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, the two were then lying on the floor and frothing on the mouth. Incidentally, a neighbor came in to give them a warning that Steven is in a very, very bad mood having been fired in his job, and that they should probably escape now to avoid being Steven's madness outlet. Yet when the neighbor saw the two bodies of Julie and Tom, she realized that they've found another means to escape Steven. Three years have passed since that incident.…...

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References

Beloved. (2006). Retrieved December 13, 2006, at ( http://www.Sparknotes.com/Beloved_ (novel)

Beloved. (2006). Retrieved December 12, 2006 at http://www.homeworkonline.com/beloved/index.asp

Borey, E. (2000, May 11). Classic Note on Beloved. Retrieved December 13, 2006, at  http://www.gradesaver.com/classicnotes/titles/beloved/shortsumm.html

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 determines that there are "no good white people." Likewise, even white people who do not believe in slavery, such as the odwins, assume the worst of black people. According to aby Suggs, "There is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks." (Morrison, p. 94).

This black vs. white color conflict creates the tensions that drive the novel and create the emotions that are symbolized by other colors. For example, aby Suggs eventually gives up on life and only wants to…...

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Bibliography

Gagliardi, Pasquale. Symbols and Artifacts: Views of the Corporate Landscape. New York: Aldine Transactions.

Marks, Kathleen. Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotrapaic Imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Random House, 2004.

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 ar. This beautifully written and Pulitzer-Prize wining novel examines three generations of women -- one who was born in Africa and brought to America as a slave, her daughter-in-law who suffered so terribly as a slave she would do anything to prevent her children from being raised in slavery, and her granddaughter who, saved from slavery by her mother's outrageous action, represents hope for future generations of African-American females. Paul D, a black man, ex-slave, and escaped convict, who helps the women in the story put the past into a workable perspective, is another protagonist character whom the three women depend…...

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Works Cited

Bettleheim, Bruno. The Uses of Enchantment. New York: Vintage Books, 1989.

Carmean, Karen. Toni Morrison's World of Fiction. New York: Whitson Publishing Company, 1993.

Conner, Marc C., Ed. The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2000.

David, Ron. Toni Morrison Explained: A Reader's Road Map to the Novels. New York: Random House, 2000.

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 and made the horrifying decision to murder her children rather than allow them to be subjected to a lifetime of the horrors of slavery. Three of her four children survived. The title refers to the two-year-old girl whom was actually killed and subsequently returns, as a vengeful, spiteful, angry and lonely baby ghost, to the mother who took her life.
In Part II, the characters are dealing with various feelings of loss, regret, guilt and shame, and the intense anger that…...

"The best thing [Sethe] was, was her children. hites 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 being a Saturday girl. I had already worked a stone mason's shop. A step to the slaughterhouse would have been a short one" (203-204).
Sethe's sense of abandonment was what gave her an imbalanced torn personality. She wanted a mother's love which she was denied and then she later did the same thing to her daughter and thus suffered immensely. In a way she was both Beloved and herself since she could feel Beloved's feelings of deprivation, abandonment and loss. hen…...

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Work Cited

1. Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987.

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 this ownership of the slaves by their masters. The jungle that was planted by the white people in the blacks through slavery is mirrored in the Sethe's violence. The murdering act of Sethe can thus be explained: she does not know herself and mistakes her own identity with the fate of her children. Unable to see herself as an independent person, Sethe clings to her role as a mother and becomes extremely possessive. She mistakes her own identity with her…...

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Works Cited

Bowers, Susan. "Beloved and the New Apocalypse." The Journal of Ethnic Studies. Vol. 18(1).1990: 59-77.

Iyasere, Solomon and Marla W. Iyasere. Understanding Toni Morrison's 'Beloved' and 'Sula': Selected Essays and Criticisms of the Works by the Nobel Prize-Winning Author. Troy: Whitston Publishing, 2000

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Knopf, 1987

The narrative becomes key eyewitness testimony in the suffering of others.
Memories of a more personal nature, such as of Offred's ex-husband and child, also permeate the present and affect identity construction. Although neither Morrison nor Atwood create novels of nostalgia, memory and nostalgia do go hand-in-hand. "Nostalgia," notes Greene, "is a powerful impulse that is by no means gender specific," (295). Nostalgia provides the emotionally uplifting links between past and present and can be used to create possible futures. The feminist elements in both Beloved and The Handmaid's Tale do present a more pessimistic picture of female nostalgia than male. After all, patriarchal social, political, and economic institutions are the root causes of trauma in both novels. Slavery is a theme in common to both Beloved and The Handmaid's Tale. The institution of slavery is directly linked to female sexual, psychological, and physical subjugation. Rape and political oppression are…...

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Works Cited

Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid's Tale. Anchor, 1998.

Greene, Gayle. "Feminist Fiction and the Uses of Memory." Signs. Winter 1991; 16; 2.

King, Nicola. Memory, Narrative, Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Plume.

234). Her house was haunted by the angry spirit of Beloved, who resented being separated from her mother and buried in the ground (88-89). The other members of the community knew about her past and were terrified of her haunted home, and no one would associate with her.
However, Paul D. reminded Sethe of her humanity. First, he exorcised the house of its baby ghost (22) and then he took her to the carnival (55), which was her first social outing in eighteen years. At that point Paul was as yet unaware that she had killed her baby girl. As the story progresses, the truth emerges. In the conversation between Sethe and Paul D (194-195), Sethe tells Paul the story of how she killed her baby girl when Schoolteacher and the other men arrived to take her and her children back to Sweet Home. Paul, horrified, tells Sethe as he…...

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Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Vintage Books, 1987. Print.

Since then, however, my grades have drastically improved, and I am on the Dean's List.
My work at Walgreens as a Pharmacy Technician has helped me to understand the needs of patients, and this is in addition to my part-time work in the Pharmacy Department at St. Luke Hospital. Through both of these jobs, I get the best of both worlds - both retail and clinical pharmacy. These experiences, in addition to my work with the Student Government Association and the Pre-Professional Medical Society Club, have helped to shape who I am and my dedication to my chosen field. While I have been through hardships in the past, I would not be the person I am today had I not gone through these difficult times. I feel that everything that I have done in my life has worked to prepare me for this career path, and my motivation to better…...

Sethe does not see death as such an opposing alternative compared to the life she remembers. Beloved, seen as the ghost-daughter, is returning back to her mother but she is doing so angry. She is angry for the same reasons as Sethe -- she missed out on the opportunity to be a daughter. Sethe can now take care of Beloved like she was supposed to before. Sethe sees her mother as she never did before and begins to accept her circumstance.
Beloved's identity symbolizes the ghost-child and ghost-mother of Sethe and others who passed before her. Deborah Horvitz believes the ghost represents both the dead child and the dead mother. She writes the ghost-child prompts Sethe to "remember her own mother because, in fact, the murdered daughter and the slave mother are a conflated or combined identity" (Horvitz). From this perspective, we can understand the importance of the mother/daughter relationship.…...

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Works Cited

Holden-Kirwan, Jennifer L. "Looking Into the Self That is No Self: An Examination of Subjectivity in 'Beloved.'" African-American Review. 32.3. 1998. Literature Resource Center. Gale. 2 Dec. 2009  http://go.galegroup.com 

Horvitz, Deborah. "Nameless Ghosts: Possession and Dispossession in Beloved." Studies in American Fiction. 17.2. 989. 1995. Literature Resource Center. Gale. 2 Dec. 2009.

We marry and make families and they become our beloveds. A husband and wife can be beloved to one another, but they are also another word that denotes another kind of relationship -- lovers.
A lover represents something more than someone who is beloved. Where a beloved person is seen as benign, a lover is mysterious and sensuous. Lovers act on the feelings that they have and it is not through long walks in the park holding hands. The dirty side of love is that sex is most definitely involved and acts as the fuel to any lustful and loving fire. To be lovers is to be physical actors in a romantic theater.

A lover, also, does not have to be the most loved person in your life. Lovers do not have to be anything more than an instrument of lust. Lovers are fleeting; they can burn bright and extinguish quickly…...

Sethe knew about this future and even as a free woman, she could not escape the anguish associated by belonging to someone else because much of the damage had already been done. Sethe was attempting to overcome the damaging effects of slavery while attempting to adjust as a free woman, even though it was like she was not actually free. Coping with the weight of slavery meant eliminating some of pain it caused and this is how Sethe found it in her heart to kill her child. She could only see the pain of a slave life in this child's future and she considered removing her from the earth something of a favor. hile we can understand the faulty reasoning here, it only seems understandable that Sethe must go through a healing process that involves a mental, spiritual, and physical level. Through this journey, she will finally discover who…...

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Works Cited

Boudreau, Kristin. "Pain and the Unmaking of Self in Toni Morrison's 'Beloved.'"

Contemporary Literature. 1995. 36.3 GALE Resource Database. Web Site Accessed

November 06, 2010.  http://www.infotrac.galegroup.com .

Holden-Kirwan, Jennifer L. "Looking Into the Self That is No Self: An Examination of Subjectivity in 'Beloved.'" African-American Review. 32.3. 1998. Literature Resource

Cry, the Beloved Country
Hungarian Scientist Albert Szent-Gyorgi once wrote that, "A living cell requires energy not only for all its functions, but also for the maintenance of its structure. In Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country the novel's formal structure helps shape its energy and message. In particular, Paton uses inserted intercalary chapters to provide a fuller picture of social issues. Some of the intercalary chapters contain a number of separate scenes and many of them use so much dramatic dialog that they could easily be presented as brief plays. This essay will focus on the intercalary chapters in Volume 2 which revolve around the Afrikaner's concern for wealth over equality. Within the chapters that will be discussed the social implications of a gold mine are examined via intense sarcasm and the effects of racism are demonstrated to the central white character Kumalo. Through an understanding of how these…...

Slavery as Removing Humanity: Toni Morrison's Beloved
Set in the time of slavery, Toni Morrison's Beloved explores how the institution was not only physically abusive, but also emotionally and mentally damaging to those forced to endure a life of servitude. Slaves were treated as property and thus had their humanity ripped out of them under extreme circumstances. Slavery does not just lock up the body; it also locks up the mind so that even the individual cannot control their most inner thoughts and behaviors. In this sense, Morrison shows how slavery can be so damaging on a mental level as well as a physical one.

As an institution, slavery robs the individual of control over their own bodies and behaviors. Essentially, it removes their humanity and reduces them to the state of animals, rather than of rational human beings. They are treated as less than human and therefore internalize this treatment so…...

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Works Cited

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Knopf Publishing Group. 2007.

Beethoven's style disturbed him, causing Beethoven to seek instruction elsewhere, including that of Mozart's rival Antonio Saleri ("Ludwig van Beethoven," the Columbia Encyclopedia, 2008). For awhile he lived in the aristocrat Prince Lichnowsky's mansion and began to secure fame as a 'dueling' piano player and composer. "Beethoven's rivals always retired, bloodied, from such combat. hile he made enemies of many pianists in Vienna, the nobility flocked to hear him.... It was his skill as a pianist rather than as a composer that brought him recognition during his twenties" (Lane 2006). This success was critical in establishing his independence, as Beethoven became the first composer to be able to 'freelance' his talent and not depend on patronage (Lane 2006). Unfortunately, his advancing deafness spelled an end to his career upon the piano -- once again Beethoven faced a setback that would have drained the will of even the most optimistic…...

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Works Cited

Classical: Musical Context." The Essentials of Music. 4 May 2008. http://www.essentialsofmusic.com/

Lane, William. "Beethoven: The Immortal." 16 Jan 2006. 4 May 2008.  http://www.lucare.com/immortal/ 

Ludwig Van Beethoven." The Columbia Encyclopedia. 4 May 2008.  http://plus.aol.com/aol/reference/Beethove/Ludwig_van_Beethoven?flv=1&ncid=cDaKHfNCCG0000000555&icid=rbox_ref_center.M 

Prevot, Dominique. "Biography: Beethoven's life." Ludwig van Beethoven's website. 2001. 4 May 2008.  http://www.lvbeethoven.com/Bio/BiographyLudwig.html

To Kill a Mockingbird is one of the most beloved books and movies of all time, making it no surprise that it has become a popular theatre production.  There are so many issues that arise in the novel, movie, and screenplay that even seemingly insignificant things, such as Atticus allowing his children to call him by his first name, take on a significance in the story.  If you were working on a narrative criticism or essay, you would highlight that significance.  However, in outlining an act from a play, you do not....

It is impossible to overstate the role that race and cultural difference play in Othello.  Often framed as a story of obsessive love, domestic violence, jealousy, deceit, and tragedy, it is less a story of the conflict between two people and more the story of racism and the conflict between cultures. That is because Othello being both a beloved and respected war hero and a suspect outsider is central to the plot of the play. That only happens because Othello is an outsider.  Not only is he not a Venetian, but he....

To be honest, writing book reviews can be challenging, even for writers who love to read.  It can feel difficult to strike the right balance between objective observations about a book, critical discussion of the book, and subjective opinion of the book. This is especially true when the book is a highly emotional one like Tuesdays with Morrie, which is beloved by many readers. You also have to consider the approach that you are taking in your book review.  Are you writing the review for readers, in general, or with a specific audience in mind? ....

1. The symbolism of the caged bird in Maya Angelou's autobiographical work, "I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings."
2. The theme of captivity and freedom in Harper Lee's novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird."
3. Analyzing the oppression and confinement of women in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's short story, "The Yellow Wallpaper."
4. The symbolism of the birdcage in Henrik Ibsen's play, "A Doll's House," in relation to gender roles and societal expectations.
5. Comparing the experiences of the caged birds in Richard Wright's novel, "Native Son," and Margaret Atwood's dystopian novel, "The Handmaid's Tale."
6. Exploring the theme of captivity and liberation in Jean Rhys's....