SHOES!

Oh my goodness! Can we talk shoes!? 

Ok - So - Baby Suggs makes shoes. There are random people's shoes in her house, and the children try them on. Beloved is wearing new black shoes when she shows it. When Sethe kills Beloved, well after, a boy shows up to drop off his shoes to be fixed. Baby Suggs dreams of those shoes, I think. Denver wears a stranger's pair of shoes when she leaves the house for the first time. And Ella says that "As long as the ghost showed out from its ghostly place - shaking stuff, crying, smashing and such - Ella respected it. But if it took flesh and came in her world, well, the SHOE was on the other foot."

Can you find other references to shoes, and tell us what the heck it could all mean?! Please!

Violence in Beloved

It is not unusual for a writer to include one or more scenes of violence in a novel.  In good literature, the violence is not gratuitous.  Using Beloved, analyze the scenes of violence that Morrison uses in her story and explain how they enhance the meaning of the work.

3's?

The structure of each of the three parts of Beloved shows a similar beginning:  “124 was spiteful;” “124 was loud;” “124 was quiet.”  Discuss the structural purpose of this repetition, the differences in focus of each part, and the purposes of this technique.

Biblical allusion?

Terry Otten, in The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison (Missouri:  University of Missouri Press, 1989, 86-87) says, “Sethe’s first willful act, the escape from the Garner estate, imitates the quest for freedom from a degenerate garden.  Sweet Home echoes again the Romantic view of a flawed Eden, where black slaves tolerated the loss of freedom because they lived in ignorance of their condition.”  Comment on this interpretation of the novel as a fall from grace and innocence in the Garden of Eden.

Abandoned daughters

Discuss this novel as a story of abandonment and loss.

Relationships in Beloved

This is a novel about relationships—maternal; marital; slave-owner to slave; abolitionist to freed slave; white to black; guard to prisoner; employer to employee.  Choose one or more relationships in the novel and analyze how each functions in the overall view of the novel.

Owning another person

Carol Iannone describes “the psychological and emotional effects of being owned—of having no sense of self, of fearing to trust or to love when anything can be taken away at any time.”  (“Toni Morrison’s Career,” Commentary 84(6), December 1987, 63).  Choose one or more characters from Beloved and analyze the psychological effects on them of being owned.