Don't judge by the title. This is not a romance novel. If you were looking for a light read for a cozy evening at home - alas. You won't be able to rest and relax. You will cry. Because this is a scary book.
American writer Toni Morrison's novel "Beloved" tells the story of the most shameful phenomenon in human history - slavery. The life story of one slave, personifying the whole essence of slavery as such.
African-American editor and professor Toni Morisson wrote the novel in the late 1980s. For her work she received the highest award - the Pulitzer Prize. He is a Nobel Prize laureate.
The novel “Beloved” is based on the true story of a black woman, Margaret Garner, who ran away from a slave owner and managed to get to the free state of Ohio.
Sethe, the main character, is also a slave and she runs away to Cincinnati. Soon they find her and want to return her and her children to her owner. The woman sees only one way out - to kill her own young daughter. Years later, a young girl named Beloved comes to Sethe's house. That was the name of the deceased daughter...
Let us note that Toni Morrison's book is based on absolutely real events; it can be considered both documentary and historical. A vivid description of mass slavery being government policy. And this is not at the beginning of the formation of humanity, but some 150 years ago against the backdrop of the development of progress and humanism in all its glory! It is simply impossible to read the book “Beloved” and not be ashamed of the human race!
Against the backdrop of all the horror of slavery, the story tells about the fate of the main character, an ordinary black woman, placed in a terrible position by civilized white people. She is forced to kill her children so as not to give them over to the power of their owners. Mother's love - what is it like from the point of view of a slave? Maybe it is stronger in a woman who has nothing? Have only one treasure in life - children. You can do anything for them.
Suppose that in order to soften the perception of such an acute reality, the author decided to add a mystical note to her work. In the face of the ghost of a girl named Beloved who was killed by her mother. But the reader will immediately understand that this is just an invention of the unfortunate freed black people who, even after the abolition of slavery, continue to live in fear.
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Have you ever had your life ruined? Have you ruined your own life? It doesn't matter. It's important to be able to get out of this.
Toni Morrison, in her book “Beloved,” showed that you can always survive, no matter what darkness life throws you into, and it is important to believe that then the light will come and things will get better.
Morrison can certainly be considered one of the diamonds of American literature of our time. The main themes of her work are slavery, racial issues and African-American identity. Her first work is the book “The Bluest Eyes” about a black teenage girl who dreams of blue eyes and believes that only people with such eyes can rightfully be considered beautiful. Thanks to this book, Toni Morrison (real name Chloe Wofford) went from being an editor of autobiographical novels by famous African-Americans to becoming a writer with her own style, as well as a winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1993).
One of her most famous books is a novel with an incredibly beautiful title “Beloved” - “Beloved”. But underneath the beauty of the cover lies all the rottenness of American society during the time of slavery. The book tells the story of Sethe, a slave woman who gains freedom, and with it the ghosts of her past that follow her to her new “Sweet Home”.
Sethe gave birth to 4 children, of whom three remained - two boys and a girl in Denver. The fourth child was Beloved - her first daughter, the one whose throat Sethe cut so that her daughter would not know what slavery was. It is her spirit that lives in Sweet Home, her spirit that causes Sethe's two sons to run away from the house, her spirit that keeps other people away from the house and then materializes into a young girl named Beloved. Sethe sees her dead daughter in her and begins to completely dissolve in her. The beloved absorbs everyone, with each new day she demands more and more love, sucking out all the vital juices that Sethe so necessary for her real life, with a real daughter and a real opportunity to feel freedom. Having escaped from one slavery, Sethe herself does not notice how she falls into another kind of slavery - her own memories and conscience.
Toni Morrison managed, with the help of fairy tale elements and “magical realism,” to convey all the pain of a mother who lost her child and a woman who went through thorns to new problems, all the pain of a slave experiencing constant physical and moral humiliation.
All pages of the book are saturated with suffering, pain and faith in the best. The heroes of the book, even after the most terrible humiliations that a common man cannot imagine, continue to love life and treat it as the most important thing they have. They believe that “ If you have the opportunity to walk, eat and sleep freely, then life is not over yet and in general it is good enough.”
Life is the greatest value of a person. Unfortunately, some people equate the words “value” with “price”.
Look: the film “Beloved” starring Oprah Winfrey.
Quotes:“To free yourself by running away from your masters is one thing, but to understand that you can control yourself is completely different”; “Why doesn’t her mind reject anything? Why does he absorb everything - poverty, regrets, other people's meanness? Like a gluttonous child, he grabs and puts into his mouth everything he comes across. Well, at least once, can he say: no, thank you, I don’t want any more? Am I full and can’t swallow a bite?”; “Any white man can take you entirely, all of you, along with your soul, if it occurs to him. Not only will he force you to work for him, kill you or mutilate you, but he will dirty your soul. It will get so dirty that you will become disgusted with yourself; you will forget who you were before, and you won’t even be able to remember. And although she, Sethe, and many others have experienced this and overcome it, she will never allow this to happen to her children. The best thing she has is her children. Okay, even if the whites stain her body and soul; but they will not get to the best in her, the most intimate and magical - to that part of her being that has always been pure.”
Toni Morrison
Beloved
There were more than sixty million of you
I will not call my people my people,
and not beloved - beloved
Epistle to the Romans; 9.25
The 124th was filled with anger. The anger and rage of a child. The women who lived in the house knew this, and so did the children. For a long time, all of them, each in their own way, put up with attacks of this anger, but by 1873 Sethe and her daughter Denver were left alone in the house. Baby Suggs, Sethe's mother-in-law and Denver's grandmother, died, and the boys, Howard and Bugler, ran away from home when they were thirteen. Bugler was signaled by the mirror shattering when he looked into it; Howard broke down when he saw the prints of two tiny hands on the freshly baked pie. Neither needed more hints: not another overturned pot and steaming pile of peas on the floor; no crumbs of cookies, which gathered by themselves at the threshold into neat piles. They didn’t even wait for calm - sometimes the house was calm for weeks or even months. No. Both fled - as soon as the house did something against each of them that could no longer be tolerated twice. Two months later, the second brother followed the first brother, and both left in the middle of winter, leaving the women - their grandmother Baby Suggs, their mother Sethe and little sister Denver - alone in the gray and white house on Bluestone Road. At that time, this house didn’t even have a number, because Cincinnati didn’t have time to reach here. In fact, Ohio began to be called a state only some seventy years ago. And so, first one brother, and then the second, put bundles with simple belongings into their hats, picked up their shoes and left the house, which so vividly made them feel their hostility.
Baby Suggs didn't even look up. Lying sick in bed, she heard, of course, her grandchildren leaving, but did not utter a sound. It was strange, she thought, how long it took them to realize that there was no other house like this one on Bluestone Road! She felt as if in a vice - between the vileness of life and the vengeful malice of the dead; she didn’t care whether to live on or leave the world of the living, leave or stay, and she didn’t care much about the flight of two frightened boys from home. The past, like the present, was intolerable; and since she knew that death brings anything but oblivion, she devoted the rest of her strength to thinking about the colors of the rainbow.
- Bring something lilac, if you can find it. Or at least pink...
Sethe tried to please her - she brought rags of lilac and pink and even showed her tongue. Winters in Ohio are especially tough when it comes to multicolor. In the skies there is the same performance in gray tones, and the very sight of the city of Cincinnati is not at all capable of awakening joy. So Sethe and Denver tried to do everything they could and what the house would allow them to do for Baby Suggs. Together they waged a sluggish struggle against the harmful nature of their home; with overturned garbage cans, with slaps on the ass, with disgusting odors coming from God knows where. Because the sources of this malice were known to them as well as the sources of light.
Baby Suggs died shortly after the brothers left, indifferent to their departure and to her own, and a short time later Sethe and Denver decided to end their torment by challenging the intolerable spirit to a duel. Or at least for negotiations. And so, holding hands, mother and daughter shouted loudly:
- Come on out! Come out now, otherwise it will get worse! The sideboard moved slightly away from the wall, but the rest remained in place.
“Grandma Baby must be the one in the way,” Denver said. She was ten, and she couldn't forgive Baby Suggs for dying.
Sethe opened her eyes.
“Hardly,” she objected to her daughter.
- Then why doesn’t it come out?
“You forget how small it is,” Sethe reminded. “She’s not even two years old.” She was too young to understand anything. And she said almost nothing yet.
“Maybe she just doesn’t want to understand,” Denver said.
- May be. But if only she would come out to us, I would explain everything to her.
Sethe released her daughter's hand, and together they moved the sideboard back to the wall. Outside the window, the driver hit the horse with a whip, sending it into a gallop - everyone was trying to quickly pass house number 124.
- She’s small, but she probably has enough strength for witchcraft! – Denver remarked angrily.
Beloved Toni Morrison
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Title: Beloved
About the book "Beloved" by Toni Morrison
In 1987, American writer Toni Morrison published the tragic story “Beloved,” which later became a bestseller and received a prestigious literary award. The book tells about the fate of black slaves in America.
The main character, a black woman named Seti, fled with her children from a slave-owning plantation owner. The hot pursuit caught the slave in the barn. Fearing a return to Sweet Home, Sethi kills her eldest daughter, wanting to leave her free. Thus begins a long history of fears that haunts the black woman all her life.
Further events of the novel “Beloved” take place in a small town in Ohio, where the Network manages to reach. The black woman settled in the house with the remaining children. Not everything is smooth in this house - the ghost of a girl neighbors a family of former slaves.
The influence of the ghost negatively affects the psyche of children and haunts the Internet. The ghost takes on tangible forms, calling itself by the name of the murdered daughter, and continues to terrorize the black woman, leading her to a nervous breakdown. Toni Morrison's other characters try to help the Network and bring it back to reality.
Beloved is an ode to a mother's love, which can take many forms. The history of the Network is mystical, but its roots are hidden in the depths of the connection between a mother and her child, established during pregnancy. The effect is enhanced by the fear of re-slavery, the horror of the return of unfreedom and bullying by the slave owner.
Toni Morrison shows the reader the trauma inflicted on the psyche of former slaves. These people have lost their “I”, it is difficult for them to return to normal life, the image of a merciless slave owner haunts them all their lives. Some characters in Beloved manage to regain their identities, while others are destined to remain lost.
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Quotes from the book "Beloved" by Toni Morrison
The spirit is zealous, but the flesh is weak.
It always hurts when something comes back to life.
There is no tomorrow. Don't delay, do it now.
He acted as if the whole world was a toy for him that he needed to play with to his heart's content.
Before you have time to blink your eye, his face is already completely different - as if he hid his feelings very close, under the skin. It was as if lava was boiling inside.
Your love is too heavy.
- Is it too heavy? Love either exists or it doesn’t. Easy love is not love at all.
When you are a child, everything you own is available and known to your family. Secrets are the privilege of adults.
A man is just a man. But a son is really something!
-...What is fair is not always right.
You can't cure anything without pain.
One of the most painful topics in history is the topic of slavery. And the specific place and time are not so important as the horror of what happened. Writers turn to this topic to remind us of what happened before in many places, and also to draw attention to the value of freedom. Writer Toni Morrison became famous thanks to her novel Beloved, which won the Pulitzer Prize and then the Nobel Prize.
The book presents America in the late 19th century, immediately after the Civil War. The writer tells the story of a black slave, and the novel is based on real events. It conveys a terrible time, shows the crippled fates of many people who were not even considered human. At the same time, there is no concept here that all dark-skinned people are good and white people are cruel. The idea is that people can be different, regardless of skin color. But the central theme is still the theme of slavery; the secondary themes can be called motherhood and the inner world of man. Being in slavery, difficult conditions, cruelty - all this can cause not only the mind, but also the soul of a person to be destroyed.
The main character of the novel is a woman who ran away from her master and dreamed of freeing herself. Sethe fled with the children, and when she was found and wanted to return, she, without doubt, decided that it was better to kill the children than to allow them to live in slavery. She only managed to kill her youngest daughter, but subsequently this act affected her own life and her relationships with the other three children. And one day the ghost of the past reminded of itself. The Beloved, the spirit of her youngest daughter, appeared in her house.
On our website you can download the book “Beloved” by Morrison Tony for free and without registration in fb2, rtf, epub, pdf, txt format, read the book online or buy the book in the online store.