Shock as modern slavery up 10m in five years

Beloved sheds light on the painful and traumatic past of African Americans who were trapped in the institutionalised slave system. Sethe's story was derived from the true story of Margaret Garner, an enslaved woman who escaped her captors with her family and fled to the free state of Ohio. When slave catchers found them and stormed their safehouse, Garner killed her two-year-old daughter, seeing it as a mercy rather than submitting her to more torture and suffering as a slave. The novel, set twelve years after the end of the American Civil War, features nine people who were slaves on Sweet Home, but Sethe's suffering is the most pronounced, as she experienced physical abuse, torture, humiliation and rape on the plantation inflicted by its manager, Schoolteacher, and his nephews. These traumatic incidents motivated Sethe to kill her eldest daughter to spare her the possibility of having to suffer the way that Sethe did. The horror of this act by such a loving mother emphasises that existing as a slave was an unliveable torment, to which death would have been preferred.

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The University of Cambridge is opening a two-year inquiry into its links to the slave trade. How much have you personally benefited from slavery? The answer could be more than you think...

Memory is an important tool for dealing with past trauma in Beloved. The characters, including Sethe, repress their pain to move forwards with their lives, but Morrison implies that it needs to be recalled in order to find peace with life. At the same time, memory is also a force that separates Sethe from those around her, as her growing closeness with Beloved drives her into madness. Toni Morrison stated that the book was supposed to act as a means of preserving the memory of slavery and forcing people to remember its atrocities, saying "there is no suitable memorial or plaque or wreath or wall or park or skyscraper lobby", and that Beloved should serve the purpose of such a memorial instead.

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Sethe has been vilifiedWhen unpleasant and abusive things are said about someone. by the community for killing her daughter, but she never vocalises that she has lost faith in her decision. Genuinely believing that Schoolteacher would come back to submit herself and her children to a lifetime of torture and enslavement, she saw it as the only ethical choice. As such, her unthinkable act of murder is presented as a loving and selfless act of maternal sacrifice: she says "it's my job to... keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that." For her, sparing her children of having to experience the inconceivably hopeless life of anguishSevere suffering, often mental. and pain that she had experienced would be the profoundest expression of love she is capable of. Yet her parasitic relationship with Beloved proves the depth of her repressed guilt and self-doubt, a guilt that she has also wordlessly absorbed as part of her duty as a mother.

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The historic sites built with slave money

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Toni Morrison's novels often centre around the lives of women, and men occupy a secondary role. However, in Beloved complex interplays between slavery, race and masculinity are central. The men in Beloved, such as Paul D, have their masculinity altered and restructured by their experiences of slavery and White supremacy, and seek to find a way to define their perceptions of masculinity outside of the paradigm created by White society and White patriarchy. Some critics assert that Beloved takes an intersectionalDescribes the way in which different types of discrimination (e.g. sexism, racism) are connected to each other. approach, presenting gender as a factor secondary to race and underlining that White men and Black men have no real commonality despite their shared gender identity.

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Loss of self is seen as a psychological impact of the dehumanising effects of slavery. Beloved, representing the daughter who was literally lost at her mother's hand, brings back a lot of the repressed feelings and memories that characters such as Sethe, Denver and Paul D had lost and forces them to grapple with the things that they had taken away from them during slavery. When Beloved disappears, Sethe says that she has lost "her best thing", highlighting Beloved's role as a symbol of that which was taken away from them by their torment under slavery.

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