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The Beloved Daughters of Nature---An Ecofeminist Analysis of Beloved
Introduction
Toni Morrison, born Chloe Ardelia Wofford on Feburary 18, 1931, is a Nobel Literature Prize and Pulitze Prize winning American writer. Beloved (1987) is Toni Morrison’s fifth novel and has always been the interest of Morrison critics. By the time of the publication of Beloved, Morrison had four previous successful novels, The Bluest Eye (1970), Sula (1974), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), to her credit and enjoyed wide national and international fame. However, only one of her previous works, Song of Solomon (1977) matched the glowing public and critic response Beloved received.

The novel was adopted from an actual event about a slave mother, Margaret Garner, who killed her own child to save her child from the fate of slave, which she considered worse than death. Morrison commented her action in the forward of Beloved as this: “[S]he was certainly single-minded and, judging by her comments, she had the intellect, the ferocity, and the willingness to risk everything for what was to her the necessity of freedom (Morrison ⅷ).” Garner’s story inspired her in the writing of the Beloved.

Set in 1873, the novel is about a former slave, Sethe, who killed her “crawling-already” baby girl when she was tracked by her slave owner 18 years ago. She had escaped form Kentucky to Ohio sending her three children, two boys and the un-named baby girl ahead to her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs in the house called 124 Bluestone. During her solitary escape, she gave birth to a girl, Denver. She was sentence to jail for the destruction of property after killing the girl Beloved(the name Sethe gave on the headstone of her grave). Then the house was haunted by the girl’s ghost, driving the two boys leaving home at 13 and Baby Suggs’ death. But Sethe continued to live in that house with Denver for 18 years in solitude. The arrival of Paul D, another former slave in the plantation called Sweet Home where Sethe previously lived, changed the situation. First he violently ridded the house of the ghost, but soon after, an unknown young woman called herself Beloved appeared and became a member of the family. Sethe considered Beloved as the reincarnation of the child she had killed and suffered physical and psychological deterioration. And the murder was gradually revealed to Denver and Paul D. Sethe faced her own past bravely and with the help of the black women in the community, she recovered and Beloved disappeared after the chorus sung by them. Denver sough the help from the black women for her mother and found courage to make life plans. Paul D and Sethe became life-partners after they both faced the horrible past and got cured.

The novel contains lots of cultural and literary interpretations for its richness and depth. Traditionally, its relation to slave narrative is often discussed. As Morrison writes in her essay entitled “The Site of Memory”, which includes many interesting aspects in her writing of Beloved, slave narrative is the “print origins of black literature,” and [L]iteracy was a way of assuming and proving ‘humanity’ that the Constitution denied them” (Morrison 189). Thus, the literary creation is to reconstruct and rebuild the silenced voices of black slaves. Linda Krumholz (1992) argues that the historical methodology of Beloved becomes a psychological recovery for black people, and Morrison considers the legacy of slavery both as n本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。