DECLARATION

I do hereby declare that the research work presented in

this project entitled “From Slavery to New Identity : A Study of Toni Morrison’s Female
Characters in Beloved “ is original and
CERTIFICATE
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
 ABSTRACT

This dissertation entitled From Slavery to New Identity : A Study of Toni Morrison’s Female
Characters in Beloved , aims at showing the way slavery imposes a harsh system that
pushes slave owners to treat their black slaves like beasts, and imposes on them rules that a
human being cannot bear. Hence, slavery affected slaves psychologically, and forced them to
believe that they had lost their identities under such treatments. In the novel, female
characters are the most affected by this constitution. It made them fear about everything,
especially Sethe. Her past experience traumatized her, it let on her psychological troubles.
The novel itself represents the story of Sethe and her tragic life during slavery. For that
reason, this research work attempts to explore and analyze the social status of slavery in Toni
Morrison’s novel Beloved (1987).The analysis highlights the effects of slavery upon the
female characters. It also points out how slavery contributed in making them believe that their
identity vanished and they have to construct a new one.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
General Introduction
 Toni Morrison, originally named Chloe Ardelia, was born on February 18th, 1931 in
Lorain, Ohio, USA. Morrison was known for her use of the black experience in her works.
The experience that she got from her family is used in her novels. Her family influenced her
development as a writer. She also made a reference to her life through the characters of her
novels, such as the character of Sethe in her novel Beloved, when she spoke about the way
Sethe educates her children alone as the way she did her also. She wrote many novels such
as The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1974) which provided her a nomination for the National
Book Award. In 1977, Morrison won the National Book Critics Circle Award for her book
Song of Solomon. She had also written other works such as Tar Baby (1981), Jazz (1992),
Paradise (1998), and the novel which is considered by most of critics to be her best one
Beloved (1987) which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988.

Toni Morrison’s Beloved is one of the most popular works in African American
literature. It highlights many social problems during the twentieth century such as cultural
identity, injustice, slavery, and motherhood. The core subject of Beloved is slavery and this
research work aims at showing the extent to which the psychological status of each of the
main female characters was affected by slavery.

The present work is done to examine the way identity was destructed by slavery
which was one of the society’s major issues of that period, and how slaves resisted under
such harsh and severe way of living. The novel as a whole is related to life under slavery. It
played a big role in showing the reader the savagery and the harshness that slaves working
on Sweet Home experienced, such as violence, and who were treated as if they were
nonhumans.

It is evident that there were many critics who dealt with Toni Morrison’s Beloved
themes, yet this research paper attempts to demonstrate the way identity is reconstructed
through the female characters under the institution of slavery.

Morrison’s novel has attracted the attention of many writers, journalists, and even
historians, and this is what made them criticize the work. Among them we have,

Harold Bloom in his book "Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Toni Morrison’s
Beloved" who says that Morrison through her novel Beloved said that during slavery’s times
it was up to the slave owners to construct the identities of blacks and whites. Whites are
human beings,but blacks are not. When slaves were beaten by their owners ,those blows

1
leave scars on their bodies, such as the marks left on Sethe’s back.

Shelby Larrick in her article entitled Psychological Criticism of Toni

Morrison’s Beloved argues that the behavior of some of Toni Morrison’s Beloved characters
at the beginning may seem brutal and savage, but when getting deep in their stories and
their past, it is easy to understand that their actions were reactions to the psychological
oppression of the traumas of slavery. Each one of these characters had suffered in his way,
either directly or indirectly, from slavery.

Carmen Gillespie who said in her book "Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the
Clearing" that Beloved’s story is a painful one because it tells many things through its lines. It
speaks about memory and forgetfulness at the same time, also about negation and
recuperation. Through Sethe’s flash-backs one can feel memory, but she wants to forget that
horrible past. So she is both denying and recalling the past.

In addition to the previous critics, Adriana

Zühlke in her book "Toni Morrison’s Novel "Beloved" An Analysis", argues that Beloved is a
novel full of emotions. It includes many feelings such as love, hatred, scare, and affection. All
those emotions are presented through Sethe’s motherly love, a mother is passionate and
loves her children, but she hates slavery and she becomes scared when she thinks that they
will be used as slaves to serve the whites.

In interpreting Toni Morrison’s Beloved the appropriate theory that can be

used is the Psychoanalytic Theory or Freudian Theory. This theory focuses first on the text
itself without taking into consideration the outside influence, by examining characters,
conflicts, dream sequences and symbols occurring in the text that will lead to a better
understand of the work.

Second, the aim of an author will be much clearer when knowing about his life, his
ideas, and the context in which he grew up. This theory contains powerful connotations such
as the son’s desire for his mother. In the novel, Beloved’s return was because of her mother;
she was all the time talking to her, she wants her mother to speak about the past. Beloved’s
desire for her mother made her obsessed by her.

This research work is divided into two chapters. The first chapter examines the
period in which the story takes place, the historical context, the life and achievements of the
Toni Morrison, the summary of the story that will tell the important events that occurred in the
novel, and the character’s description.

2
 The second chapter will deals with the way in which slavery destroys the characters’
psyche by applying the psychoanalytic theory. Then it focuses on the way characters search
for their identities, how the author sees and uses the term of identity in his work, and to
which extent he supports this idea of characters’ searching for their identities.

By the end of this research, the conclusion will state the result of the analysis made
upon the female characters. The conclusion will be a final step which summarizes the aim of
the research.

3
 Chapter One:

A General Overview of

Toni Morrison and Beloved

Introduction

Toni Morrison is one of the most influential African American novelists and
prolific writer of the twentieth century. She deals with various sensitive subjects concerning
the African American community. Beloved is, according to many critiques, her best novel and
this is due to the topics it deals with. The present chapter gives an overview of this novel,
starting from the socio-historical context to its plot. It also deals with the biography of Toni
Morrison, a part that will help us understand the motives and influences of the writer. Finally,
the three main female characters will be described as they are the main interest of this novel.

1.The Historical Context of the Novel

In Beloved, Toni Morrison leads the reader to become more aware of the physical and
psychological disaster that the harsh American system committed upon the African
American people, how blacks were perceived, used and treated by the American
population. The novel is a voice to the denied African American people especially women. It
narrates facts that happened in the past. Morrison makes past events visible for the reader;
she placed them in a place where it can be known and discovered by the reader.

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved the relationship between history and memory is

dramatized. She uses memory to explore and represent the various dimensions of
slave life. By doing so, she seeks to make slavery accessible to readers for whom
slavery is not a memory but a remote historical fact to be ignored, repressed and
forgotten. (ctd in Maschler 3).

As a novelist, Morrison set her fiction in key periods of African American history. She
dedicated her literary career to narrate black experience under slavery. Morrison is revealing
their lives as they were living it, and is telling the effects of racism and enslavement under
the institution of slavery.

In describing Beloved, Carmen Gillespie argues that it is a novel which tells

the conditions, under which both main characters Sethe and Paul D. were living.

4
 Beloved is the story of what happens in the silences of trauma. The novel reveals the
lives of its two main characters, Sethe and Paul. D. Both are former slaves and both
are trying to create lives for themselves in the wake of decimating and pervasive
personal histories. Both are forever marked by the legacy of their individual
experiences with American slavery.

Through time, slavery may have changed and taken new forms but still had the same
principles; it is a kind of using someone’s life for the benefits of other persons. Slavery had
its beginning in 1619, when the first African slaves were brought to the North American
colony of Jamestown, Virginia, to aid in the production of such profits as tobacco.

Between 1800 and 1860, cotton production doubled every 10 years. By the latter year, the
American South was producing two thirds of the world’s supply. At the same time, cotton
exports were worth double the amount of all other goods and crops exported by the United
States.

Slavery was also important to the South’s economy because it was the source to the cotton
gin invention since the demand for this product in Europe was growing. By the mid
nineteenth century, the American westward expansion with the abolition movement, which
was growing in the North, created a debate over slavery, which was a direct cause to the
bloody American Civil War (1861-65).

In the late eighteenth century, the abolitionist movement emerged in the North and the
country began to divide over the issue of slavery between North and South. In 1820, the
Missouri Compromise banned slavery north of the southern boundary of Missouri, which
Southern saw as a threat to the institution of slavery itself. After, in 1857, the Dred Scott
case held that congress did not have the right to ban slavery in states and that slaves were
not citizens. Negroes had no rights of citizenship, and slaves that escaped to Free states
were not free, but remained the property of their owners and must be returned to them. This
decision breathed new life to the floundering abolition movement. Ferrell in her book The
Abolitionist Movement explains why the Abolitionist movement was created. She claims that
this act was a reaction to the violation of slaves’ rights as humans and to say that slavery
should not exist:

The history of the Abolitionist movement in the 1600s-1700s-if such a

movement can be said to have existed- is essentially the history of the
increasing use of slaves in the British North American colonies and the
growing commitment of Quakers to prove that slavery was wrong, that it was a
violation of human brotherhood and of the "Golden Rule"

5
 When Abraham Lincoln, a member of the anti-slavery Republican Party, was elected
to the presidency in 1860, many southerners were convinced that slavery would never be
permitted to expand into new territories acquired by United States, and might ultimately be
abolished. Deborah H. DeFord in her book Slavery in the Americas Life Under Slavery said
that slavery was a serious problem during the presidency of Abraham Lincoln:" In 1860,
Abraham Lincoln won the presidential election with less than 40 percent of the popular vote.
By then, the nation was hopelessly divided, and although the arguments focused on states’
rights, the heart of the problem was slavery" .

According to DeFord Southerners wished that slavery would never know an end because it
was the source of the South American economic well being:

The South had become a society that depended on slavery for its economic
well being. Southerners would not voluntarily end or limit slavery. The
Democratic Party, especially in the South, believed that individual states
possessed the right to decide for themselves whether to be Slave states or
Free states. However, the Republican Party in the North claimed that the
nation must stand united to halt the spread of slavery or fall divided. (94)

Precipitating the Civil War, eleven southern states attempted to secede from the
union, and during the war, president Abraham Lincoln presented the preliminary
Emancipation Proclamation, which stands for freeing the slaves which were in all the areas
of the country.

Furthermore, Abraham Lincoln established an institution in which he gave the access

to blacks to join the United States Army. The United States Colored Troops (USCT) served
on many battlefields, and won many Medals of Honor, and brought victory to the Union in the
war. On December 1865, Eight months after the end of the Civil War, the United States
adopted the Thirteenth Amendment to the constitution, which outlawed the practice of
slavery: "With the end of the Civil War in April 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth
amendment in December, the slaves’ deepest longing became a reality. Slavery came to an
official end in the United States" .

6
2. Plot summary

Beloved begins in 1873 in Cincinnati, Ohio, where Sethe, a former slave, has been living with
her eighteen-year-old daughter Denver. Sethe’s mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, lived with them
until her death eight years earlier. Just before Baby Suggs’s death, Sethe’s two sons,
Howard and Buglar, ran away. Sethe believes they fled because of the malevolent presence
of an abusive ghost that has haunted their house at 124 Bluestone Road for years. Denver,
however, likes the ghost, which everyone believes to be the spirit of her dead sister.
On the day the novel begins, Paul D, whom Sethe has not seen since they worked together
on Mr. Garner’s Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky approximately twenty years earlier,
stops by Sethe’s house. His presence resurrects memories that have lain buried in Sethe’s
mind for almost two decades. From this point on, the story will unfold on two temporal
planes. The present in Cincinnati constitutes one plane, while a series of events that took
place around twenty years earlier, mostly in Kentucky, constitutes the other. This latter plane
is accessed and described through the fragmented flashbacks of the major characters.
Accordingly, we frequently read these flashbacks several times, sometimes from varying
perspectives, with each successive narration of an event adding a little more information to
the previous ones.
From these fragmented memories, the following story begins to emerge: Sethe, the
protagonist, was born in the South to an African mother she never knew. When she is
thirteen, she is sold to the Garners, who own Sweet Home and practice a comparatively
benevolent kind of slavery. There, the other slaves, who are all men, lust after her but never
touch her. Their names are Sixo, Paul D, Paul A, Paul F, and Halle. Sethe chooses to marry
Halle, apparently in part because he has proven generous enough to buy his mother’s
freedom by hiring himself out on the weekends. Together, Sethe and Halle have two sons,
Howard and Buglar, as well as a baby daughter whose name we never learn. When she
leaves Sweet Home, Sethe is also pregnant with a fourth child. After the eventual death of
the proprietor, Mr. Garner, the widowed Mrs. Garner asks her sadistic, vehemently racist
brother-in-law to help her run the farm. He is known to the slaves as schoolteacher, and his
oppressive presence makes life on the plantation even more unbearable than it had been
before. The slaves decide to run.
Schoolteacher and his nephews anticipate the slaves’ escape, however, and capture Paul D
and Sixo. Schoolteacher kills Sixo and brings Paul D back to Sweet Home, where Paul D
sees Sethe for what he believes will be the last time. She is still intent on running, having

7
already sent her children ahead to her mother-in-law Baby Suggs’s house in Cincinnati.
Invigorated by the recent capture, schoolteacher’s nephews seize Sethe in the barn
and violate her, stealing the milk her body is storing for her infant daughter. Unbeknownst to
Sethe, Halle is watching the event from a loft above her, where he lies frozen with horror.
Afterward, Halle goes mad: Paul D sees him sitting by a churn with butter slathered all over
his face. Paul D, meanwhile, is forced to suffer the indignity of wearing an iron bit in his
mouth.
When schoolteacher finds out that Sethe has reported his and his nephews’ misdeeds to
Mrs. Garner, he has her whipped severely, despite the fact that she is pregnant. Swollen and
scarred, Sethe nevertheless runs away, but along the way she collapses from exhaustion in
a forest. A white girl, Amy Denver, finds her and nurses her back to health. When Amy later
helps Sethe deliver her baby in a boat, Sethe names this second daughter Denver after the
girl who helped her. Sethe receives further help from Stamp Paid, who rows her across the
Ohio River to Baby Suggs’s house. Baby Suggs cleans Sethe up before allowing her to see
her three older children.
Sethe spends twenty-eight wonderful days in Cincinnati, where Baby Suggs serves as an
unofficial preacher to the black community. On the last day, however, schoolteacher comes
for Sethe to take her and her children back to Sweet Home. Rather than surrender her
children to a life of dehumanizing slavery, she flees with them to the woodshed and tries to
kill them. Only the third child, her older daughter, dies, her throat having been cut with a
handsaw by Sethe. Sethe later arranges for the baby’s headstone to be carved with the word
“Beloved.” The sheriff takes Sethe and Denver to jail, but a group of white abolitionists, led
by the Bodwins, fights for her release. Sethe returns to the house at 124, where Baby Suggs
has sunk into a deep depression. The community shuns the house, and the family continues
to live in isolation.
Meanwhile, Paul D has endured torturous experiences in a chain gang in Georgia, where he
was sent after trying to kill Brandywine, a slave owner to whom he was sold by
schoolteacher. His traumatic experiences have caused him to lock away his memories,
emotions, and ability to love in the “tin tobacco box” of his heart. One day, a fortuitous
rainstorm allows Paul D and the other chain gang members to escape. He travels northward
by following the blossoming spring flowers. Years later, he ends up on Sethe’s porch in
Cincinnati.
Paul D’s arrival at 124 commences the series of events taking place in the present time
frame. Prior to moving in, Paul D chases the house’s resident ghost away, which makes the

8
already lonely Denver resent him from the start. Sethe and Paul D look forward to a
promising future together, until one day, on their way home from a carnival, they encounter a
strange young woman sleeping near the steps of 124.
Most of the characters believe that the woman—who calls herself Beloved—is the embodied
spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter, and the novel provides a wealth of evidence supporting this
interpretation. Denver develops an obsessive attachment to Beloved, and Beloved’s
attachment to Sethe is equally if not more intense. Paul D and Beloved hate each other, and
Beloved controls Paul D by moving him around the house like a rag doll and by seducing him
against his will.
When Paul D learns the story of Sethe’s “rough choice”—her infanticide—he leaves 124 and
begins sleeping in the basement of the local church. In his absence, Sethe and Beloved’s
relationship becomes more intense and exclusive. Beloved grows increasingly abusive,
manipulative, and parasitic, and Sethe is obsessed with satisfying Beloved’s demands and
making her understand why she murdered her. Worried by the way her mother is wasting
away, Denver leaves the premises of 124 for the first time in twelve years in order to seek
help from Lady Jones, her former teacher. The community provides the family with food and
eventually organizes under the leadership of Ella, a woman who had worked on the
Underground Railroad and helped with Sethe’s escape, in order to exorcise Beloved from
124. When they arrive at Sethe’s house, they see Sethe on the porch with Beloved, who
stands smiling at them, naked and pregnant. Mr. Bodwin, who has come to 124 to take
Denver to her new job, arrives at the house. Mistaking him for schoolteacher, Sethe runs at
Mr. Bodwin with an ice pick. She is restrained, but in the confusion Beloved disappears,
never to return.
Afterward, Paul D comes back to Sethe, who has retreated to Baby Suggs’s bed to die.
Mourning Beloved, Sethe laments, “She was my best thing.” But Paul D replies, “You your
best thing, Sethe.” The novel then ends with a warning that “[t]his is not a story to pass on.”
The town, and even the residents of 124, have forgotten Beloved “[l]ike an unpleasant dream
during a troubling sleep.”

9
3. Characters Description:

The impact of slavery was a cause for the father’s absence in the novel; that’s why
the role of the mother was dominant. In the novel, Morrison presents the house always as
women’s responsibility. Here one can say that Morrison reflects her personal life and
experience through this novel. In Beloved women are oppressed for multiple reasons. The
brutal institution of slavery which stole their rights of womanhood, also being especially a
black woman is a clear reason for oppression, although women tried to prove their existence
by playing their roles at home and out with the society. Sethe, Denver and Beloved are black
women who suffered a lot in their life, and they have special and important roles in the novel
that cannot be ignored.

3.1. Sethe:

An iron-willed, iron-eyed woman, Sethe is haunted not only by the ghost of her dead
daughter but also by the memories of her life as a slave. While she has been scarred by the
physical brutality of schoolteacher's nephews, she seems even more deeply disturbed by her
discovery that most white people view her as nothing more than an animal. She asserts her
humanity through her determination to reach freedom and to give her children a free life. Her
escape from Sweet Home demonstrates the force of her will to overcome impossible
circumstances and foreshadows the desperate measures that she'll take to keep her children
from becoming slaves.

Much of Sethe's internal struggle also derives from her ambiguous relationship with her
mother. Because of the long hours her mother worked, Sethe barely knew her. However,
through Nan she knows that she was the product of a loving union. Of all her mother's
children, Sethe was the only one given a name and allowed to live. The comfort she may
derive from this knowledge is tempered, though, by the suspicion that her mother was trying
to run away when she was caught and hanged. If her mother was indeed trying to escape,
she was abandoning Sethe in the process. This abandonment was twofold, because her
mother not only left Sethe without her only living relative, but she also forced Sethe to face
the horrors of slavery on her own.

10
Her mother's abandonment affected Sethe deeply and helps explain the choices she makes
as a mother. Notice Sethe's resolve not to do the same thing to her children. She refuses to
leave them without a mother when they've gone ahead to Ohio, and she risks her own life to
reach them. When faced with the reality that her children may be sent back into slavery,
Sethe chooses to free them through death rather than allow them to encounter even a
portion of her past experiences. In Sethe's mind, killing her children to save them from
slavery is the ultimate expression of a mother's love.

3.2. Beloved:

Some debate exists over the identity of Beloved. While some critics claim that she is the
spirit of Sethe's murdered daughter, others argue that she is a human woman who is
mentally unstable. The most common interpretation of the Beloved character, however, is
that she is the spirit of Sethe's dead child and, as Denver notes, "something more." That
something more is a collective spirit of all the unnamed slaves who were torn from their
homes in Africa and brought to America in the cramped and unsanitary holds of slave ships.
You can find evidence for this interpretation in Beloved's stream of consciousness narrative
in Chapter 22. In this chapter, Beloved remembers crouching in a hot place where people
are crowded together and dying of thirst.

Because Sethe's mother came from Africa, the experience that Beloved remembers is also
Sethe's mother's experience. In a sense, Beloved is not only Sethe's daughter but her
mother as well. Because Beloved is supernatural and represents the spirit of multiple people,
Morrison doesn't develop her character as an individual. Beloved acts as a force rather than
as a person, compelling Sethe, Denver, and Paul D to behave in certain ways. Beloved
defines herself through Sethe's experiences and actions, and in the beginning, she acts as a
somewhat positive force, helping Sethe face the past by repeatedly asking her to tell stories
about her life. In the end, however, Beloved's need becomes overwhelming and her
attachment to Sethe becomes destructive.

Notice that Morrison dedicates the book to "sixty Million and more," an estimated number of
people who died in slavery. Beloved represents Sethe's unnamed child but also the
unnamed masses that died and were forgotten. With this book, Morrison states that they are
beloved as well.

11
3.3. Denver :
Denver experiences the most positive personal growth in Beloved and represents the African
American hope for the future. Sethe comments that Denver is a charmed child, and indeed
Denver seems to survive impossible circumstances. However, physical survival is not
enough. Denver displays intelligence and promise as a child, but her innocence is destroyed
when she discovers what Sethe did to her sister and planned to do to her as well.

With the loss of her brothers and grandmother, Denver becomes increasingly isolated and
self-centered. Even as a young adult, her attitude is still very childlike; for instance, she
behaves rudely when Paul D arrives and wants only to hear stories about herself. Denver's
initial immaturity demonstrates how Sethe's inability to escape her past has also trapped her
daughters. One daughter, Beloved, is dead and remains forever a child haunting their house,
and the other daughter, Denver, lives as a child, never venturing beyond her own yard.

Beloved's arrival at 124 marks the beginning of Denver's transformation. She finally has
someone to devote herself to — someone to love. Note how Denver becomes industrious
after Beloved arrives, whereas before she was lazy. As Beloved gradually takes over the
house and weakens Sethe, Denver recognizes that the family's survival rests upon her
shoulders. Denver is finally able to step out of Sethe's world into the outside world and begin
her own life. By the end of the novel, Denver is a mature young woman who has become a
part of a larger community and who appears to have a future of love and family ahead of her.

12
Conclusion:

The era during which the story of the novel takes place has greatly affected Toni
Morrison. She lived those times through what her grandparents told her. The narratives she
has been told were part of her heritage and the source of influence for her. One can say that
slavery is one of the major topics that African American literature deals with. Beloved is a
story that offers hints and images about life during and after slavery. Furthermore, its main
female characters namely: Sethe, Beloved and Denver represent different aspects of the
novel that are primal suffer from slavery, guilt incarnated in a mysterious person and finally
second-hand experience of slavery through mother-daughter relationship. This connection to
slavery creates a psychological impact upon them, and that is what formed their
personalities. In the coming chapter a psychoanalytic study will be done to understand more
how the female characters were affected by slavery and what consequences did it left on
them.

13
 Chapter Two:

Female Characters in Beloved and

their Quest for Identity

Introduction

The era where and when the novel was written, the writer’s biography and the description of
the characters are elements that one cannot omit while analyzing a novel. The description of
the female characters is not sufficient to understand their attitude toward what they are
living. So the present chapter is a psychological study of the characters of Sethe, Beloved
and Denver and the way they were affected by the legacy of slavery.

2.1. Sethe

The novel presents the emotional effects of enslavement, but at the same time it shows the
consequences of slavery on the psyche of the characters, mainly Sethe. As Elizabeth Ann
Beaulieu states in her book The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia:"Beloved, as it depicts the
emotional costs of enslavement, shows the psychic consequences of the slave owner’s
denial of the slave’s status as a human subject". Through Beloved one can deduce that
slavery seriously hurt slaves’ feelings and emotions. Slaves were treated like beasts or worst
as things that slave owners can buy and sell as they want. This was hurting for the slaves,
knowing that they lost their identity.

From all the slaves in the novel Sethe is the most influenced one by the past, she
caused pain to herself and to the ones who surround her. Sethe’s life is a big struggle; in the
past she was struggling against slavery, now she is struggling against the society, which
looks at her as a savage mother and accuses her of murder.

But the struggle that hurts her the most is the one with herself. Her mind calls to the
memory of her dead baby, though she knows that she killed her for her own sake. In the
book So Black and Blue: Ralph Ellison and the Occasion of Criticism, Kenneth W. Warren
states; "… a mother could cut the throat of one of her children in an attempt to kill them all to
avoid having them returned to slavery"(79). All this gives to Sethe an instable personality.
The external environment influences her personality; she is no more a slave but what she
lived is kept in her mind. She is still living in her memories, each time she reflects her
present life to the previous one.

2.1.1 Sethe’s Relationship with her Children

Sethe is deeply devoted to her children; she accepts them as a part of herself: "… Sethe
began to talk, explain, describe how much she had suffered, been through, for her children,
waving away flies in grape arbors, crawling on her knees to a lean-to". This former slave
woman is an example of a revolutionary mother, who murders one of her four children to

14
avoid her physical and emotional unpleasant of a life spent under slavery; "While Sethe, who
is extremely invested in motherhood, claims her position as subject in the discourse of the
good mother, she also treats her children as part of herself, not as separate, and thus makes
life and death decisions for them" (ctd in Beaulieu 37).

Sethe is given the role to speak about the past. She is speaking about the act she
commits when she tries to cut the throats of her daughter. Bhaskar A.Shukla argues that;
"Sethe eventually confronts the memory of her daughter’s death". That hurts her but she had
no choice, for her that was the best and the only way to protect her baby. Sethe was sure
that if her daughter is taken back to slavery, she will suffer like her mother. She will die under
the harsh rules of slavery or she will be killed by the masters; "if I hadn’t killed her she would
have died and that is something I could not bear happen to her". Sethe’s experience of
slavery was the cause that encouraged her to murder her daughter. She knows that pity
doesn’t exist in the hearts of the masters. She declares that even though she regrets what
she did to her daughter, she preferred that rather giving her to slave owners; "I couldn’t let all
that go back to where it was, and I couldn’t let her nor any of em live under schoolteacher".
Her act of killing can be understood as Sethe’s excessive love for her children. Adriana
Zühlke in her book Toni Morrison’s Novel "Beloved" An Analysis states: "Sethe, the
protagonist of Beloved fits into that scheme: she is a woman, she is a slave, she is black.
These are the three circumstances which determines and nearly destroy her life. But there is
still another fact, which determines her life-her motherhood". As a comment, one can say
that it is true that Sethe have psychological troubles because of her past as a black woman
slave, but the most powerful force which pushes her to do so with her daughter is her
maternal instincts.

Her act can also be justified by her life during slavery «It ain’t my job to know what’s
worse. It’s my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did
that» . She remembers all what she lived, and she imagines what if her children experienced
that.

Sethe never experiences her mother’s love "My woman? You mean my mother? If she did, I
don’t remember. I didn’t see her but few times out in the fields and once when she was
working indigo". So this can explain her attachment to her children. She maybe is trying to
do with her She wants to protect them.

The relationship between son and mother is clearly seen in the novel. Zita Rarastesa states
in her book Love and Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: "For a while, her position as a
mother made her lose her individuality. It meant that she only considered herself a mother

15
 and extended much energy to fit in the role of mother for her children, especially for
the daughter she killed"(chapter three). Sethe is so close to her daughters, mostly Beloved,
she wants to get back all the lost time when Beloved was far from her. Sethe’s regrets about
her murdered daughter pushes her to believe that this woman who came to her home is her
daughter, so she offers all her life and time to Beloved, just to serve her whenever she
wants; "We’ll smell them together, Beloved. Beloved. Because you mine and I have to show
you these things, and teach you what a mother should".She killed her daughter, but she is so
obsessed by the returned ghost. Later on she was persuaded that it is her dead daughter
who came back and now haunts the house. Sethe’s relation with Beloved is a deep one. Zita
Rarastesa states: "The relationship between Sethe and Beloved is not simply a mother-
daughter relationship, but it is the relationship between Sethe’s present and past"(chapter
three).

Beloved made Sethe remember always the past and live it in the present. Shelby
Larrick explains that: "Sethe brings Beloved into her home, believing she is the daughter
killed out of love and protection so many years before. Beloved becomes a haunting figure
that feeds off of the lives of those around her"

The basic element to form a strong personality is the family, but Sethe didn’t have a
family; she didn’t even saw her mother; "By the time I woke up in the morning, she was in
line. If the moon was bright they worked by its light. Sunday she slept like a stick. She must
of nursed me two or three weeks—that’s the way the others did". Sethe’s miseries during her
enslavement formed her troubled personality.

A mother is supposed to love and take care of her children. The maternal instincts
create a very strong force beside Sethe. Johanna Wising wrote an article entitled
Motherhood and the Heritage of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Novels Sula and Beloved in
which she speaks about Sethe and says: "Sethe is a woman of tremendous, inner strength
who has survived the brutality which was a common aspect of slavery. As a result of having
experienced the evils of slavery her greatest fear is that her children will suffer this as well".

Sethe’s strange and instable acting up reflects her psychological distress. Her
conscious experience in the past controls her present life, she could not forget it; "She
repressed the memory of the attack, causing her to never fully move on with her life, but live,
instead, constantly trying to subdue the memories that threaten to haunt her every
day"(Larrick2). She is so scared of slave holders, because she knows that if they find her
they will take her back to slavery. She got the trauma because of what she lived, and she

16
 doesn’t want to experience that anymore. A child is supposed to have a happy
infancy, but Sethe spent her childhood in slavery.

It is true that being a slave for Sethe is hurting because she suffered much, but it
wasn’t an obstacle for her to make a new beginning. She became much stronger: she is able
to confront anything.

Her relation with Denver was so close, because she is the only one who stayed with
her. She tells her something about her past "You never told me what happened. Just that
they whipped you and you run off, pregnant. With me".Denver had always been alone: her
mother relived her past for herself. Her mother’s decisions caused her solitude. "Sethe’s
daughter, Denver, also suffers because of Sethe’s decisions. Denver has always been alone
in the world, her older brothers having run away, and Beloved being killed at such a young
age"..(Larrick 3)

2.1.2. Sethe’s Relationship with Men

Sethe’s relationship with her husband Halle is strong because they

loved each other when they were at sweet Home, but now she hates him because he was

absent when she needed him, because if he was by her side, those horrors that Sethe lived

wouldn’t happen.

She considers her husband the only responsible for her act of killing her daughter
and for her two boys running out from home. She was alone with no protection neither from
her family nor from her husband. As Tiya Miles states: "Sethe learns later that her husband,
who disappeared, had witnessed her humiliation and could not survive the fact of it"(62). But
she was proud of what she did to protect her children "I did it. I got us all without Halle
too"(Morrison 115).

Contrary to Halle, she loved Paul. D. They experienced slavery together, so they
know many things about each other; "Almost from the moment of Paul D’s arrival, Denver is
threatened by his relationship with her mother and by the memories that they share but she
does not"(Gillespie 20). Sethe was very happy when Paul. D told her that he wants to have a
baby with her; "I want you pregnant, Sethe. Would you do that for me? Now she was
laughing and so was he"(Morrison 92). One can say that Paul. D appeared at the moment
when Sethe needed someone to share her pain with.

17
2.1.3. Sethe’s Quest for identity

The idea of having a home can be considered as a resolution for quest for identity.
The humiliation and hardships the blacks suffered have left them with psychic and
bodily impacts. Black community, especially black women have greatly suffered from
slavery. For Morrison, to recover from slavery means to recover the home that has been
unfortunately lost. In Beloved home is to say the black female body. Due to the legacy of
slavery, which is interwoven throughout the whole story, emphasis on the body reveals that
the female body itself becomes the home. Sethe’s body full of scars is unsuitable to live in
because it is not a place where identity can be recognized in a positive manner. Due to the
heinousness of life her body remains crippled and thus her identity remains wounded. Taking
place in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1873, Sethe, the main female protagonist, after escaping from
Kentucky plantation, attempts to kill her children to prevent them from being put into slavery.
She succeeds in murdering only one of her four children, an 18-month-old “the crawling-
already? Girl” as she puts it .The cruelty that led Sethe to commit this act of murder can be
understood by two heart-stopping anecdotes in her life. The first incident takes place early in
her life when Sethe is put on the animal side of the list of features according to
Schoolteacher’s education while teaching his nephews; she overhears the lesson, when he
draws a thick line between an animal and a human being. To provide his students with more
obvious example, he classifies her as a representative of the animal. After this humiliation,
Sethe begins to trust in the words of Baby Suggs, who acts as a mother figure for her: “there
is no bad luck in the world but whitewolks”. Another incident takes place much later in
Sethe’s life when, she is pregnant with Denver. Sethe’s journey of suffering seems to be
never-ending. Another indication of the terrible violence practised on slaves is shown in the
moment when Schoolteacher’s nephews beat her while pregnant to the point that they injure
her so badly that “her back skin had been dead for years” They held her and sucked her
breasts. The fact that “they took her milk” by force is so traumatising for Sethe as well as for
husband Halle, who is a witness to what happens but is unable to do anything and since he
cannot protect her, he starts to feel emasculated, and therefore abandons her. She is robbed
of her breast milk in a very animalistic fashion. Her milk, the substance that would sustain
her child’s life, is the one thing that truly belongs to her, but when the white boys take it from
her they diminished her worth as a woman, a mother, and a human being. Consequently, as
indicated earlier, feeding white boys with Sethe’s own milk over feeding her own child is so
brutal for her that she is even deprived in the role of being a mother. She is humiliated to the
position of a breeder because she is used like an animal for feeding a human being. To
Sethe’s

18
disappointment, even Paul D is not able to reconcile with her committing so horrific act of
murder when he says: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four” (Beloved 194). This statement is
even more humiliating for Sethe because what Paul D implies here is the fact that Sethe is a
human being, not a beast. Sethe perceives Paul D’s words as the words expressed by the
white people. Paul D is simply unable to understand the complexity of Sethe’s actions and
believes that she should have found another way. Sethe, who desperately hopes for Paul
D’s support in her suffering, received it neither from the black community, nor from Paul D.
Therefore, when speaking about Sethe’s quest for identity, it should be emphasized that “as
a direct result of enslavement, every slave created his/her identity based on the definition
provided by white people”. All peoples are struggling to blast a way through the industrial
monopoly of races and nations, but the Negro as a whole has failed to grasp its true
significance and seem to delight in filling only that place created for him by the white
man. Sethe’s isolation among the four walls of 124 Bluestone Road can be understood as a
place of redemption where to some extent she is able to define her identity. The house
becomes her refuge after being condemned by the society for slaying her own daughter. She
limits her life to the premises of the house and is able to see a way to search for her true
identity. Sethe constantly unifies her identity with that of her child. Sethe unintentionally
names Beloved after herself. When the priest at her child’s funeral addresses the living
“Dearly Beloved” Sethe believes that the Reverend refers to her dead daughter. Rather than
engraving her child’s name on her tombstone, Sethe lets engrave “Beloved.” This proves
that Sethe conflates her identity with Beloved. Since Sethe feels devaluated and humiliated
by her experience as a slave, she thus puts her energy into loving her children. Her own
identity is clearly defined in terms of motherhood. Sethe regards her children as “the best
thing she was, was her children” .Beloved’s arrival at 124 Bluestone as a manifestation of
the dead daughter, reveals memories which helps Sethe understand her past and thus
herself. With the arrival of Beloved, Sethe’s wounds caused by slavery are open again.
Beloved can be seen as Sethe’s personal past and at the same time as her repressed
memories. When Sethe finally learns to cope with her past memories, she comes to
understand fully and objectively her past and herself. Beloved’s role in formulation of Sethe’s
identity is absolutely crucial in the novel. Beloved is not only the ghost of Sethe’s killed
daughter, but also a powerful symbol of the link between the present and the past. Sethe’s
identity is formulated with the connection to her past which she obtains through the ghost of
Beloved. Beloved is thus also understood as a symbol of pain Sethe has experienced in
slavery. Sethe is emotionally prepared to start a new life, and feels the emergence of
a family after she ice skates along with her two daughters. The shadow of walking hand
in hand gives her a chance at having a life again. Indeed, Beloved stands here as a key
element in the construction of Sethe’s quest for identity.

19
2.2. Denver:

It is evident that Denver did not live during slavery’s period. But she
experienced it through the eyes of her mother. She hates slavery; "Denver don’t like for me
to talk about it. She hates anything about Sweet Home except how she was born"(Morrison
144). The trauma that Sethe endured in the past is transmitted to her daughter Denver,
through the psychological status of her mother. Silvia Castro-Borrego states; "Denver’s
storytelling, overlapping with memory, is desire-ridden. The fleshing out of her mother’s story
nurses Beloved’s interest; alternatively, it endows Denver with a history and ability to
connect to the other“.

2.2.1. Denver’s Solitude:

After her grandmother’s death and her brothers running away, Denver stood alone.
Even children of the community refused to play with her. This environment caused her a
psychological harm; she suffered from loneliness; "Because their house is haunted by the
spirit of Beloved, before she returns, no children have ever dared to seek closeness with
Denver. Such solitude can cause severe psychological damage, and Denver struggles to
find a sense of meaning and purpose in her life"(Larrick 3).She wanted to go outside but she
was scared of slavery, of what can happen to her:

I need to know what that thing might be, but I don’t want to. Whatever it is, it
comes from outside this house, outside the yard, and it can come right on in the yard if it
wants to. So I never leave this house and I watch over the yard, so it can’t happen again and
my mother won’t have to kill me too. (Morrison 145)

All what Denver fears is the return of the past. She thinks that if she went out, the
slave catchers would come and will try to take her. Denver thought that her mother would kill
her just to keep her far from slavery.

Denver takes Beloved’s return as a pleasing event. Carmen Gillespie states; in her
"Since she is so lonely after her grandmother, Baby Suggs, dies and her brothers run away,

20
 Denver actually enjoys the company of the ghost who haunts the house". All what
Denver thought about was that, now since Beloved is there she will never feel alone again

2.2.2. Sisterhood:

Denver was very lonely that the coming of Beloved made her so happy "Beloved
looked at the sweet bread in Denver’s hands and Denver held it out to her. She smiled then
and Denver’s heart stopped bouncing and sat down—relieved and easeful like a traveler
who had made it home".

One can say that Beloved’s arrival at Sethe’s home is a gift to Denver. She feels
that she will be able to build new relations. And maybe it’s time for her to get out of her
solitude and discover the outside world. "Beloved’s arrival serves as test of Denver’s worth
and her ability to connect with another"(Larrick 3).

One can notice that the coming of Beloved had an influence upon Denver’s
attitude, but at the same time it isolated her from her mother. Sethe and Beloved share the
same past, in which Denver was not a part of. Rebecca Hope Ferguson in her book entitled
Rewriting Black Identities: Transition and Exchange in the Novels of Toni Morrison states:

The intensity that characterizes the relationship between Denver and

Beloved, then lies in a shared need and a mutual feeding-in Denver’s desire to know about
the place Beloved came from, and of course to have a companion, and in Beloved’s desire
to find out from Denver about the shape of things in the world and the history of the living .

Both Denver and Beloved need each other. Denver needs her to be with her since
she has always been alone. Beloved needs her to know more about the earthly life, since
she is not a normal person.

Denver loves Beloved and enjoys her friendship, but at the same time she is
frightened of what Beloved can do to her mother; "Walking toward the stream, beyond her
green bush house, she let herself wonder what if Beloved really decided to choke her
mother".

21
2.2.3. Denver’s Quest for Identity:

Denver had never gone outside the house. She was obsessed by the idea that all
the community’s people hate them and do not want them there. She was also affected by the
idea that her mother will kill her if she went out and the slave catchers came to take her;
"Because their house is haunted by the spirit of Beloved, before she returns, no children
have ever dared to seek closeness with Denver"(Larrick 3).

Denver did not have an identity. She was all the time at home, no friends, no family
rather than her mother who was most of the time silent. By the end of the novel, Denver
decided to go out and ask for help; "Denver knew it was on her. She would have to leave the
yard; step off the edge of the world, leave the two behind and go ask somebody for help" .

She didn’t want to wait anymore. She felt that it was time for her to start her own way in
protecting her mother; "Waiting for me. Tired from her long journey back. Ready to be taken
care of; ready for me to protect her. This time I have to keep my mother away from her.
That’s hard, but I have to. It’s all on me". Denver wanted to make a new beginning, starting
from keeping her mother away from danger. It is clear that she wants to make a new starting
and to build a new identity far from fear and loneliness "She ventures out into the world and
learns to get along and communicate with her community. She becomes a more confident
and strong woman"(Gillespie 38). One can argue that Denver created her identity through
strengthening her own personality. She gained confidence and this helped in building her
individuality.

2.3. Beloved:

Beloved is the mysterious character in the novel. She is not only the past and
memories of Sethe, but also the spirits of all the dead slaves; "Beloved becomes more than
just a repressed memory, but also a representation for the entire community"(Larrick 4).
Beloved represent all the African Americans dead during slavery.

Beloved’s return can be understood as the need for taking revenge.

Caroline Rody claims that; "In Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) a murdered baby girl returns
from death in passionate longing for the ex-slave mother who killed her, and in the ensuing
drama nearly strangles her to death". One can view that Beloved couldn’t bear what her
mother did to her. She wanted to drive her up to death.

22
 Beloved return was to take revenge from Sethe, she wanted to make her suffer; "She
is the one. She is the one I need. You can go but she is the one I have to have. Her eyes
stretched to the limits, black as the all night sky" (54). One can deduce that the one and only
objective of Beloved’s coming was to take Sethe with her: she wanted her dead.

2.3.1. Beloved Representing Past and Present:

Beloved couldn’t accept the idea that she is dead. She wished that she is still alive,
and to live with her mother. In her book Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic
Imagination Kathleen Marks states; "Beloved wants to be kept alive, but Paul. D’s protective
use of the lard can thwarts her". Beloved was obsessed with her mother. She was all the
time trying to spend all her time with her. Beloved was a tiny baby when her mother killed
her, but she still remembers her. It is understandable that Beloved couldn’t forgive her
mother.

Beloved know things about Sethe. She knows many secrets about her; "Beloved
begins to hum a song that only Sethe’s children know"(Marks 93). Beloved lives in the
present with them but knows things which happened in the past:

"I made that song up," said Sethe. "I made it up and sang it to my children.

Nobody knows that song but me and my children"

Beloved turned to look at Sethe. "I know it," she said. (Morrison 123)

According to these quotes it seems that the personality of Beloved is really ambiguous and
mysterious. She lived in the past and she is living in the present.

Beloved remembered many things Sethe did; "She went there. She was getting ready
to smile at me and when she saw the dead people pushed into the sea she went also and
left me there with no face or hers. Sethe is the face I found and lost in the water under the
bridge"(Morrison 151). One can say that her existing in different places and different
moments is the proof that she is Sethe’s baby girl who came back home.

Beloved’s familiarity of the past makes Sethe more aware about whom she is;
"And so Beloved agitates memory, explicitly in Sethe, from whom she seeks, even while still
a stranger, stories from Sethe’s past"(Bloom’s 17). One can argue that it is evident that
Beloved is Sethe’s dead daughter. She was present in many events in the past.

23
 2.3.2. Beloved’s Quest of Identity:

Beloved lost her life and identity when her mother cut her throat. Pamela B. June
claims that; "Most obviously, Beloved’s scar on her neck reveals her identity as the daughter
murdered by Sethe"(24). One can argue that Beloved lost her identity when her mother gave
up on her. But she regained it now since she is back to life even it is just as a ghost.

For Sethe Beloved had never died, she believed that she was always with her. She
gave her an identity through her thoughts; Beloved had always been alive in the memories
of her mother; "The "click" is something recalled because Sethe had already pre-created
Beloved as well as her place in the world, and only now when she no longer has even to
speak words can the join truly begin"(Marks 93). One can view that Sethe was the
responsible of Beloved coming back to life. It is understandable that Beloved felt her mother
accusing herself because she killed her daughter. Also she knew that her mother missed
her, so she decided to come back.

Through her return Beloved is manifesting her identity and her existence; "Beloved’s
return first as a spirit and then as a body indicates the continuing physical presence of
historical wounds, but it also emphasizes the body’s role in identity and recognition"(June
30). One can understand that Beloved was not satisfied by her spiritual presence: she
wanted to regain her identity. And to do so she came back as a body.

Conclusion:

Slavery’s horrors had a psychological impact upon the female characters of the novel. One
can say that Sethe’s mental troubles came from her past. Sethe had psychological troubles
due to her life in slavery. She also hurt Denver’s psyche by letting her imagine how slavery
hurts. But for Beloved it is not the same. She experienced the terrors of slavery by herself,
and the result was that she lost her life. The psychological damage of the female characters
made them search for their identity so this quest for identity will let them recognize their
status as human beings.

24
General Conclusion
 In Beloved Toni Morrison employs narrative expressions of the body life, of the time
and memory through a feminine notion. Sethe is narrating her life and the life of other blacks
who experienced slavery with her. In fact she is telling how their bodies survived the harsh
conditions of slavery. In Beloved, Morrison tends to give a voice to the black history, the
history denied by the whites, because it shows the savagery of the slave owners, and the
terrifying conditions that surrounded the slaves. She recreated the past to keep the reader
remember what happened to African Americans.

The present work has shown to the reader what African Americans endured in an
institutionalized slave system. By focusing on the dehumanizing effect of slavery we were
able to shed light on the sufferings of slaves and how they managed to resist such kind of
life. Each one of the major female characters had been touched by the effects of that
traumatic way of living under such conditions.

Sethe committed a crime when murdering her older daughter. Her life as a slave
influenced her psychologically. She was tortured, raped and mistreated. As a consequence
she has mental troubles. Her experience as a slave made her fear that her children will have
the same fate.

Beloved as Sethe’s killed daughter lost both her life and her mother. She is
representing the consequences of slavery. Though she was not a slave, she lost her life
because of slavery. One can say that she experienced slavery indirectly.

Denver also is suffering from the effects of that horrible past. She does not have any
relation with her community because of her mother’s act of murdering her daughter. She is
living alone far from society in a dark world that was haunted by the ghost of her sister. Her
behavior is strange, as she is isolated from the outside world and created her own world only
with her ghost sister as a companion. She is living the effects of slavery through her mother.

Hence, one can argue that the female psyche in this novel is affected in a negative way by
slavery, it destroyed their souls and their identities. For Sethe, slavery forced her to feel like
she is seen like a beast. The mistreatment she had from the schoolteacher made her think
that even others believed in her dehumanization.

The novel shows us what happened to Sethe, her family and other slaves working on
the plantation. Sethe was mistreated and raped. Afterward she tried to escape from the
plantation. As a result of her miserable life, she killed her baby and attempted to kill the rest
of her children. Her husband went mad when he saw what happened to his wife and he
could do nothing to protect and save her.

25
 In the novel, even though slaves became free, they had never forgotten about their
horrific past. They are still living in the past through their traumatic memories. They have
even the feeling that they have lost their identities, Sethe’s past full of cruelty shapes her life
to the extent she is not able to recover her identity and thus remains wounded. The slave
holders made their victims such as Sethe feel that they lost their identities through their
harsh treatment. So later on each one of the female characters tends to quest for her
identity, and each one of them did that in her own way.

Sethe considers her children as her identity. She believes that since she could
protect them from becoming slaves, she is seen by the others as a human, who can feel and
love, also as a protective mother who care for the well being of her children.

For Beloved, she wants to regain her identity through her coming back to life.
Slavery made her lose her life as well as her identity. So she thought that with her return to
life she is going to have an identity.

Denver’s quest for identity is different. She thinks that since she is living with just her
mother and without having any contact with the outside world, she cannot form her identity.
Therefore, she feels that she acquired her identity when she succeeded to get free from her

solitude and make herself a part of her community, where she feels like she is free and
does not depend on her mother’s help. Denver creates her own personality and identity.

Toni Morrison’s skillful writing has vividly depicted the horror of slavery and its
consequences on female characters. One can say that it is very obvious in the novel that
slavery threatens the psychology and spiritual world of individuals especially Sethe’s one,
and causes horrific and brutal consequences.

26
 Works Cited

1) Primary sources:

Morrison, Toni. Beloved (1987). Bejaia: Talantikit, 2010. Print

2) Secondary sources:

Books:

Beaulieu, Elizabeth A. The Toni Morrison Encyclopedia. Westport, Conn: Greenwood

Press, 2003. Web.

Bhandari, Sumedha. Toni Morrison’s Art. A Humanistic Exploration of the Bluest Eye and
Beloved.Anchor Academic Publishing, 2017. Web.

Bloom, Harold. Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Toni Morrison's Beloved. New York:
Bloom's Literary Criticism, 2009. Print.

Bruce, Dickson D. The Origins of African American literature 1680-

1865.Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001. Web.

Castro-Borrego, Silvia. The Search for Wholeness and Diaspora Literacy in Contemporary
African American Literature. Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2011. Web.

Chakravarty, Joya. Indian writing in English : perspectives. New Delhi: Atlantic Publishers &
Distributors, 2003. Web.

Ciment, James. Atlas of African-American History. New York: Facts On File, 2007. Print.

DeFord, Deborah H., and Philip Schwarz. Life Under Slavery. New York: Chelsea House
Pub, 2006. Web.

Drescher, Seymour. Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery. Cambridge New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009. Web.

Eckard, Paula G. Maternal Body and Voice in Toni Morrison, Bobbie Ann Mason, and Lee
Smith. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2002. Web.

Gillespie, Carmen. Critical companion to Toni Morrison: A Literary Reference to herLife and
Work. New York: Facts On File, 2008. Print.

27
Toni Morrison: Forty Years in the Clearing. New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2012. Web.

Graham, Maryemma, and Jerry W. Ward. The Cambridge History of African American
Literature. Cambridge, U.K. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011. Web.

Hillstrom, Kevin, Laurie C. Hillstrom, and Lawrence W. Baker. American Civil War. Detroit:
UXL, 2000. Web.

Hornsby, Alton. A Companion to African American History. Malden, Mass: Blackwell Pub,
2005. Web.

June, Pamela B. The Fragmented Female Body and Identity : The Postmodern, Feminist,
and Multiethnic Writings of Toni Morrison, Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Phyllis Alesia Perry,
Gayl Jones, Emma Perez, Paula Gunn Allen, and Kathy Acker. New York: Peter Lang, 2010.
Web.

Kramer, Barbara. Toni Morrison: A Biography of a Nobel Prize-Winning Writer. Berkeley

Heights, NJ: Enslow Publishers, 2013. Web.

Marks, Kathleen. Toni Morrison's Beloved and the Apotropaic Imagination. University of
Missouri Press, 2002. Web.

McDonald, Paul. Reading Toni Morrison's 'Beloved': A Literature Insight. Penrith Cumbria:
Humanities-Ebooks, LLP, 2013. Web.

Articles:

Bennett, Jane Foress. Introducing Toni Morrison. Taylor & Francis, Ltd, 1994. Web.

Brown, Cecil. Interview With Toni Morrison. The Massachusetts Review, Vol.
36, No. 3, Autumn 1995 Web.

Wising, Johanna. Motherhood and the Heritage of Slavery in Toni Morrison’s Novels
Sula and Beloved. English C-Course Autumn, 2008. Web.

Larrick, Shelby. Psychological Criticism of Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Millikin University,

Decatur, IL, 2007.Web

Caesar, Terry Paul. Slavery and Motherhood in Toni Morrison's "Beloved". Revista de
Letras, Vol. 34, 1994. Web.

28
 27

.
I
I