BELOVED: The Novel and Film

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BELOVED The Novel and Film

• Presented by
• Shannon Sprentall and Joanna Pierson
• Edited By Laura Pratt and Dr. Kay Picart

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Margaret Garner Inspiration for the novel
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Characters

• Sethe
• Denver
• Beloved
• Halle
• Paul D.
• Baby Suggs (Grandma Baby)

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Map of Free and Slave States, before Civil War

• http//images.google.com/images?hlenlrqmapof
  slaverystatesbtnGSearch

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http//images.google.com/images?qmapofohiohl
enbtnGGoogleSearch
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Morrison, on her novel

• The novel is not, she said, about slavery.
  Slavery is very predictable, she said. There
  it is, and theres some stuff about how it is,
  and then you get out of it or you dont. It cant
  be driven by slavery. It has to be the interior
  life of some people, a small group of people, and
  everything that they do is impacted on by the
  horror of slavery, but they are also people.

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Themes we would like address

• _________________
• _________________
• _________________
• _________________
• _________________

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Magical Realism

• __________________________________________________
  __________________________________________________
  ___________

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Back to us

• To be able to delve into this narrative, one must
  first get past a non-belief in the supernatural.
• A ghost present seems normal to all the
  characters

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Discussion Question

• Why do you think Morrison uses this
  unbelievable supernatural to explain a past
  that is true?

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Motherhood/Womanhood

• One of the nice things that women do, she said,
  is nurture and love something other than
  themselves- they do that rather nicely.
  Instinctively, perhaps, but the are certainly
  taught to do it, socialized to do it, or
  genetically predisposed to do it- whatever it is,
  its something that I think the majority of women
  feel strongly about. But mother love is also a
  killer. NY Times (1987)

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Whoa
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The Sermons of Baby Suggsnothing left to give
but her heart.

• Preached in a clearing in the woods. A tree
  stump was her pulpit.
• It started that way laughing children, dancing
  men, crying women and then it got mixed up.
  Women stopped crying and danced men sat down and
  cried children danced, women laughed, children
  cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each
  lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for
  breath. In the silence that followed, Baby
  Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big
  heart (88).

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The Body

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  _______________________

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The Bodily Reminders of the Past

• SCARS- ___________________________________________
  __________________________________________________
  ____

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scars

• __________________________
• ___________________________
• ___________________________

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Parallel Opposites

• Using Magical realism to explain the truths about
  the past (slavery)
• Ghost as a human form. Beloved died as an
  infant, comes back in an 18-year old body, the
  mind of a 2 year old
• Sethes body is free, her memory still in chains
  (shown by the constant flashbacks in text and
  film)
• Morrison creates the male characters as
  psychologically weaker

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Last thoughts

• What do you think?
• Did Sethe do what she had to do?
• Should she have killed her child?

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Works Cited

• Beloved. Dir. Demme, Jonathan. Winfrey, Oprah
  and Glover, Danny. 1998.
• DuBois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New
  York Norton Co., reissued date, 1999 (Eds.
  Gates, Jr., Henry and Oliver, Terri. Harvard
  University).
• Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York A Plume Book,
  1988.
• Rios, Alberto, Magical Realism
  Definitions,http//www.public.asu.edu/aarios/res
  ourcebank/definitions/