Beloved context Flashcards
(15 cards)
Margret Garner
She escaped slavery by crossing the frozen Ohio River in 1856 with her children, and committed infanticide when found out that the marshals were looking for her.
Neo-slave Narrative
A neo-slave narrative is a modern fictional work set in the slavery era by contemporary authors or substantially concerned with depicting the experience or the effects of enslavement in the New World.[10] The authors use their imagination, and research in oral histories and existing slave narratives to create such stories. Neo-slave narratives are written by authors whose focus is not the abolition of slavery, but the amelioration of the wounds it has left behind; they seek reconciliation with a past that still haunts the present.
Reconstruction Era ( 1873)
America trying to find their identity (this could be seen in the American Civil war)
Loss of Identity
Toni Morrison changed her own name because her peers had trouble pronouncing her name, so she began to go by a shortened version of Anthony, the name she chose at her Catholic confirmation.
Transatlantic slave trade
Sethe recalls a memory of the middle passage, which is not her own memory, instead a collective memory
10 million African American’s transported between Europe and Asia between the 15th and 19th centuries.
Importance of song- paul D details two-step dance the chain gang juxtaposing the “music” of the iron . The wording creates a cruel irony of the free-expressive nature of dance and music juxtaposes the limitations of the bindings. “They sang it out and beat it up”, as they chain dance over fields and trails, “garbling the words so they could not be understood”
In 1864 due to the North and South divide Harriet Tubman set up theh underground railway used song as a form of call and response to help the enslaved in the south escape to the north
Magical Realism
Surreal, supernatural, dream-like quality
Post-modernism
varying ideologies and interpretations
Temporal distortion
rejects linear
Morrison’s purpose in writing Beloved
- The history of slavery must not be forgotten.
- To ‘fill in the blanks that the traditional slave narrative left’ (The Site of Memory).
- Chronicles the psychological damage of slavery on men.
African archetypes
- Morrison’s work celebrates African archetypes.
- The Great Mother, nommo, the creative and sacred actualisation of nature. Great Mother can kill as well as create
The Great Migration
- Movement of over 300,000 African American from the rural south into Northern cities between 1914 and 1920.
Subversion of sex in the male mind
Paul D, and the raw tone of his sexual memories where “rape seemed
the solitary gift of life”, emphasising the twisted nature of sexual desire due to the traumaof the slave trade. In particular, the use of the dysphemism “rape” emphasises the blurred lines between fantasy and reality due to romanticisation, and the innate sense of the brain to conceal the deep rooted traumas faced to the human body and mind.
- shows trauma as images of sexual desire turn to violence rather than intimacy and normality.
This is further emphasised through the use of phallic imagery when describing the male reaction to Halle and Sethe’s sexual intercourse “it had been hard, hard, hard, sitting there erect as dogs”, with the use of the animalistic undertones, through the simile “erect as dogs” further heightening the twisted viewpoint of sex held by the men, and even a loss of identity through the subhuman undertones Morrison utilises this as part of her metafiction style and genre, in order to break boundaries through the discussion of taboo topics, and emphasise the long-
lasting effects of slavery and boundaries to sex on the human mind and psyche.
Morrison and women
-Morrison giving a voice to African American sisters ‘rescued their sisters from silence’- Claudia Tape.
- Concentrates on an elaboration of female pain. The pain of not knowing one’s children, losing husbands, sexual exploitation.
When was the slavery abolition act?
1833
