Slow, lingering death lies in the daily carnage of body and spirit- not only of her own, but more so with Tom's. And so on that night, before Steven came and start his abusing spree of the mother and child, Julie prepared a special dinner for her and Tom. She and her son then devoured a delicious bowl of meatball soup, mixed with insecticide. In a matter of hours,

Clearly, color, specifically the color red, plays a significant symbolic role in developing these aforementioned central themes. At the most basic level, in a book that is primarily about slavery, color is a powerful theme as the colors of black and white divide society and is the entire reasoning for the conflicts of slavery. Even after emancipation, the colors of black and white continue to create conflict, as even Sethe

Beloved is a contemporary novel with the appeal of a ghost story, a mystery, and a work of historical fiction. It is a complex literary work that pieces together a story line of complexity with descriptions of how African-American people were treated before, during, and directly after the Civil War. This beautifully written and Pulitzer-Prize wining novel examines three generations of women -- one who was born in Africa and

Beloved by Toni Morrison is a haunting, darkly beautiful and intensely moving novel that depicts the profound traumatic reality of slavery and its repercussions on one woman's life, her mental stability and psychological well-being, her ideas of and abilities in motherhood, her entire sense of self, even her basic humanity. Beloved tells the story of an escaped slave woman who, when faced with capture, slipped into a state of psychosis

"The best thing [Sethe] was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing -- the part of her that was clean" (250). She had been made to endure a lot which most slave women experienced during enslavement. They were brutally raped, used and beaten and often had to work as prostitutes. "I got close. I got close. To

Swift unnavigable waters, swinging screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for their sweet white blood.... But it wasn't the jungle blacks brought with them to this place from the other place. It was the jungle whitefolks planted in them. And it grew. It spread....The screaming baboon lived under their own white skin; the red gums were their own. (Morrison, 198-199) The strong bond between Sethe and her children reflects