meeeeeeeeeeesha^-^

this is my Beloved summary, well it's not mine i just shortedned the original:

As narrative strategy, remembrance, in Morrison's words, is "a journey to a site to see what remains have been left behind and to reconstruct the world that these remains imply" (qtd. in Samuels and Hudson-Weems 97). As in Marcel Proust's The Remembrance of Things Past, the recovery of lost experience is triggered by some external, ostensibly insignificant event. For example, in Beloved Sethe worked hard to remember as close to nothing as was safe. Unfortunately her brain was devious. She might be hurrying across a field, running practically, to get to the pump quickly and rinse the chamomile sap from her legs. Nothing else would be in her mind. ... Then something. The plash of water, the sight of her shoes and stockings awry on the path where she had firing them; or Here Boy lapping in the puddle near her feet, and suddenly there was Sweet Home rolling, rolling, rolling out before her eyes, and although there was not a leaf on that farm that did not make her want to scream, it rolled itself out before her in shameless beauty. It never looked as terrible as it was and it made her wonder if hell was a pretty place too. Fire and brimstone all right, but hidden in lacy groves. Boys hanging from the most beautiful sycamores in the world. It shamed her--remembering the wonderful soughing trees rather than the boys. Try as she might to make it otherwise, the sycamores beat out the children every time and she could not forgive her memory for that. (6)  Beloved is the story of Sethe Suggs's quest for social freedom and psychological wholeness. Sethe struggles with the haunting memory of her slave past and the retribution of Beloved, the ghost of the infant daughter that she killed in order to save her from the living death of slavery. On a legendary and mythic level, Beloved is a ghost story that frames embedded narratives of the impact of slavery, racism, and sexism on the capacity for love, faith, and community of black families, especially of black women, during the Reconstruction period. Set in post-Civil-War Cincinnati, Beloved is a womanist neo-slave narrative of double consciousness, a postmodern romance that speaks in many compelling voices and on several time levels of the historical rape of black American women and of the resilient spirit of blacks in surviving as a people. As the author has explained in interviews and as a sympathetic white minister's report in the February 12, 1856, issue of the American Baptist reveals (see Bassett), at the center of Beloved is Morrison's retelling of the chilling historical account of a compassionate yet resolute self-emancipated mother's tough love. Margaret Garner, with the tacit sympathy of her sexagenarian mother-in-law, cut the throat of one of her four children and tried to kill the others to save them from the outrages of slavery that she had suffered. Guided by the spirits of the many thousands gone, as inscribed in her dedication, Morrison employs a multivocal text and a highly figurative language to probe her characters' double consciousness of their terribly paradoxical circumstances as people and non-people in a social arena of white male hegemony. She also foregrounds infanticide as a desperate act of" 'thick'" love (164) by a fugitive-slave mother "with iron eyes and backbone to match" (9). "'Love is or it ain't,'" Sethe, the dramatized narrator/protagonist, says in reproach to a shocked friend, Paul D. "'Thin love ain't love at all'" (164). Indignantly reflecting on Paul D's metonymic reprimand that she" 'got two feet.., not four'" (165), she later expands on their oppositional metaphors in reverie: "Too thick, he said. My love w as too thick. What he know about it? Who in the world is he willing to die for? Would he give his privates to a stranger in return for a carving?" (203).  Foregrounding the theme of motherhood, Morrison divides the text into twenty-eight unnumbered minisections, the usual number of days in a woman's monthly menstrual cycle, within three larger, disproportionate sections. Within these sections, Sethe experiences twenty-eight happy days of "having women friends, a mother-in-law, and all of her children together; of being part of a neighborhood; of, in fact, having neighbors at all to call her own" (173). Also within these sections, the passion and power of memory ebb and flow in a discontinuous, multivocal discourse of the present with the past. Unlike the univocal, nineteenth-century slave narratives, in which plot rides character in the protagonist's journey of transformation from object to subject, Beloved is a haunting story of a mother's love that frames a series of interrelated love stories (maternal, parental, filial, sororal, conjugal, heterosexual, familial, and communal) by multiple narrators. These stories begin in 1873 and end in 1874, but flash back intermittently to 1855. In the flashbacks and reveries, the omniscient narrator invokes ancestral black women's remembrances of the terror and horror of the Middle Passage. She also probes the deep physical and psychic wounds of Southern slavery, especially the paradoxes and perversities of life on Sweet Home plantation in Kentucky, and recalls Sethe's bold flight to freedom in Ohio in 1855. Freedom, as Paul D's and Sethe's stories most dramatically illustrate, is "to get to a place where you could love anything you chose--not to need permission for desire" (162). The metaphors of personal and communal wholeness in the text heighten the psychological realism of its womanist themes of black kinship, motherhood, sisterhood, and love. Besides the structural analogue to a woman's natural reproductive cycle, the text frequently and dramatically highlights metaphors and metonyms for the agony and ecstasy, despair and hope, of loving, birthing, nurturing, and bonding. Heart, breasts, milk, butter, water, and trees--these recurring tropes first appear in the opening eight mini-sections as the vehicles for controlling the psychological emotional, and moral distances among the narrators, characters, and implied reader, who participate, on various levels, in Sethe's historical and mythic quest. Our sympathies for Sethe are strengthened, however, through her grim reverie and dialogue with Paul D. Through them we discover that, earlier in 1855, while pregnant with Denver and before she could escape with her husband Halle to join their children in Ohio with the milk to nurse her baby girl, she was outrageously violated. "I am full God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth," she remembers, "one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up." Weaving into her story the additional gruesome details provided eighteen years later by Paul D, who knew her from their shared years of slavery on the ironically named Sweet Home plantation, the horror continues: Add my husband to it, watching, above me in the loft--hiding close by--the one place he thought no one would look for him, looking down on what I couldn't look at at all. And not stopping them--looking and letting it happen. ... There is also my husband squatting by the churn smearing the butter as well as its clabber all over his face because the milk they took is on his mind. And as far as he is concerned, the world may as well know it. (70)  Ella, an agent on the Underground Railroad who twice rescues Sethe, believes in root medicine but not love. As a result of Ella's having been regularly abused sexually while in puberty by her master and his son, "'the lowest yet,'" she considers sex disgusting and love a "serious disability." She remembers having delivered, "but would not nurse, a hairy white thing, fathered by 'the lowest yet'" (258-59). While she understands Sethe's rage in the shed, she regards Sethe's reaction as prideful and misdirected. Even so, "... Ella didn't like the idea of past errors taking possession of the present.., of sin moving on in the house, unleashed and sassy" (256). Morally and emotionally, the relationship of the past to the present is relative, not absolute. Similarly, Baby Suggs, an "unchurched preacher" who is driven to bed to think about the colors of things by the un-Christian ways of white Christians, passes on the bittersweet wisdom of her years in stories she tells to her granddaughter Denver and her daughter-in-law Sethe. Baby Suggs's heart, her faith and love, began to collapse twenty-eight days after Sethe's arrival, when white slave catchers violated her home and terrorized Sethe into killing Beloved, the daughter of the only son Baby Suggs was allowed to mother, Halle. "What she called the nastiness of life," the sympathetic implied author tells us in free indirect discourse, was the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because the pieces included her children. Halle she was able to keep the longest. Twenty years. A lifetime. Given to her, no doubt, to make up for hearing that her two girls, neither of whom had their adult teeth, were sold and gone and she had not been able to wave goodbye. To make up for coupling with a straw boss for four months in exchange for keeping her third child, a boy, with her--only to have him traded for lumber in spring of the next year and to find herself pregnant by the man who promised not to and did. That child she could not love and the rest she would not. "God take what He would," she said. And He did, and He did, and He did and then gave her Halle who gave her freedom when it didn't mean a thing. (23) Unlike Morrison's The Bluest Eye and the womanist texts of Alice Walker, in Beloved black men are not stereotyped as "low-down dirty dog[s]. Although circumstances may reduce some to debasing themselves with cows, clabber, or the daughters of their lovers, Baby Suggs, Sethe, and the implied author agree: "'A man ain't nothing but a man ...'" (23). Even Gamer, the benevolent master of Sweet Home, stands out among his white neighbors for treating his slaves (Paul D, Paul A, Paul F, Halle, and Sixo) like men. "'Bought em thataway, raised em thataway,'" he boasts with dramatic irony. Gamer allows Halle to hire himself out on weekends for five years to buy his mother's freedom, allows his slaves to have guns, and even allows them to marry rather than breed them like animals. Thus, although Sethe was a desirable young girl of thirteen when she arrived at the plantation, the Sweet Home men, who were all in their twenties and "so sick with the absence of women they had taken to calves," did not rape her. They "let the iron-eyed girl be, so she could choose" (10). Clearly, the theme, protagonist, structure, and style privilege a black woman's perspective, but sexual politics complements rather than dominates racial politics in the implied author's celebration of black people as more than the dehumanized victims of brutal social oppression.

 King Lear is not like most other tragedies where fate suddenly turns against the main characters. Instead Lear, being the main charcater, goes from being of the highest rank, both in society (as king) and his family (as father), to being the lowest he can be. This is a point when he cannot get the help he rightfully deserves and is forced to literally need his basic survival needs. He becomes homeless and eventually meets Edgar on this strange path of life. Lear also has his Fool with him, who is anything but what his name would suggest. He also has his faithful servant Kent who stays loyal till the end. Then Edgar meets his blind father Gloucester and saves him from suicide by being his insane guide. Gloucester does show a change in heart when he feels pity for King Lear and eventually for his son Edmund. In turn fate opens up a path for Gloucester to be avenged; that path being the one both he and Edgar follow. Thus revenge is evetually attained by Edgar but only because Gloucester changed. Both Lear and Gloucester were wronged by their children, but they failed to see the child that was the key to their happiness. These two stories coexist to emphasize the feelings gathered by the heart. They eventually come together to make the viewer/reader feel that true love between a good child and a good parent can always do such a relationship justice. Lear dies a tragic death not because of all he's been through, but because after everything Cordelia was the only daughter who loved him, and at the end she died.

ok so here's a part that i don't really understand: "According to Shakespeare's plan, the guilty, it is true, are all punished, for wickedness destroys itself; but the virtues that would bring help and succor are either too late or are overmatched by the cunning activity of malice." = i think the quote is saying that the guilty characters in shakespeare's plays/novels are punished because their own evil within themselves is their downfall but the things in their life or "virtues" (which would be cordelia i assume) that are suppose to help them and make them be a better person become overshadowed by the "the cunning activity" which i would think would be king lear's arrogance and foolishness. so basically bad characters can be helped but they are so evil that the help they need is overlooked by their evilness (not sure if thats a word). hope that helped a lil lol = = <span style="color: #000000; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif; font-size: 12pt;">- briana :)  ﻿thnx Briana, that does help, and now i feel -- (really i cant put in that word?) lol, actually that wasn't funny at all =(   lol your welcome and it is kinda funny lol   -briana  = Hello Ladies. I have one question regarding Misha's critical excerpt for all of you. The quote suggests that, "the guilty are punished because they are wicked"...does this apply to Gloucester and Lear? Are they being punished in the play because they have wronged Cordelia and Edgar? If this applies to Goneril, Regan, and Edmund - then, it must apply to Gloucester and Lear because in their own ways were just as cruel to their "good" children....No? Please let me know your thoughts on this....Mrs. Moore

<span style="color: #1c923d; display: block; font-family: Verdana,Geneva,sans-serif;">okay i do agree with this quote because no one's perfect and i think that fate somewhat revolves around karma. So Gloucester & Lear aren't the best people in the world, which is why i feel that they were punished because of their wrongdoings, just as everyone else was..... but i can't explain Cordelia... her death was just a sacrafice for the greater good... i guess.