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How Does Toni Morrison Present Racism In Beloved

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The Emerald Closet: Racism and the Representation of Violence
A Review of Toni Morrison’s Beloved

Set against the backdrop of the American Civil War, Beloved weaves myth together with the history of the divisive and violent racism of 1873 Ohio. This exquisitely sensitive novel lamented the “sixty million and more” Black Americans who yielded to the claws of painful death, if not for a lifetime of servitude and humiliation. Taking inspiration from the life and legal case of the slave, Margaret Garner, who was known for having killed her own daughter rather than seeing her return to slavery, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison draws to her a marvelous collection of lovelorn souls that scarcely escaped from a slave plantation –ironically named “Sweet Home” – but are persistently haunted by their echoing past. This 1987 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel brings the reader to a spiteful house on Bluestone Road in Cincinnati, Ohio, manned by a recluse family of runaway slaves, who, despite their desperate attempt to dismiss the memories of their bitter past, are pursued by the ghost of the firstborn daughter, who met her untimely death in the hands of her own mother, Sethe. She, on the other hand, had mistaken the cry of the townspeople, “Dearly Beloved,” for her baby’s name, and insisted on inscribing it on the tombstone after a ten-minute sex with the …show more content…

It was used as an allusion to her dehumanizing years as a slave, as if her pain has gotten and established its roots, grows, and lives forever within her—a thing that no man could understand, and might even find abhorrent: “But maybe a man was nothing but a man… They encouraged you to put some weight in their hands and soon as you felt how light and lovely it was, they studied your scars and tribulations, after which they did what he has always done: ran her children out and tore up the

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