The Effects Of Rape And Sexual Assault In Beloved By Toni Morrison

In the novel The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah, the cities of Carriveau and Paris are transformed from peaceful locations into bloody war zones after the Germans invaded France. Setting is used to emphasize the destructive impact the Nazis had in France during its occupation in World War II.

Christianity was, to the slaves of America, (something with a double meaning). In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Frederick Douglass, the author, argues about how Christianity can mean one thing to a free white man and something completely different to a black slave. The slave owners follow the ‘Christianity of the Land’ while the slaves follow the ‘Christianity of Christ.’ Frederick begins to build his credibility to a, white, northern, audience by including documents from trustworthy writers and by getting into personal experiences through his writing.

Documenting not only the fear that the slaves faced but also the violence of both physical and sexual abuse, the most ghastly account was towards a slave women he was imprisoned with named Patsey. She was a slave who had the misfortune of

Beloved, the novel by African-American writer Toni Morrison is a collection of memories of the characters presented in the novel. Most characters in the novel are living with repressed painful memories and hence they are not able to move ahead in their lives and are somewhere stuck. The novel, in a way, becomes a guide for people with painful memories because it is in a way providing solutions to get rid of those memories and move ahead in life. The novel is divided into three parts; each part becomes a step in the healing ritual of painful repressed memories. The first stage is the Repression of memories. For example, Sethe, throughout the first and the second part of the novel is haunted by the memory of murdering her child. The second step is the painful reconciliation with these memories. This happened when Beloved, the ghost of Sethe’s murdered child comes back in their lives. The third step is the clearing process which takes place in the end of the novel where Sethe tells Paul D about the murder she committed. These three steps not only apply to the individual memory but also to the collective memory. In this novel, the memory of an individual is not just his or her memory; it’s actually the memory of a community that has gone through the same pain, cruelties and humiliation. That is, Sethe’s character represents every black woman who was tortured, raped and whose children were taken away from her.Thus, her character represents the pain that every black woman in

The character Beloved is an anomaly in the story, and is the whole crux of the plot of the

Symbolism is the practice of representing things by symbols, or of investing things with a symbolic meaning or character. In Speak, Laurie Halse Anderson uses literary devices to help the reader better understand Melinda’s personal changes and growth. Trees, lips, and coldness are all symbolically used to represent the changes of Melinda. Throughout the novel, trees play a big part in symbolizing Melinda.

The purpose of symbolism in literature is to represent the turmoil and struggles of the characters which cannot directly conveyed. Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak relies on these as a subtle method of characterization and a way of expressing the themes of the novel. These symbols in the story are plentiful and make parallels to Melinda’s feelings, fears, and character development, such as mirrors, the settings of the closet and art room, and trees.

Morrison 's masterpiece Beloved, is dedicated and refers to the number of blacks who were killed as captives in Africa or on slave ships and, therefore, never made it into slavery. Through non-western eyes, Morrison allows the reader to re-vision and understand African-American history by re-telling history through the lives of former African slaves, because the “violence within the African American community can only be understood in a context in which ... the white power continue[s] to violate African American lives.”( Kader Aki, 1) The novel re-conceptualizes American history and is concerned with historical transmission which continues into the present.

Speak, a novel written by Laurie Halse Anderson, is a memorable story about a girl who overcomes a horrific experience, rape, and with it, injustice. Melinda, the main protagonist, has an emotional journey, and with the help of her art teacher, Mr. Freeman, survives through this excursion. As Mr. Freeman says, “‘Welcome to the journey’” (12). Mr. Freeman assists Melinda, by constantly questioning her emotional being, turning an art project into a pool of her feelings, and forcing Melinda to see the light in her heart. With Mr. Freeman lifting her emotional baggage, Melinda can finally be free and with that, experience happiness once again.

Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is a multiply narrated story of having to come to terms with the past to be able to move forward. Set after the Civil War in 1870s, the novel centers on the experiences of the family of Baby Suggs, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D and on how they try to confront their past with the arrival of Beloved. Two narrative perspectives are main, that of the third-person omniscient and of the third person limited, and there is also a perspective of the first-person. The novel’s narrators shift constantly and most of the times without notifying at all, and these narratives of limited perspectives of different characters help us understand the interiority, the sufferings and memories, of several different characters better and in their diversity.

In Morrison’s reconceptualization of African American history, she attempts to visualise both the physical and psychological impact of the dehumanising process of slavery on the black Americans. According to Trudier Harris: “… ownership and possession are characteristics of slavery. They reflect the monetary exchange involved in that system of dehumanization as well as the psychological control usually attendant upon the physical imprisonment” (Harris, “Escaping Slavery” 330). Along with the right of

The institution of slavery not only brutalizes its victims, but also dehumanizes the practitioners of it. Slavery had warped and twisted the very essence of every person it encountered, from the slaves being subjected to the cruelty and sadism of their masters, to the masters themselves losing their very humanity to such barbaric degrees, some of whom even being previously persons of reputable morality. The Classic slave Narratives provides numerous examples of this, many of which being within the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, and The History of Mary Prince.

In the novel, trees are a prevailing symbol, as it represents the life and growth of the protagonist mental recovery after being raped. The reoccurring use of trees allows readers to understand Melinda feelings beyond the words, as readers are able to visualize her feelings literally. Readers of YA readers use symbolism as a way to understand the mood of a novel; at the beginning of the novel, Melina selects a tree as her yearlong art project, where she is asked make her “object say something, express and emotion, speak to every person who looks at it” (Anderson 11). As struggles to express emotion through her tree, she is equally incompetent with sharing what occurred the night the police was called. Her meager attempts to construct her tree

You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice. I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do. The painful and humiliating memory will haunt me to my dying day. Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others” (Incidents,

Another “educated youth,” Han Shao gong from Hunan, explored the daily lives of the lower orders of society in an unconventional style of literature. Another “educated youth,” Han Shaogong from Hunan, explored the daily lives of the lower orders of society in an unconventional style of literature. It is one that reflects the traditions of folk culture, as represented in his root-denying Homecoming and root-searching Dad Dad Dad and Woman Woman Woman. In these works, Han tries, as he himself puts it, to “solve some of the riddles that determine ethnic development and human subsistence,” while “releasing the hot energy of modern concepts and recasting and re-illuminating the ethnic ego.” After graduating from middle school, Han went to Baxidong, a remote minority ethnic area in Hunan, and