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Toni Morrisons Beloved (1987) was her fifth novel, and consequently the most controversial work she had ever written. Morrison was working as a senior editor at the publishing firm Random House when she was editing a nineteenth century article which was in a historical book and found the basis for this story. A direct connection between Morrison and this novel is best demonstrated by Morrisons statement of I deal with five years of terror in a pathological society, living in a bedlam where nothing makes sense. This novel is set during the mid-nineteenth century and reveals the pain and suffrage of being a slave before and after emancipation through deeply symbolic delineations of continued emotional and psychological suffrage. Stanley Crouch stated For Beloved, above all else, is a blackface holocaust novel (38 - 43). He believed that by including sadistic guards, murder, separation of family members, a big war, failed and successful escapes, and losses of loved ones to the violence of the mad order, Morrison was attempting to enter American slavery into the martyr ranks of the Nazis abuse of the Jews (Crouch 38 - 43).
Also, Crouch stated, she lacks a true sense of the tragic (38 - 43). He supported this by stating it shows no sense of the timeless and unpredictable manifestations of evil that preceded and followed American slavery (Crouch 38 - 43). However, Crouch realizes that Morrison has real talent, in that he believes she has the ability to organize her novel in a musical structure by using images as motifs. He also felt that the characters in the novel served no purpose other than to deliver a message. Crouch believed that Morrison did not want her readers to experience the horrors of slavery that others did, but rather just to tally up the sins that were committed against the darker people and feel sorry for them. Furthermore, he presumed that this novel was designed to make sure that the view of the black woman being the most scorned and rebuked of the victims of society, doesnt weaken.
According to Ann Snitow, she harps so on the presence of Beloved, sometimes neglecting the mental life of her other characters (pp. 25 - 26). She believed that by sacrificing the other characters vitality until the very end, the novel is left hollow in the middle. However, Snitow did state If Beloved fails in its ambitions, it is still a novel by Toni Morrison, still therefore full of beautiful prose, dialogue as rhythmically satisfying as music and scenes so clearly etched theyre like hallucinations (25 - 26). Snitow compares Morrisons writing style to Dickens, in that she believes that each of them are great, serious writers.
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Research essay sample on Nineteenth Century American Slavery
