NOvel is about more than a haunting. Beloved enters the narrative as a fully grown woman , but in fact is a pre-mature child (murdered by her mother to be saved from slavery). She is larger than life, disruptive and chaotic – a symbol of history being re-written (hence sentences structures being ‘unreadable’). Beloved has no palmer creases (hands or feet) and is unable to carry the weight of her own head when Sethe meets her again by the river. She is spiteful – a mark of history’s making. The theme of infanticide is used to denote the horror of slavery, the rape of black women and the denigration of black men. Community is central to Afro-American women’s writing as both the men and women share the same history (slavery). Threaded with narratives of chaos, and what Morrison calls ‘discredited knowledge’ Beloved as her other novels uses ‘naming’, the blues, quilting, hauntings and beautiful imagery to evoke ANOTHER (new history) for blackwomen ( by the way that is how it is written – as one word – politically they WILL not separate the two concepts.You will see these themes in all novels by blackwomen – The Color Purple for example – the women of the town make quilts (motif of weaving their individual stories together to raise a collective voice. Baby Suggs in Beloved is the ancestor (the ancestral voice – maternal/matriarchal archetype …… and again this is found as a motif in blackwomens’ writing ………… re-uses communal and domestic space to deconstruct patriarchy
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POE.
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in January of 1886, sold 40,000 copies in six months in Britain. Stevenson said later that its plot was revealed to him in a dream. The mystery of Jekyll and Hyde is gradually revealed through the narratives of Mr Enfield, Mr Utterson, Dr Lanyon, and Jekyll’s butler Poole. Utterson, Jekyll’s lawyer, discovers that the nasty Mr. Edward Hyde is the heir of Dr. Jekyll’s fortune. Hyde is suspected of a murder. Utterson and Poole break into Jekyll’s laboratory and find the lifeless Hyde. Two documents explain the mystery: Jekyll’s old friend, the late Dr. Lanyon, tells that Jekyll and Hyde are the same person. In his own account Jekyll tells that to separate the good and evil aspects of his nature, he invented a transforming drug. His evil self takes the form of the repulsive Mr Hyde. Jekyll’s supplies of drugs run out and he finds himself slipping involuntarily into being Hyde. Jekyll kills himself, but the last words of the confession are written by his alter ego: “Here then, as I lay down the pen and proceed to seal up my confession, I bring the life of that unhappy Dr. Jekyll to an end.”
The story has been considered an criticism of Victorian double morality, but it can be read as a comment on Charles Darwin’s book The Origin of Species – Dr. Jekyll turns in his experiment the evolution backwards and reveals the primitive background of a cultured human being. Henry James admired Stevenson’s “genuine feeling for the perpetual moral question, a fresh sense of the difficulty of being good and the brutishness of being bad”. (‘Robert Louis Stevenson’ by Henry James in Century Magazine 35, April 1888) Modern readers have set the story against Freudian sexual theories and the split in man’s psyche between ego and instinct, although the “split” takes the form of a physical change, rather than inner dissociation. The conflict between Jekyll and Hyde reveals also era’s class phobias. Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has become an icon of popular culture and adapted among others into screen over 20 times. The story of double personality and metamorphosis appealed strongly to Victorian readers. The novel was partly based on Stevenson’s and W.E. Henley’s play DEACON BRODIA (1880), where an Edinburgh councilor is publicly respectable person but privately a thief and rakehell. The basic theme of true identity have attracted such writers as Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, 1818), Hans Christian Andersen (‘The Ugly Duckling’, 1845), Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment, 1866), Bram Stoker (Dracula, 1897), Franz Kafka (‘Metamorphosis’, 1915).
When slavery has torn apart one’s heritage, when the past is more real than the present, when the rage of a dead baby can literally rock a house, then the traditional novel is no longer an adequate instrument. And so Pulitzer Prize-winner Beloved is written in bits and images, smashed like a mirror on the floor and left for the reader to put together. In a novel that is hypnotic, beautiful, and elusive, Toni Morrison portrays the lives of Sethe, an escaped slave and mother, and those around her. There is Sixo, who “stopped speaking English because there was no future in it,” and …. Baby Suggs, who makes her living with her heart because slavery “had busted her legs, back, head, eyes, hands, kidneys, womb and tongue;” and Paul D, a man with a rusted metal box for a heart and a presence that allows women to cry. At the center is Sethe, whose story makes us think and think again about what we mean when we say we love our children or freedom. The stories circle, swim dreamily to the surface, and are suddenly clear and horrifying. Because of the extraordinary, experimental style as well as the intensity of the subject matter, what we learn from them touches at a level deeper than understanding.
Cath Corri
“Song of Solomon” (1978) with its description of the black world in life and legend, forms an excellent introduction to the work of Toni Morrison. Milkman Dead’s quest for his real self and its source reflects a basic theme in the novels. The Solomon of the title, the southern ancestor, was to be found in the songs of childhood games. His inner intensity had borne him back, like Icarus, through the air to the Africa of his roots. This insight finally becomes Milkman’s too.
“Beloved” (1987) continues to widen the themes and to weave together the places and times in the network of motifs. The combination of realistic notation and folklore paradoxically intensifies the credibility. There is enormous power in the depiction of Sethe’s action to liberate her child from the life she envisages for it, and the consequences of this action for Sethe’s own life.
Emily’s House.
Emily’s house has many rooms – where children play and men and women find their togetherness in language. All of her rooms are red – womb-like and warm. Laughter pervades the house – sheering smiles, a touch of love through times tended by her eyes, sometimes tears but mainly her house is filled with the feelings of life and the whole of humanity sits gently on her red sofa, cushioned by pillows that feel like pink clouds against your skin.
You cannot enter her house if you carry a key to its main door – the entrance to her porch is open always, but only if you are a free soul and care about others will she let you in. The house has large star-shaped white windows and no roof, for it is connected to the inside as well as the outside of her essence and being – is earthly, fantastically real. Its location is anywhere, everywhere, right there beside you.
Large gardens hem its borders and from her kitchen she can feed a multitude, walk on water, change the ten commandments to fit history’s makings – immortalize sinners as well as those blessed with purity.
On entering her house you will find that the rooms form a labyrinth – a spectacular road to a journey of knowing who and what you are – always special, always present in the songs she sings of womanhood. You are beloved (always) – for she is yours – the sound of the name and the name of the sound – Emily. Emily’s Shoes. Diamonds on the sloes of her feet. Emily’s house – a place of reincarnation – re-birth, remedy and healing.
The stairs are curved with silver banisters and marked in ascendancy with the imprint of the many hands that have climbed her braided stairs to paradise. Pink and silver ribbons guide the way to the top floor – the place she needs you to reach! Only one room matters to her and its door has no handle.
There she is waiting for you – goddess of the sky and sea, holding sea-shells and the flight of the birds in her hand. She has lived in this room all of her life – its attic shape domed like her mind is large with thoughts that call you to her – soul-mate, sister, daughter, mother, she walks in beauty like the night waiting for you – no invitation needed should you call her by her name.
Although considered one of Shakespeare’s less popular plays, there has been a continued interest in theatrical stagings of Coriolanus in the twentieth century. Jonathan Kent’s 2000 production of the play featured stage and film star Ralph Fiennes in the title role. Robert Shore (2000) notes that Kent’s production at London’s Almeida Theater focused heavily on the personal over the political. Rather than exploring the conflict between the plebeians and patricians, Shore contends, Kent explored—almost exclusively—the relationship between Coriolanus and his mother. Shore states that Fiennes’s portrayal of Coriolanus offered a psychological portrait in step with the approach of the production as a whole. Ben Brantley (2000) reviews the same production staged in New York. Brantley finds that the production was accessible and the performances of the supporting cast were excellent, but faults both the production and Fiennes with failing to dig below the surface and explore the play’s deeper issues. John Lahr (2000) also evaluates the New York staging of Kent’s production, and contends that Fiennes did not play his role with any sense of humor or heroism. Lahr also faults Kent’s direction for lacking a point of view, and finds that the director failed to risk a psychological interpretation of the relationship between Coriolanus and his mother. In her review of the Kent production in London, Heidi Holder (2001) discusses the importance of the setting to the success of the production, describing the way the imposing set emphasized the psychological and physical violence of the play. Holder praises Fiennes’s performance, finding it both subtle and emotionally complex.
Coriolanus – my favourite Shakespearian Play – I love this play simply because of it’s HUBRIS – Coriolanus himself is larger than life – in stature, ambition and language itself. I also like the mother/son development of a nurturing kind of misdirected pride – a bond that is as fatal as a fall from grace itself. Full of metaphors, similes and self-admiration it’s number one on the play list for me!!!!!!
THEMES –
POWER :
“Thy valiantness was mine, thou suck’st it from me;” (III.ii.129)
Volumnia tells Coriolanus that he inherited from her the martial valor for which he is famed. Volumnia has lived out her martial ambitions through her son. It later turns out that his valor is hers in another sense, too: so dominated is he by her that he is prepared to set aside valor’s demands in accordance with her will.
HUBRIS-
“You common cry of curs! Whose breath I hate
As reek o’ th’ rotten fens, whose loves I prize
As the dead carcasses of unburied men
That do corrupt my air, I banish you.” (III.iii.119-122)
Coriolanus responds to Brutus and Sicinius’s informing him that he is banished from Rome for being a traitor to the people. Coriolanus’s pride quickly rises, and he insists that it is he who banishes them, just as he would wish to banish a bad smell. He refers to them as a “cry of curs,” a pack of dogs, showing that he thinks of the plebeians as being so low that they are barely human.