Character Development In Toni Morrisons "Beloved"

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Chance Lompa English II Nov 23, 2010 Answer in Opposites Throughout the course of Toni Morrisons, Beloved, a shift occurs between mother and daughter, a complete reversal of roles if you will. Denver, starting out as a very dependent girl lacking purpose is transformed from the sheltered to the protector. She in the end must take care of and watch over her once strong and independent mother, Sethe who was at the beginning of the novel a strong and fiercely independent woman is reduced to a person more like a child herself than the daughter that looks after her. She has becomes completely dependent and lost. However, each in their own way matures along this journey, and gains a better understanding, or knowledge of their lives and themselves. The main character, Sethe appears first as an extremely independent and strong woman, she refuses to accept help from anyone. Which the black community sees as her being stuck up, “trying to do it all alone with her nose in the air” (Morrison 299). As soon as Paul D. arrives on her doorstep, bringing her past with him, her resolve to block out the past at all costs begin to crumble, as do her hardened exterior actions. When Paul D. first arrives, Denver, Sethe’s daughter notices that she is, “Looking in fact acting like a girl, instead of the quiet, queenly woman Denver had known all her life. The one who never looked away” (Morrison 14). If Paul D. introduced Sethe to unwanted feelings of her past, then Beloved’s appearance at 124 flooded her with them. Beloved, Sethe’s murdered baby’s ghost supposedly back from the dead, brings with her memories of “ two boys [bleeding] in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood soaked child to her chest”( Morrison 175). The bloodied child Sethe was holding was Beloved, her own daughter whom she killed just so that she would not have to live

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