Page 1 of 12 - Cover Page Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
submission
My Files
My Files
University
Document Details
Submission ID
trn:oid:::10159:73395894 9 Pages
Submission Date 2,345 Words
Dec 8, 2024, 8:45 PM GMT+5:30
12,579 Characters
Download Date
Dec 8, 2024, 8:46 PM GMT+5:30
File Name
3887038..docx
File Size
21.6 KB
Page 1 of 12 - Cover Page Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 2 of 12 - Integrity Overview Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
1% Overall Similarity
The combined total of all matches, including overlapping sources, for each database.
Filtered from the Report
Bibliography
Crossref database
Crossref posted content database
Match Groups Top Sources
4 Not Cited or Quoted 1% 1% Internet sources
Matches with neither in-text citation nor quotation marks
1% Publications
0 Missing Quotations 0% 0% Submitted works (Student Papers)
Matches that are still very similar to source material
0 Missing Citation 0%
Matches that have quotation marks, but no in-text citation
0 Cited and Quoted 0%
Matches with in-text citation present, but no quotation marks
Integrity Flags
0 Integrity Flags for Review
Our system's algorithms look deeply at a document for any inconsistencies that
No suspicious text manipulations found. would set it apart from a normal submission. If we notice something strange, we flag
it for you to review.
A Flag is not necessarily an indicator of a problem. However, we'd recommend you
focus your attention there for further review.
Page 2 of 12 - Integrity Overview Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 3 of 12 - Integrity Overview Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Match Groups Top Sources
4 Not Cited or Quoted 1% 1% Internet sources
Matches with neither in-text citation nor quotation marks
1% Publications
0 Missing Quotations 0% 0% Submitted works (Student Papers)
Matches that are still very similar to source material
0 Missing Citation 0%
Matches that have quotation marks, but no in-text citation
0 Cited and Quoted 0%
Matches with in-text citation present, but no quotation marks
Top Sources
The sources with the highest number of matches within the submission. Overlapping sources will not be displayed.
1 Internet
www.coursehero.com 0%
2 Publication
Lumumba, Ebony Olivia. "Of Mules and Mamas: Four Women, Africana Mothering… 0%
3 Internet
ebin.pub 0%
4 Publication
Emilia María Durán-Almarza, Esther Álvarez-López. "Diasporic Women's Writing o… 0%
Page 3 of 12 - Integrity Overview Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 4 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
1 Student’s Name
Instructor’s Name
Course
Date
Final Research Paper ENG 454
A literary criticism of another literary masterpiece that does not afford itself the luxury of
dancing around interrogating the traumatic legacy of slavery and the challenge of maintaining a
sense of individuality and owning a self after the systematic oppression it endured, that is what
Beloved by Toni Morrison is. Jessica is setting the tone for post-Civil War America, where
eventually, Sethe, a formerly enslaved woman, will have to deal with the haunting of her past,
likely physically and mentally. Beloved examines the theme of motherhood, memory, and
cultural trauma in that the work indicts the infinity of the scars that slavery left in America and
our failure to listen to Black women's voices. From a dual perspective of Feminist/Womanist
Theory and Postcolonial Criticism, this essay analyzes Beloved (House 17). A Feminist
framework proposes the Black women's experience from a gendered and racial oppression
perspective. In contrast, Postcolonial Criticism approaches the cultural and psychological
legacies of slavery as a form of colonized domination. When these critical approaches work
together, they demonstrate how Morrison asks we put Black women's voices front and center to
rewrite histories that have been erased and condemn the dehumanizing institution of slavery.
At the heart of Beloved emerges a radical interrogation of Black motherhood as both a
place of resistance and experiences of wrenching pain. Being a mother is the only thing that
Page 4 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 5 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
means anything to Sethe, but it is, in and of itself, full of what it is to be a mother, enslaved to all
of the atrocities done to her. The act of killing her daughter to save her from the terrors of
enslavement by Sethe is perceived through the Feminist/Womanist lens as a complicated
assertion of agency (Patterson 683). Their obligation to consider the psychological and emotional
anguish that the infliction of infanticide on Sethe by society would create is what Morrison
obligates. This isn’t a rejection of motherhood, but a radical, if tragic, articulation of love for
one’s children and a refusal of her children being consumed by a system that pointed her out as a
potential monster.
Infanticide itself is a direct challenge to both patriarchal and white supremacist structures
in the way enslaved women were defined exclusively through their ability to produce labor for
the system. She ends her daughter's life and, with that, denies her daughter that freedom from
servitude as a mother and refuses her daughter to be manipulated as an economic tool for the
exploitation of others (Patterson 683). Despite its devastation, this radical act is characteristic of
the way that Morrison probes across her entire oeuvre how enslaved mothers figured into a world
where motherhood was the scapegoated object of the enslaved people's exploitation. But she puts
motherhood back into this space of agency even as the entire society will come crying and
proclaim that there is only motherhood, and they can use it as their power base.
Furthermore, this study of motherhood is expanded by Sethe’s remembrances of herself
as her mother. Sethe, one of the many children born by her mother, was kept, and her mother
drowned the rest as one of many multigenerational struggles of enslaved women to have control
over their bodies and the futures of their children. Through the parallel domestic violence in the
Page 5 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 6 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
past and present, identity was given to how slavery rendered Black women incapable of creating
safe, wholesome family ties, thus forced to choose the impossible.
In expanding the theme of motherhood, the character Baby Suggs, Sethe’s mother-in-law,
represents the neverending effort in the womanist objective of family and spiritual power. Baby
Suggs' sermons in The Clearing are about a radical reclaiming of humanity and dignity taken by
slavery. She understands her generation's violence on the Black body and spirit, and she engages
Black siblings in loving their 'hands,' 'feet,' and 'hearts.' Black women and acts of spiritual
leadership of empowerment and solidarity did occur even in the shadow of systemic oppression
(House 21). Womenist lessons of coming together and becoming whole through mutual care
within the community as a means of survival and resistance were taught by Baby Suggs.
Denver, Sethe’s youngest daughter, is another essential character whose exploration of
her mothergrown identity is explored in the novel. However, it is only when Beloved's shadow
alone surrounds Denver, and she has to depend on her mother for her survival, that she decides to
ask for help from the community (Patterson 683). Through this, she revolves her entire approach
to the community. Denver's story is about the possibility for younger generations to start
breaking the cycles of trauma together, interdependency. Once again, Morrison clarifies that
stepping out into the world is an act of agency and that communal support can transcend personal
pain and, often, generational pain.
From a Postcolonial perspective, the critique of slavery of Beloved is that slavery is a
cultural and psychological genocide. Slavery was not just a system of forced labor; it was an
institution in which enslavers took pains to stamp out the culture, history, and humanity of
enslaved people. In effect, Seth's sense of self is fragmented, a microcosm of the overall
Page 6 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 7 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
dislocation that came with being dispossessed of one's name, family, and heritage as an enslaved
person (Patterson 683). This erasure is indispensable to colonial domination because the
colonized cannot have a history cannot have, ultimately, an identity. What makes the
reconfiguration of identity in the aftermath of such overwhelming dislocation any less
straightforward is evidenced in Beloved's fragmented, nonlinear narrative structure.
The novel is littered with cultural trauma, but one most striking is Beloved herself. The
Ghost of the departed daughter of Sethe, beloved, is both representative of personal and
collective trauma. As a personal manifestation, she is Sethe's unsorted sorrow and guilt. More
broadly, she becomes a symbol of the still lingering legacy of slavery, something you can’t ever
forget or quite put to rest. Trauma is a present disease that eats the present and consumes those
that follow (House 23). Morrison uses the method of magic realism in Beloved to condemn
slavery as an evil whose effects reverberate across generations and exposure of which shatters
hegemonic universal narratives of history intent on cloaking or whitewashing that evil.
A profoundly nuanced story of the long-lasting effects of slavery and Black women's
perseverance in a longstanding system of oppression, Beloved by Toni Morrison is beloved.
Examined via the intersection of Feminist Theory and Postcolonial Criticism, Morrison's attack
on both racial and gender aspects of oppression is better understood via the novel. These are
critical frameworks as they help to view the novel as a showcase of how slavery was a system of
racial and cultural domination that depended on the exploitation and dehumanization of Black
women. This can be exhausted unless used about one another (House 24). The most crucial part
that Beloved illuminates is how it highlights intersections of patriarchal and colonial violence by
Page 7 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 8 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
layered representation of motherhood, identity, and community and how it celebrates agency,
creativity, and solidarity possibilities of Black women at the same time.
At its core, Morrison's Beloved illustrates the unique oppression experienced by enslaved
women, who were subjected to dual forms of dehumanization. To the same laborers who, as
reproducers. One type of slavery, primarily enslaved men as physical labor, and another type of
slavery, enslaved women for labor and forcible childbearing. At the center of Beloved is this
meeting of racial and sexual exploitation of Black women's bodies under slavery. The plantation
from which Sethe was freed in life but from which she remains haunted in death is Sweet Home.
The schoolteacher's nephews stole her breast milk during one of the most blood-curdling
moments in her recollection. It should also be read as an expression of the entire system of
oppression that denied enslaved women control of their bodies, including the bodily violation of
enslaved women (House 19). The perpetrators, who stripped Sethe of a subject status as an
object, then stole her milk, milk that was meant for her child, certainly expose how slavery stole
Black women's reproductive capacity. It also represents the theft of Black motherhood itself:
2 Because enslaved women possessed no legal right to mother them, children were property and
not persons they were not allowed to nurture and protect them. What Morrison attends to in her
treatment of this violation is the intersection of feminist and postcolonial concerns in the critique
of both patriarchal domination and colonial commodification of the body of the enslaved.
Moreover, her infanticide is a combination of these themes. By killing her daughter,
Sethe emerges as a tragically and extremely assertive agent who tries to save her from the
horrors of slavery. The dominant society condemns her act, but that act signifies the female's
refusal to be a slave to the colonial system and to become the object of the colonial will on the
Page 8 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 9 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
determination of her child’s future. We approach this Feminist/Womanist Theory from the
standpoint of how Sethe’s choice was a maternal act of resistance to patriarchal narratives that
would not create her as anything but a monstrous/mad individual. Postcolonial Criticism, for its
part, reads Sethe’s actions within the larger sociological framework of cultural genocide as
slavery was a genocidal systematic killing of familial and cultural links (Patterson 683). By
centering Sethe’s perspective, Morrison forces readers to face the unrealizable choices enslaved
women had to make and complicates easy moral determinations that give an absurdity to the
enormity of their stoicism.
Storytelling is one of Morrison's most potent ways of combining the Feminist and
Postcolonial themes. Beloved's nonlinear, broken story represents the way of short memory and
an inability to repair oneself after slavery. A key act of resistance in Feminist/Womanist and
Postcolonial stories is challenging the dominant historical narratives. Through Black women's
experience, Morrison focuses on the experience by giving voice to Sethe, Denver, Baby Suggs,
and even the spectral Beloved; she highlights how Black women's voices are deleted from
official history. It is about how marginalized women can regain their agency through one of the
most potent things: storytelling and claiming their subjectivity. Storytelling here isn't about
confronting the past but also a way to heal (Patterson 683). For instance, Baby Suggs preaches
sermons out in the Clearing, assuring its members' humanity by telling them to feel good and
love their bodies and spirits, accepting the violence they suffered with fortitude. Because of this,
she embodies Womanist ideals of collective care and empowerment and reveals how Black
women resisted dehumanization through acts of solidarity and affirmation.
Page 9 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 10 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
From a Postcolonial perspective, storytelling in Beloved is a reclamation of history. The
novel undoes these linear Eurocentric narratives of how slavery went away and rewrote these to
create a polyphonic account of the complex and diverse Black experience. Another beloved is
the symbol of the Ghost of Sethe’s dead daughter and refers to the haunting of history that could
not be forgotten, passed over, or made to disappear (Patterson 683). Her fragmented recollections
are based on memories of the Middle Passage and the horror of enslavement but tell for those
silenced. In her critique of the eradication of cultural individuality that comes with colonial
domination, she does not forget or neglect the past but remembers.
Therefore, the theme of community is used to bring together Feminist and Postcolonial
concerns. Beloved's climactic exorcism is an exorcism in which a group of Black women
exorcise a ghost through collective action that shows what collective action can do to transform.
3 This shows solidarity among black women as a way to counter the isolation effect of trauma as
Black women stand by one another in moments of helping one another heal black women's
trauma. From a Womanist point of view, the exorcism transforms into a reclaiming of spiritual
and cultural power through the collective women's chant of affirming their shared humanity and
resistance. As a symbol for repossessing suppressed cultural rituals and practices under slavery
concerning Postcolonial thought. But it also reminds Denver about how important community is
to surviving trauma (House 22). In Denver's case, we begin by seeing her rely too much on her
mother and gradually become reliant on her neighbors. She was initially isolated and dependent
on her mother but increasingly dependent and isolated from her neighbors, although she finally
needed her neighbors' aid. Morrison asserts this decision to step into the world as a renewal and
through healing in solidarity. In Morrison’s writings, the Feminist/Womanist and Postcolonial
Page 10 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 11 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
ideals of hope and resilience can be seen through how people like Denver come out of the
traumatic lineage the two theorists advocate.
In conclusion, Toni Morrison's Beloved is a profoundly nuanced novel that takes on race,
gender, and cultural trauma with the frankness of speech and artistic brilliance rare in the world.
With the help of Feminist/Womanist Theory and Postcolonial Criticism, the novel is examined as
4 a powerful critique of the systemic oppression of Black women and as a celebration of Black
women's resilience and creativity. Black motherhood is the particular struggle Morrison seeks to
foreground, as are the harrowing remnants of slavery and the capacity of a community and a
story to heal. Beloved then recenters the voices of people whose presence was erased by history
and challenges a readership to struggle with the still longer shadow cast by systemic injustice.
But Beloved demands instead that we consider the force of motherhood, memory, and resistance
to cultural domination as a complicated endeavor and a still current need to reclaim what has
been effaced. But Morrison’s novel is not a fiction, it is an act of resistance, one which still
occurs today as a reminder to Black women and as a reminder of the power we have to rewrite
history, to allow ourselves to be, to have power.
Page 11 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Page 12 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
Works Cited
House, Elizabeth B. "Toni Morrison's Ghost: The Beloved is Not Beloved." Studies in American
Fiction, vol. 18, no. 1, 1990, pp. 17-26.
Patterson, Anita, and Saidiya V. Hartman. "Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-
Making in Nineteenth-Century America." African American Review, vol. 33, no. 4,
1999, p. 683.
Page 12 of 12 - Integrity Submission Submission ID trn:oid:::10159:73395894
