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Toni Morrison Home Beloved Analysis

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The aim of this assignment is to portray the various subjugations faced by Toni Morrison’s characters in her award winning novel and novella Beloved and Home respectively, inorder to depict the voice of the suppressed. While Beloved shows slavery as an outcome of racism, Home portrays the aftermath of war and the ill effects of gendered racism. Morrison wrote Home in the backdrop of the 1950s, where racism prevailed and many medical experiments were conducted on army veterans and Blacks. The novella is narrated through the eyes of the protagonist, Frank Money, who is a Korean War veteran. His sister Ycindra (Cee) and girlfriend Lily are the female characters depicted by Morrison. “Through Money, Home calls us to acknowledge not only America’s …show more content…

The siblings’ dual-witnessing is modelled most clearly in Home’s final chapter when Frank and Cee exhume the body of the man they saw buried as children, rearrange his bones as “they once were in life,” (Morrison 140) enfold his skeleton in a quilt Cee has made, and rebury him beneath a bay tree. In doing so, they symbolically dual-witness their childhood trauma. (Wales) The ‘home’ in Home is not only pertaining to a physical structure but an emotional sphere more specific to the brother-sister relationship that Wales states as: Authors and critics define “home” as both a physical place and a psychic space. While the word commonly denotes a “fixed residence” or “domestic setting”, the concept of “home” extends beyond the material structure of a house into a psycho-emotional space of being. (Wales) Through both these works, Morrison has portrayed the voice of the suppressed and downtrodden Black community, who have been subjugated by their respective oppressors. It depicts the courage and strength that the Blacks have developed through their hardships that started centuries ago, and how they look forward with hope for a better tomorrow where their trials will

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