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  • Essay / Slavery, Memory, and Women in Toni Morrison's Beloved

    Writing about an artist or author makes us more curious about the writer and their outlook on life. I believe that each writer reflects their own point of view in their writing, even if they do not speak for themselves; it will appear to the reader in one way or another. So any attempt to read the noble Prize winner; Toni Morrison's profound views compel us to see one side of her opinions, as she is an exceptional emanation of the universal literary tree, most especially in American literature. Beloved has become a staple of the American reading list despite its complexity due to its effective subject matter and artistic representation. In 1873 slavery had been abolished in Cincinnati, Ohio for ten years, this is the setting in which Morrison places the characters for her. Influential moving novel. Morrison introduces Sethe (a black African American slave), the novel's protagonist and the mother who murdered her child to protect her from slavery that could continue until death. Here we have a good idea of ​​what kind of mother would murder her child? For what? We therefore realize to what extent she suffered from slavery. Slavery has left a mark on Sethe's personality, to a very large extent she is still a slave to her past, which she cannot get rid of, this can be considered as a perpetual slavery that she will live, as long as she will be haunted by her past. She may have escaped slavery, but she is very much a slave to her own life. To be truly free, she must accept her whole self – past, present and future. Morrison expresses a very strong feeling about slavery by describing the emotional impact that slavery had on each individual in the novel. Since the author is African American, she gave a picture of blacks in America after the Civil War, although... middle of paper ...... her experience as a slave woman who had no right to her body, and her experience as a slave mother accustomed to the violation of her own body, but unable to bear the forced extraction of her milk intended for her children, the body of Sethe itself with its chokecherry scar is written in the text on several levels. When she sleeps with Paul D, it's the first time she uses his body for her own pleasure. Denver's childbirth pain is written through her bleeding feet and Amy says that "it hurts to have something new growing up." Through her deeply complicated ideas to present slavery and the miseries of black women through memories and flashbacks, Toni Morrison has probably created her masterpiece. . Sethe alone as the novel's heroine predefines all of the ideas above, she is a black African American slave who suffered from being a woman as well as a slave..