Preview

Reaction to Beloved

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
594 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Reaction to Beloved
Reaction To Beloved

The movie Beloved was a tale of a woman who is so devastated by the evil of slavery. Therefore she is willing to kill her toddler daughter rather than allow her to be taken back into the horror. This murderous act proves itself to be a choice, which only further enslaves her soul as her daughter's ghost haunts her life. The movie was set in the 1800's. Sethe is a pregnant slave on a Kentucky plantation named Sweet Home. She was under control by a violent slave master. To me there is no reason or excuse for this kind of evil. The enslavement and brutal treatment of our fellow human beings is a spiritual scar. When Sethe gives birth to Beloved and is reunited with her children in Ohio. The happiness of this reunion is turn into a tragic event as she sees her former master riding up to the house with the local sheriff. Sethe knows that he is coming back to take her children back into slavery, she runs into the shed, cuts the throat of her two year old daughter, Beloved, and hits her sons' heads with a shovel. Her sons didn't die but beloved did. Soon after the tragic event the spirit of Beloved haunts Sethe's house. The scene of seeing Sethe kill Beloved is very disturbing to witness. The ghostly tantrum of Beloved comes back over and over again to disrupt Sethe's home. Her two sons become very scared by the haunts of Beloved. Sethe's younger daughter, Denver becomes calm with her mother and the ghost, and she never leaves the house and yard. Sethe also becomes ok with the ghost presence in the house. She keeps denying that she did anything wrong by killing Beloved. So she feels that she doesn't need any help. This is often the way evil take over our lives. Rather than having the courage to face the evil we suffer, as Sethe did she affected her own children with this violence. Sethe became in denial with her responsibility. She accepted the pain of her guilt and shame with a lie towards her dignity. She felt everything was

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Good Essays

    The enslavement of African Americans was undoubtedly a cruel institution. Nowadays, it is looked upon with shame. However, there was a time when it had its staunch supporters. Southern slave owners would always defend this institution, despite the firestorm of criticism it faced, justifying it with legal, religious, and economic arguments.…

    • 428 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The stepfather reported that the child has spoken with him about multiple dreams that have been disturbing to her. He indicated that the dreams consist of her father taking her from the home and stating that she will never see her mother again. There was one when the child stated that the father picked her up and jump off a cliff and killed them both. Drea indicated that the dreams consist of the father hurting her family.…

    • 499 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    When I hear the word slavery, the only thing that comes to my head is cruelty. I could not even imagine how a human can threat another one like animals, as if they were and inferior or less because of the skin color. The idea of being able to read a book that was written by someone that lived during this years of brutality amazed me. Harriet Jacobs was taught how to read and write by her mothers mistress, this was not common for many of the slaves, and it is the reason why she used the name “Linda” to talk about herself during her stories, because if by any chance her master knew that she could read and write, she would have had the punishment of being whipped and put in jail. During the first chapters of her book we could notice that not all her years as a slave were miserable. In fact the first six years of her life were happy, because she didn’t know she was a slave, once she grew up her innocence started to fade, her days started to turn dark and sad. As described in her book the living conditions were like hell on earth. Slavery not only affected the slaves, it also completely destroyed moral…

    • 1236 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    father along with her uncle were the ones that did these horrible things to her. The night before…

    • 1032 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slaves are a commercial cost to him. He sees nothing to claim, figuring he has lost money because Sethe is too crazed. Further on, he warns his nephew of "that kind of confusion" (Morrison 150). Schoolteacher warned one of his nephews not to see Sethe as a mother doing something beneficial. They simply are not people, and that is a big justification for the physical and mental abuse at Sweet Home.…

    • 1273 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slavery was an oppressive time in history. Nothing good came from it, only hatred against others for the color of their skin, violence against them because the whites saw themselves as a superior, intellectual, and more dominant race. Some historians believe that life for slaves may have been different than what we’ve been taught by traditional historians, but how could it have been different. They weren’t treated any better. They were whipped, beaten, looked down upon, they have recorded chattels, where animals were treated better.…

    • 462 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sethe views her children as the best part of herself, so she prioritizes their needs over her own. For example, when Sethe tells Paul D the story of how schoolteacher’s nephews stole her breast milk, she alludes to the fact that they might have also raped her; however, the reader cannot be sure because she is so preoccupied with the theft of the milk that belongs to her children that she glides over the details of her own rape (Morrison 19). Because Sethe invests most of her identity into motherhood and because she views her children as extensions of herself, every abuse she suffers feels more offensive toward her children than toward herself. In addition to the struggle of defining herself apart from her children, Sethe also devotes much of her energy to repressing the past, for her memories of Sweet Home are too painful for conscious recollection; however, this process is unhealthy and detrimental, for the absence of a past prevents the construction of a solid identity. Because Sethe’s “brain [is] not interested in the future” but is instead “loaded with the past,” even the freedom for which Sethe has worked so hard is threatened (Morrison 83). She remains completely stuck in the past until Paul D arrives, and she is able to take a small step toward…

    • 439 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slavery is the saddest period of human’s history. What slaves went through was really hard and it takes strong people to survive to that’s situation. They not only had to work every day of their lives without any compensation, but they were also broken down morally and separated from their families. Slaves were not treated as humans. They were treated as objects and machines and the only thing they were supposed to do were to obey to their masters, and if not, they would get beaten up, whipped or even killed. This is clearly shown on the Angela Davis’s essay, Reflection on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves.…

    • 533 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Sethe, when she utters “Nobody was going to nurse her like me…nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me.” (19) This explains us how she never had a chance to be with her mother, to have a real mother-daughter quality time. Being an over obsessive mother to her sons and daughters is because she didn’t want them to go through the things that she went through. And this elucidates that Sethe thought process of killing her baby girl is the only way of protecting her baby girl from being raped in future just like her. A mother’s instinct is a dangerous thing because a mother cannot be wrong about her gut feeling. Just as Sethe predicted, Beloved after eighteen years when returned, she was beautiful, shining and glowing with soft hands and slippery feet with no cracks on her heels. If Beloved was given a chance to live her life by Sethe, she would have probably gone through the same thing as her ma’am or even worse. Now, how this tells us anything about Sethe psychologically affected? Her body is healed, her scars are closed; it is bygone, it happened eighteen years before. Does that mean she got over the incident that changed all those lives that surrounded her? Sethe recalls the day she got raped by the two boys and how they stole her milk. For eighteen long years she pretends to have forgotten her slave life, her abuse, and her wounds. But in reality, every day she relives it and it is not easy to set…

    • 686 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Beloved: Passage Analysis

    • 1348 Words
    • 6 Pages

    Buffalo men, they called them, and talked slowly to the prisoners scooping mush and tapping away at their chains. Nobody from a box in Alfred, Georgia, cared about the illness the Cherokee warned them about, so they stayed, all forty-six, resting, planning their next move. Paul D had no idea of what to do and knew less than anybody, it seemed. He heard his co-convicts talk knowledgeably of rivers and states, towns and territories. Heard Cherokee men describe the beginning of the world and its end. Listened to tales of other Buffalo men they knew — three of whom were in the healthy camp a few miles away. Hi Man wanted to join them; others wanted to join him. Some wanted to leave; some to stay on. Weeks later Paul D was the only Buffalo man left — without a plan. All he could think of was tracking dogs, although Hi Man said the rain they left in gave that no chance of success. Alone, the last man with buffalo hair among the ailing Cherokee, Paul D finally woke up and, admitting his ignorance, asked how he might get North. Free North. Magical North. Welcoming, benevolent North. The Cherokee smiled and looked around. The flood rains of a month ago had turned everything to steam and blossoms.…

    • 1348 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    If each one of you, readers, take the time to think a little about this, you’ll change your mind and judgement about this issue. Imagine if it was you, being taken away from your home to become a slave. Imagine it was you who’s being forced to work on plantations from sunrise to sunset. Imagine if you were owned as any object and nobody cared if you’re sick or hungry. If it was you who’s being separated from your family and whose dreams, innocence and liberty are taken away forever. If it was you, you’ll understand why this is not okay. Ms Jacob’s explained how hard it was for her to be separated from her kids, and this shouldn’t be happening to anyone. They deserve to be together and happy, but slave owners are separating families and shattering their dreams. Also, most slaves are forced to start working when they’re still kids and this too should stop. Slaves must be…

    • 491 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Miss Brill and Miss Emily

    • 835 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Samantha McPherson R.Bishop English 1312 Comp II Online 6 Oct. 2011 Miss Brill & Miss Emily Emily Grierson from “A Rose for Emily” and Miss Brill from the story “Miss Brill” are two women that are trying to relive their past in the present time. In these stories, you are taken into the lives of two elderly women living very different lives, yet sharing many characteristics. You wouldn’t think to compare these two characters, but if you do, they are strikingly similar in many ways. In addition to being significantly alike, they also have their obvious differences. From the very beginning of both stories, we can tell that the women are lonely.…

    • 835 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Defense attorney Paul Mones says “The problem is, child abuse ... is the perfect crime. It's the perfect crime because parents who do it seal their own protection, because they know the kid's typically, a, not going to fight back, and b, typically not [going to] report, because as bad as children get treated by their parents, that parent is still the caregiver; that parent still is the nourisher. And it's very difficult for the average human being to fight against that person, to rebel against that person.” suggest that it was very hard for one to break out of silence and seek help because of the role his mother and stepfather had in his life as care givers. Jacob was 15 at the time and under a tremendous amount of stress going…

    • 1008 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Better Essays

    sometimes it was the kid that suffer the brutality or even it was something they watched…

    • 857 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Slavery Dbq

    • 668 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Slavery was a very controversial subject in the 1800’s. While some people did not see anything wrong with slavery and saw it as a part of the economic and social structure, other people felt that it was morally wrong and completely unethical. Even in the North, where slavery was nonexistent, there were people, like Lydia M. Child, who disapproved of the way African Americans were treated like second-class citizens. She believed that although the actual physical institution of slavery was not present, that was just because of climatic factors that did not really call for slaves, and the essence of slavery was still present. Another slavery-opposer, a poet named John Leaf Whittier, wrote a poem as a reaction to the attempted recapturing of an escapee expressing his disdain for these actions taken by the government. However, Thomas R. Dew clearly articulated that there are no moral complications with slavery because there is absolutely nothing in the bible that suggests that slavery is an immoral institution, while Whittier viewed it as immoral and unacceptable, and Child viewed just the differentiation made between African Americans and whites as unethical.…

    • 668 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays