The narrator states that she would like to "give" her protective charms, to help the beloved guard against grief. She wants to help guide the person back to the waking state like a divine, loving and eternal presence of spiritual support. Whether the beloved is a child or a lover, the narrator's love is powerfully transcendent.
The English language refers to "falling" asleep and waking "up." Therefore, images of ascending and descending correspond to states of consciousness in Atwood's poem. When falling asleep, the narrator refers to "the cave where you must descend." After encountering the source of "grief at the center," the narrator notes that she would like to "follow / you up the long stairway." Again, Atwood stresses an attitude of selflessness and surrender by using the word "follow" and emphasizing it by placing it at the end rather than at the beginning of the following line. Leaving the word "follow" hanging at the end of the line draws the reader's attention toward it, taking the place of a rhyming couplet.
Likewise, the narrator does not want to "take" the beloved up the stairway because she does not want to interfere with her partner's self will. Even when she wants to protect her beloved from grief, the narrator does not state that she wants to take away or even alleviate that grief. She simply seeks to offer protective tools to strengthen that person's own character. The narrator seems to understand that the beloved needs to travel to the center of that grief in order...
Slow, lingering death lies in the daily carnage of body and spirit- not only of her own, but more so with Tom's. And so on that night, before Steven came and start his abusing spree of the mother and child, Julie prepared a special dinner for her and Tom. She and her son then devoured a delicious bowl of meatball soup, mixed with insecticide. In a matter of hours,
Clearly, color, specifically the color red, plays a significant symbolic role in developing these aforementioned central themes. At the most basic level, in a book that is primarily about slavery, color is a powerful theme as the colors of black and white divide society and is the entire reasoning for the conflicts of slavery. Even after emancipation, the colors of black and white continue to create conflict, as even Sethe
Beloved is a contemporary novel with the appeal of a ghost story, a mystery, and a work of historical fiction. It is a complex literary work that pieces together a story line of complexity with descriptions of how African-American people were treated before, during, and directly after the Civil War. This beautifully written and Pulitzer-Prize wining novel examines three generations of women -- one who was born in Africa and
Beloved by Toni Morrison is a haunting, darkly beautiful and intensely moving novel that depicts the profound traumatic reality of slavery and its repercussions on one woman's life, her mental stability and psychological well-being, her ideas of and abilities in motherhood, her entire sense of self, even her basic humanity. Beloved tells the story of an escaped slave woman who, when faced with capture, slipped into a state of psychosis
"The best thing [Sethe] was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing -- the part of her that was clean" (250). She had been made to endure a lot which most slave women experienced during enslavement. They were brutally raped, used and beaten and often had to work as prostitutes. "I got close. I got close. To
Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.... But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread....The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own. (Morrison, 198-199) The strong bond between Sethe and her children reflects
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