Beloved Case

Section 1:

Toni Morrison's Pulitzer Prize winning novel Beloved has received praise all across the globe academically and publically. The Pulitzer Prize is one of many other prizes this book has received such as the Frederic G. Melcher Book Award and the New York Times best work of fiction in the last 25 years. Because Beloved is so popular it has had many papers and articles written about it, but in this paper I will be discussing eight of those scholarly papers and articles in depth to come up with themes in which I will discuss the similarities and differences within them.

First, I will discuss what Nancy Jesser argues in her essay; how the memory of the character's in the novel Beloved change a simple space into a place. A space is simply an area, geographically speaking, where as a place is also a space but filled with memories that give it that sentimental value, like it cannot be replaced. She then goes more in depth and separates place into hard and soft. In her words, 124 Bluestone (before Sethe kills her children with the handsaw) is much more of a softened place because it was a place where the members of the African-American community could meet and greet and also eat. Then she goes on and says that after the horrible massacre of the children by Sethe, 124 Bluestone immediately becomes a hardened place (Jesser 326). A soft place is where common memories happen, where as a hard place is often where more specific, often very traumatizing memories happen. Jesser does a good job of comparing the four significant places in the novel: Sweet home, Georgia, the Clearing, and 124 Bluestone. In each section of her article she discusses how the memories have transformed those four places from a space to a place, and how they have become hardened or softened places. Specifically, she describes Georgia as being a hardened place and goes on by telling the significance of Paul D's escape from there, "a place hardened in the extreme by violence and objectification." (Jesser 330) she is referring to Paul D's time in prison.

Secondly, I am going to discuss how Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber focuses on the effects of these said memories on the family in his article "Shared Memory". Schreiber describes the effects of Sethe's memories by telling us that Sethe suffers from feelings of abandonment and her mother's physical pain and death is lodged in her psyche (Schreiber 35). She later talks about those memories and points out the abandonment Sethe felt as a child from her mother are passed on to her daughter Denver (Schreiber 36). Schreiber goes on to say that those said memories are what caused Sethe to murder her child. By saying memories are reactivated when a person is exposed to a situation similar to the one when the original memory was stored, "Schoolteacher's appearance triggers Sethe's violent response" (Schreiber 37). She then begins