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    Beloved (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Beloved (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Beloved (MAXNotes Literature Guides)
    Ebook146 pages1 hour

    Beloved (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

    By Gail Rae

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    About this ebook

    REA's MAXnotes for Toni Morrison's Beloved MAXnotes offer a fresh look at masterpieces of literature, presented in a lively and interesting fashion. Written by literary experts who currently teach the subject, MAXnotes will enhance your understanding and enjoyment of the work. MAXnotes are designed to stimulate independent thought about the literary work by raising various issues and thought-provoking ideas and questions. MAXnotes cover the essentials of what one should know about each work, including an overall summary, character lists, an explanation and discussion of the plot, the work's historical context, illustrations to convey the mood of the work, and a biography of the author. Each chapter is individually summarized and analyzed, and has study questions and answers.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherResearch & Education Association
    Release dateJan 1, 2013
    ISBN9780738673059
    Beloved (MAXNotes Literature Guides)

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      Beloved (MAXNotes Literature Guides) - Gail Rae

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      SECTION ONE

      Introduction

      The Life and Work of Toni Morrison

      Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931, in Lorain, Ohio. Her parents, Ramah (Willis) and George, survived the Great Depression with the aid of government assistance and by sharing with their equally poor black and white neighbors. Her great-grandmother had been a slave and her grandfather was born in slavery, not being freed until he was five, when the Emancipation Proclamation became law.

      Ms. Morrison earned a B.A. in English from Howard University in 1953 and, while a student there, changed her name to Toni. She also joined the Howard Players during her undergraduate years and toured the South, playing to mostly black audiences. Her M.A. was earned in 1955 at Cornell University; her thesis was on the theme of suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf. She moved to Texas Southern University, where she became an instructor of English from 1955 to 1957. There she wrote a play entitled Dreaming Emmett which dealt with the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Ms. Morrison returned to Howard University to be an Instructor of English for the next seven years and began writing. During that time, in 1958, she married a Jamaican architect, Harold Morrison. Two sons were born during this six-year marriage. After divorcing her husband, she took her sons back to Lorain to their grandparents’ home. The next year, she became an editor for the textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse, New York.

      Five years later, in 1970, her first novel, The Bluest Eye, was published and Ms. Morrison took an editorial position at Random House’s New York office, where she eventually became a senior editor. During this time—1971 and 1972—she was also an Associate Professor of English at the State University of New York-Purchase. In 1974, Sula, her second novel, was published and she edited The Black Book, a collection of memorabilia from three hundred years of black history, which contained the Margaret Garner story—the springboard for Beloved. Upon the publishing of The Black Book, Ms. Morrison wrote an article entitled Rediscovering Black History. The following year, Sula was nominated for the National Book Award. For the next two years, she was a visiting lecturer at Yale University. In 1977, her third novel, Song of Solomon, for which she received the National Book Critics’ Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letter Award, was published and quickly became a paperback best seller with 570,000 copies in print. Ms. Morrison was then named Distinguished Writer of 1978 by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Tar Baby, her fourth novel, published in 1981, was on the New York Times best seller list for four months. During this time, Ms. Morrison was on the cover of Newsweek.

      From 1984 to 1989, Ms. Morrison was the Schweitzer Professor of Humanities at the State University of New York-Albany and won numerous honors. In 1986, her play was produced by the Capitol Repertory Company and she won the New York State Governor’s Art Award. The following year, Beloved—which was dedicated to the 60 million who died in slavery—was published and nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics’ Award. In 1986, Ms. Morrison won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction as well as the Robert E Kennedy Award for this fifth novel. In 1989, Ms. Morrison became the Robert F. Goheen Professor of Humanities at Princeton University, where she teaches both creative writing and Afro-American Studies. Jazz, which is her sixth novel, and her non-fiction Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, were published in 1992.

      Toni Morrison has been featured on the Public Broadcasting System’s Writers in America, London Weekend Television’s South Bank Show, and Swiss Television Production’s In Black and White. She was appointed to President Carter’s National Council of the Arts and elected to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Many books of interpretation and criticism have been written about her novels. Her own novels have been translated into German, Spanish, French, Finnish, and Italian and are taught in Afro-American, American Literature, and Women’s Studies courses.

      Historical Background

      In July of 1862, President Lincoln announced the Emancipation Proclamation, freeing all slaves. In 1865, the Civil War between the states, basically fought over the slavery issue, had ended. By 1871, all the states were once again part of the federal government. However, some of the states were slow to accept the now-freed slaves. Although they were free, random violence against them was still commonplace: lynching, rape, beating. Concurrently, blacks were still judging each other through white values, such as monetary worth and uppityness. At the same time, the blacks who had established their own Underground Railroad during slavery continued to help. Most blacks, along with the poor whites with whom they shared the community, worked together assisting without waiting to be asked but as a matter of course, preaching, urging on, and sharing.

      The flashback portions of Beloved take place in Kentucky, a border state during the Civil War, and one which practiced slavery as exemplified in Sweet Home (after schoolteacher comes to take the deceased Mr. Garner’s place) where Sethe was a slave 16 years before the story begins. Kentucky is also the state south of Ohio. The book’s present takes place in Cincinnati, Ohio, Ms. Morrison’s home state (although not her home city) eight years after the end of the Civil War.

      The novel is based upon the Margaret Garner incident that Ms. Morrison read about when she edited The Black Book. In 1855, Mrs. Garner escaped slavery in Kentucky and fled to Cincinnati, Ohio, to live with her mother-in-law, who was a preacher. She brought her four children out of slavery with her. When she realized that a slave catcher had found them, she killed

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