Ready Reference Treatise: Beloved

By Raja Sharma

“Beloved” by the Nobel Prize winning American writer Toni Morrison was first published in 1987.

The story is set during and after the Civil War in America, between 1861 and 1865. An African-American slave, Margaret Garner, is the source of inspiration for the story.

Margaret Garner had run away from slavery for a brief period during 1856. She had run away from Kentucky and gone to Ohio, a free state.

A group of temporary police force came there to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. According to that Act, the slave owners had the right to follow their runaway slaves across state borders.

Margaret Garner did not want her daughter to become a slave so she killed her two year old daughter.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Raja Sharma
• Release date: Jan 28, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301621873

Raja Sharma

Raja Sharma is a retired college lecturer.He has taught English Literature to University students for more than two decades.His students are scattered all over the world, and it is noticeable that he is in contact with more than ninety thousand of his students.

Book preview

Ready Reference Treatise: Beloved

Raja Sharma

Copyright

Ready Reference Treatise: Beloved

Raja Sharma

Copyright@2012 Raja Sharma

Smashwords Edition

All rights reserved

Chapter One: Introduction to Beloved

Beloved by the Nobel Prize winning American writer Toni Morrison was first published in 1987.

The story is set during and after the Civil War in America, between 1861 and 1865. An African-American slave, Margaret Garner, is the source of inspiration for the story.

Margaret Garner had run away from slavery for a brief period during 1856. She had run away from Kentucky and gone to Ohio, a free state.

A group of temporary police force came there to retrieve her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. According to that Act, the slave owners had the right to follow their runaway slaves across state borders.

Margaret Garner did not want her daughter to become a slave so she killed her two year old daughter.

The main character in the story is named Sethe. Having killed her two years old daughter, the mother tries to kill her other three children when she sees the posse who have come there to take them back to Sweet Home, the plantation in Kentucky whence Sethe had escaped.

After many years a woman presumed to be her daughter, called Beloved in the story, comes back to haunt Sethe’s home at 124 Bluestone Road Cincinnati.

The novel Beloved begins with the introduction of the ghost, called Beloved.

Beloved won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize in the year 1988. After ten years of that the book was adapted into a movie of the same name. Oprah Winfrey was the main star in the movie.

Beloved was ranked as the best American fiction of the past 25 years during 2006 New York Times survey of famous writers and literary critics.

The epigraph in the book reads Sixty Million and more, which is dedicated to millions of Africans and their descendants who lost their lives during the period of slavery in America.

Chapter Two: Plot Overview

The story revolves around the central character Sethe, and her daughter Denver. They have escaped from slavery. They live in a house 124, Bluestone