  millions of African men, women, and children were
  savagely torn from their homeland, herded onto
  ships, and dispersed all over the so-called New
  World. Although there is no way to compute
  exactly how many people perished, it has been
  estimated that between thirty and sixty million
  Africans were subjected to this horrendous
  triangular trade system and that only one
  third-if that-of those people survived...'
• BACKGROUND THE MIDDLE PASSAGE

9
Epigraph 1

• Sixty Million
• and more
• Why is Sixty Million capitalized?

10
Epigraph 2

• I will call them my people, which were not my
  people and her beloved, which was not beloved.
• --Romans 925
• Activity Readers Responsetone of Romans 9
  1-25