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... circumstances of Sethe's determination to avoid her past life that her child departs this world. When the reader first comes into the story it is past the event of her Beloveds death. In fact, Sethe does not even remember her daughters name, but she does remember what the priest said at the funeral.
The priest said Dearly Beloved hence, the name Sethe now associates with her dead daughter. In addition, the specter of Beloved has taken to haunting the house at 124 and people now experience a sense of depression as they enter 124. Later in the story, the ghost of Beloved inexplicably returns to Sethe as a young woman by appearing outside the house one day. She even uses the name that Sethe has ascribed to the ghost Beloved. After a while Sethe does eventually makes the connection between the name of her visitor and the name of her dead daughter. At the end of the book, the ghost of Beloved is exorcised from 124 by same women that were present at the party on the day of her living death.
Thus, in the context of the story Beloved really is a specter that has come back from death and that Sethe, and the community in general, must deal with in order to bring closure to the story. On a subconscious level within the story, the character of Beloved can be considered to be much more than just a specter. In fact, she is a representative of the past to the characters in the story and her presence continues to remind them of their pasts. Specifically, the character of Beloved has a healing effect with two characters in the story, Sethe and Paul D. , become able to accept with their pasts and move on with their lives.
When Paul D. first arrives at 124 he brings back, to Sethe, all of the memories of living on the farm with Teacher. In an interesting turn of events, the first action performed by Paul D. upon his arrival at 124 is to confront the disembodied spirit of Beloved that creates the feelings of depression in the threshold to the house. His confrontation temporarily casts the spirit from 124 but the peace that follows is short lived and within a short time the spirit of Beloved returns to the house as a young woman.
The event of her return causes a number of emotional reactions in Paul D. and Sethe. With regards to Sethe, we find that Beloved is constantly asking questions regarding her past. She seems to have knowledge regarding past events in Sethe's life that she really should not know about and it is almost as if Beloved knows which memories will be the hardest for Sethe to deal with emotionally. She then sets out to ask questions that deliberately invoke these difficult memories and this causes Sethe to relive a number of very traumatic events from her life prior to her living at 124.
While Beloved is asking these hard questions of Sethe she also sets out to control access to Sethe. Denver, Sethe's daughter, and Paul D. both feel competitive with Beloved for Sethe's affections and attention. The relaying of the stories of her past has a positive effect upon Sethe and she begins to accept her past and is able to move on with her life. In fact prior to Beloveds arrival, Sethe's life at 124 appears to be very stable at the beginning of the story because she has not yet dealt with her own past and has spent her life avoiding deliberately avoid her history. Over the course of her involvement with Beloved, Sethe becomes able to move beyond her stationary life at 124 and because of her personal healing is able to form a romantic relationship with Paul D.
This romantic relationship is the basis for lot of healing for in her character. Life and Poetry of Stephen Crane Stephen Crane, one of America's foremost journalist and novelist, utilized characters and topics of realism to awaken a sleeping literary public of his times. " Although he was born more than six years after the end of the American Civil War, Stephen Crane's novel The Red Badge of Courage depicted that war so vividly, and rendered the fears of men in battle so intensely, that many veterans who read the book were convinced that he was one of them. In a career of less than ten years, Crane produced a body of work that, in its striking and concise phrasing and its unflinching confrontation of smugness and hypocrisy, helped set the course of American fiction and poetry in the twentieth century. Born in Newark, New Jersey, on November 1, 1871, Stephen Crane was his parents' fourteenth child.
His father, Dr. Jonathan Townley Crane, was a Methodist minister, as were his maternal grandfather and other relatives on both sides of his family. Dr. Crane's successive ecclesiastical appointments led the family to move in 1876 to Paterson, New Jersey, and in 1878 to Port Jervis, a town in upstate New York that, with its surrounding countryside, would become the setting for a number of Crane's works, including Whilomville Stories, the novel The Third Violet, and one of his greatest short stories, "The Monster. " After Dr. Crane's death in 1880, his widow moved the family to Asbury Park, New Jersey. Crane attended the Hudson River Institute in Claverack, New York, from 1888 to 1890, where he was taught history by John B.
Van Peter, who had been an officer in the Civil War. In September 1890, he enrolled at Lafayette College to study mining engineering, but left without completing his first semester. He entered Syracuse University in January 1891, where he showed more interest in catching for the varsity baseball team than in his studies. In his single semester at Syracuse, he only passed one out of six courses, which was English literature, for which he received an A.
He had also begun to write for the New York Tribune, and even though he was to lose that position the following year for writing a satirical account of a parade by the Junior Order of United American Mechanics, journalism would remain one of his principal means of support and avenues to fame for the rest of his brief life. Crane later maintained that he wrote his first major work of fiction, Maggie: A Girl of the Streets, in two days just before Christmas of 1891. He borrowed money from one of his brothers to have it printed, since he was unable to publish it commercially because of its bleak and uncompromising presentation of life in the slums of New York City: the title character is forced to turn to prostitution after being self-righteously rejected by everyone she has loved and trusted. The book appeared early in 1893 under the pseudonym Johnston Smith, and, while very few copies were sold, it won favorable attention from the influential novelists Hamlin Garland and William Dean Howells. Also in early 1893, Crane wrote a first version of what would become The Red Badge of Courage. This novel, his masterpiece, was published in 1895 in both the United States, where it became a bestseller, and England, where it also attracted a great deal of positive notice.
In vivid and impressionistic prose, studded with the kinds of striking similes that were a hallmark of Crane's style, the novel relates the experiences of "the youth" Henry Fleming and his comrades as they test themselves on the field of battle. Also in 1895 appeared The Black Riders, the first of Crane's two collections of free verse. These often fable-like little poems, with their stripped-down lines and stark phrasing concentrated on the rendering of a single effect, were to influence the Imagist movement in Anglo-American poetry in the second decade of the twentieth century. Crane was himself a dashing figure, whose life was often as much of a story as anything that came from his pen. One night in September 1896, he interviewed several chorus girls for a series of articles about New York City.
After leaving a restaurant at two in the morning, Crane and his party were stopped by a policeman named Charles Becker, who two decades later would be the principal figure in a much more notorious affair. Becker arrested Dora Clark, one of the women with Crane, on a charge of soliciting. Crane vigorously asserted her innocence in the matter and appeared in court to denounce the arresting officer. The incident caused a sensation in the then-lively world of New York City newspapers, with Crane exalted (largely by his own paper) as a selfless defender of womanhood and scourge of a corrupt police force, pilloried as a meddler and a publicity hound, and libeled as a drug addict and frequenter of prostitutes. Whatever Crane's motives may have been, the affair was a highly stressful one for him and took a great toll, costing him, among much else, the friendship of then New York City Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt. In November of 1896, Crane met Cora Taylor, an intelligent woman with literary inclinations several years his senior, who was operating a house of assignation in Jacksonville, Florida.
She was to become his companion for the rest of his life-although she called herself Cora Crane and was introduced by Crane as his wife, no evidence of a marriage has ever come to light-and an untiring champion of his work and reputation after his death. They settled in England in 1897, where they were quickly accepted into a circle of British and American novelists, including Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Harold Frederic, and Ford Madox Ford. Meanwhile, Crane continued his astonishing productivity as both journalist and literary artist, covering the Greco-Turkish War in 1897 and the Spanish-American War in 1898, and publishing in the single year of 1898 some of his finest short stories, "The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky, "Death and the Child, "The Monster, " and "The Blue Hotel. " In the last year or so of his life, Crane suffered from increasingly virulent attacks of tuberculosis, aggravated by a punishing work schedule. Many of these writing projects were hack work undertaken out of financial need. With their money virtually gone and surviving on the generosity of friends, Cora brought Stephen to a health spa at Badenweiler, Germany, where he died on June 5, 1900, at the age of twenty-eight. Bibliography: James, Henry.
The Turn of the Screw. Random House Inc. New York: 1999. Carey-Webb, Allen. Racism and Huckleberry Finn: Censorship, Dialogue, and Change. English Journal 82 (November 1993): 22 - 34.
Clemens, Samuel. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Later, et al. 2 nd ed.
Vol. 2. Lexington: Heath, 1994. 236 - 419. Ellison, Ralph. Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. An Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Sources Criticism.
Ed. Sculley Bradley, et al. 2 nd ed. New York: Norton, 1977. 421 - 22. Fishing, Shelley. Was Huck Black? Mark Twain and African-American Voices.
New York: Oxford UP, 1993. Hoffman, Daniel. Black Magic-and White-in Huckleberry Finn. Adventures of Huckleberry Finn: An Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Sources Criticism. Ed. Sculley Bradley, et al. 2 nd ed.
New York: Norton, 1977. 423 - 436. Kesterson, David B. Critics on Mark Twain. University of Miami Press, 1973. (From: Eliot, T.
S. New York: Chanticleer, 1950), pp. vii-xvi. MacLeod, Christine. Telling the Truth in a Tight Place: Huckleberry Finn and the Reconstruction Era.
The Southern Quarterly 34 (Fall 1995): 5 - 16. Sale, Peter. Is Huck Finn a Racist Book? web (November 24, 2000) Zwick, Jim, Should Huck Finn be Banned? web (November 28, 2000). David, Kimberly Chabot.
Postmodern blackness: Toni Morrisons Beloved and the end of history. (novel by Black female author). Twentieth Century Literature, Summer 1998 v 44 i 2 p 242 Heffernan, Teresa. Beloved and the Problem of Mourning, (Toni Morrison). Studies in the Novel Winter 1995 v 30 p 558 (1) Holden-Kirwan. Jennifer L. Looking into the self that is no self: an examination of subjectivity in Beloved...
African American Review, Fall 1998 v 32 n 3 p 415 (12) Keizer, Arlene R. Beloved: ideologies in conflict, improvised subjects. African American Review, Spring 1999 v 33 i 1 P 105 (1) Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Penguin Books, 1988
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