Beloved Toni Morrison

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

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)

Morrison and Her Work Morrison discusses her reason for writing Beloved: mkgMRq4 mkgMRq4

Is this a … Ghost story? “Didactic” novel? Historical fiction? Margaret Garner

Putting Beloved in Perspective… Morrison discusses “The White Gaze”: D_9YZD4 D_9YZD4

Morrison’s “Writing Style” Stream of consciousness Figurative language (kennings, motifs, paradoxes, archetypes, metaphor) P.O.V. (Author—attitude [tone]) Symbolism Non-linear (think purpose) Shifting narrative perspectives Diction

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

Epigraph #1 Sixty Million and more Why is “Sixty Million” capitalized?

Epigraph #2 “I will call them my people, which were not my people; and her beloved, which was not beloved.” --Romans 9:25 Activity: Reader’s Response—tone of Romans 9: 1-25