Summary Toni Morrison Beloved Notes

TONI MORRISON - BELOVED
Monday, 12 April 2021 11:36

INTRODUCTION

- Epigraph: an inscription; a short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book or chapter,
intended to suggest its theme
"I will call them my people,
which were not my people;
and her beloved,
which was not beloved." - Romans 9:25
- Dedication: "Sixty Million and more"
○ Reference to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade; the Holocaust
 Most vast practice of slavery
○ Time when industrialisation boomed in Europe
○ Sugar, tobacco and cotton were traded as well as people

ONE
- First page:
- "124 was spiteful."
○ Immediate suggestion of the people to whom numbers were given to people instead of
names
○ Productive confusion/ambiguity - 124 is a house
○ House has a personality
- "Full of a baby's venom."
○ We do not associate a baby with danger, venomous
- Very short sentences which set up paradoxes; lyricism
- Omniscient narrator
- "The women in the house knew it and so did the children."
○ Absent men
- Use of ;
○ When the 2 brothers leave
○ List of characters is separated
- "lively spite"
○ A house should be inanimate
○ One playful, one dangerous
- Theme of Name
○ interesting names
○ strangeness of naming
- Information:
○ Time
 1873 (present)
□ Just after the end of the American Civil War of 1861-1865
□ War primarily over the status of slavery; North v South states
○ Place
 124 Bluestone Road, Cincinnati, Ohio
□ Non-slave state
□ Ohio river
○ Characters
 Grandmother - Baby Suggs