Beloved: The Novel By : Toni Morrison

1. Beloved: The Novel By : Toni Morrison Presentation By: Sheena Monds Edited by: Dr. Picart and Donna Gallagher

2. Key Terms and Themes • Scarring • Motherhood • Slavery’s effects on the individual and family • The Role of Memory • Storytelling • The Role of Dance • Personification of Beloved • Magical Realism and the Supernatural

3. Background and Overview: • Beloved, a book set in Ohio shortly after the Civil War, tells the story of Sethe and her struggle--not only escape slavery, but also to escape her past. Sethe's character is loosely based on the story of Margaret Garner, a woman who arranged for her children to be smuggled away from the plantation where she was enslaved, then escaped her captors. However, Garner made headlines in 1856 when the owner of her plantation pursued her in hiding. Rather than submitting herself, and more importantly her children, to the unimaginable cruelties of slavery once more, Garner took her four children to the woodshed and killed them. Like Garner, Sethe also attempts to kill her children in the woodshed, one fateful day when her former owner finally catches up with her and comes to take them all back to the plantation. Sethe, however, succeeds only in killing her three-year-old daughter, Beloved. Years later, Beloved will revisit her, and Sethe will have to come to terms with her haunting, careful reconstruct her own "rememory," and confront the painful memory of her past.

4. Morrison’s Style • Fragmentation:- • Magical Realism • In her novels, she focuses on the experience of black Americans, particularly emphasizing black women's experience in an unjust society and the search for cultural identity. She uses fantasy and mythic elements along with realistic depiction of racial, gender and class conflict.

5. Significance of Scarring What is the significance of scarring?

6. Scarring as Identification • How are scars used as identification?

7. Scarring as Self Definition • How is scarring used as self definition?

8. Scarring as Communication • How is scarring used as Communication?

9. The Supernatural & Magical Realism • Definitions of Magical Realism:

10. Discussion Question • Based on the previous definition of Magical Realism, in what ways could Toni Morrison’s novel be defined as a Magical Realist text? Use specific examples. • there is a contemporaneous quality to time past and time present as well as a sense that the lines between reality and fiction, truth and memory have become inextricably blurred".

11. Slavery: Destruction of Identity • Alienation of the Self • Effects of Possession on the human psyche. • Slaves as commodities: Questions of Value and Self worth • Slaves as complicit in their own oppression. • Examples: Paul D., Sethe, Baby Suggs, Stamp Paid, Denver, and Beloved.

12. Slavery: Destruction of the Family Give some examples of how slavery destroys the family?

13. Beloved: A Personification of the Past

14. Beloved: A haunt of Slavery

15. Beloved & Dance

16. Discussion Question: • In your opinion, what purpose does dancing serve in the novel? • Possible Suggestions to consider: • A form of release • A form of expression • A form of storytelling • A form of communication