2. Create a timeline documenting the events that occur in Beloved. 3. Construct a Web site that other students reading Beloved could use. The Web site should include a page about major themes in the book, a page about Toni Morrison, and a page about slavery in the United States.

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2. What are some examples of healing in Beloved? How are people healed physically? Spiritually? 3. Discuss the use of nature imagery in Beloved and how it corresponds to the characters’ moods or situations. 4. Describe the different ways in which white people treat African-Americans in Beloved. How do the […]

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AMEs and Baptists, Holinesses and Sanctifieds black religious denominations. AMEs refers to the African Methodist Episcopal church, founded in New York City in 1801 by Richard Allen. anointed put oil on in a ceremony of consecration. barnacles smallpox. battlefields of Alabama The Union army captured the Tennessee Valley in 1862; […]

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While the film addresses these issues, its success at reproducing the style, mood, and characters of the book is uneven. At points, the filmmakers capture Morrison’s vision perfectly; at other times, important concepts are lost and the flow of the story becomes confused. For instance, the film beautifully depicts Baby […]

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For Cincinnati blacks, slavery’s legacy lies beyond the whip, far from the auction block, a generation away from dogs, slave catchers, patrollers, rapists, child-sellers, iron bits, and pronged necklaces. The curse of bondage lies in the spirit that has been so dirtied that it can no longer love itself. Morrison […]

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For Morrison’s post-slave era women, menopause is the resurgence of desire, a fleshly encumbrance that precedes death, a well-deserved respite from indiscriminate breeding, unsatisfactory mates, and children sold before mothers could return home to wave goodbye. Ma’am, the elusive role model whom Sethe never fully knew, is excluded from this […]

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The precise detail of Morrison’s fiction has the ring of truth, as though she were recalling some oddment from an evening’s story session long past in her childhood. For example, she explains that Sixo marks Patsy in order to deceive her master; he “punctured her calf to simulate snakebite so […]

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Temporarily, water freezes into ice firm enough to hold the three women, sliding on one whole pair of skates and one shared pair. Like their tenuous family triad, the happy scene results in slips and mishaps, and then crumbles into unforeseen tears from Sethe. Her solution is the liquid of […]

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In Morrison’s own terms, the controlling theme of the novel is “how women negotiate or mediate between their nurturing compulsion to love the other, the thing that’s bigger or better than they are in their lives — husband, children, work — and the other part, which is the individual separate […]

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For Sethe, birth occurs somewhere on a southern plantation, where her unnamed mother bends into the watery fields among a host of maternal ma’ams and slaves who dance the antelope. Maturity nets Sethe separation and resettlement in Kentucky, where she works in a white woman’s kitchen and nightly rests atop […]

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