The Strategy Implementation Of Starbucks Management Essay

The Strategy Implementation Of Starbucks Management Essay The Strategic business management and planning process is becoming more and more widely used by small firms, large companies, non profit organizations, governmental companies as well as multinational companies. David (1995) The process of empowering managers and employees has almost limitless benefits. In this study we find the strategic business management and planning of Starbucks Company. Starbucks that provide the one of best coffee shop in the world. They are starting their journey from 1970. The name of the Starbucks Company is taken from a classic American novel in 19th century that is Herman Melvilles Moby Dick. starbucks To identify the goals and values of Starbucks, we analyses their glorious history. After journey their 1970s then 1980s join their company Howard Schultz in 1982s. In 1990s they are opening a publicly traded company. In 2000s we see that Starbucks established their branch more than 15000 locations across the globe. They offer new product in 2000s that are Tazo ® tea and Frappuccino ® ice blended beverages are more popular to the consumers. The goal of the Starbucks is that identifies achievement of this organization and analyzes their competitive position by discussing their previous experience. To achieve their goals they identify the relationship between different goals. They traced their business goal level to produced business goal hierarchy. Rational (2003) In the value of the Starbucks Company they identify the consumer behaviour to their company and employee. The make a statement about the value of the consumers, their suppliers and local community. Heathfield Characteristics of strategic business management and planning can be defined by the formulation of science and arts, cross functional decision implementation and evaluation that is capability of the company to reach their goals and objectives. These characteristics implies the strategic management and planning that are focused on the management integration, accounting/finance, marketing, operations, development and research and computer software information to gain the companys success. As this definition implies, strategic management focuses on integrating management, marketing, finance or accounting, production/operations, research and development, and computer information system to achieve organizational success. Kargar The characteristics of strategic business management can be categorized in three stages that are strategy formulation, strategy implementation and strategy evaluation. In strategy formulation includes developing a business mission, identifying an organizations external opportunities and threats, determining internal strengths and weaknesses, establishing long term objectives, generating alternative strategies and choosing particular strategies to pursue. Strategy implementation is the action stage of strategic management. Implementation means mobilizing employees and managers to put formulated strategies into action. Strategy evaluation is the final stage in strategic management. Manager desperately needs to know particular strategies are not working well that means strategy evaluation is the primary means of obtaining this information. To develop business strategy and plan create a model that is conceptual framework of business model that are identifying the economic situation and provide the value of customer. In classic model that is give a picture about the customers, the value of the customers, and cost of the delivery to the customers and make profit, etc. In contemporary model used in business that are discuss about the product quality, types of product that are delivered to the customers. Here also consider about the services that are provide to the customers. In contemporary model also give a picture about the business operating system and organizing value. The external environment means impact of the forces of economy, influences of political issue, market competition, local culture, social impact, local environment, technology influences, etc. It can be simplify the customer requirement in industrial and customer goods and services. It can be impact on the developing goods categories, strategies of market division, different type performance offered, and the option of market policy and market competition. blurtit The Starbucks Company is running in more than 25 countries with United States of America. In the impact of external environment, they faced many training program for their employee, continue supervision and monitoring of the branch. They also need management market competition and keep patch with technology. The organizational governance is responsible for making the function of the organization. These functions are most effective and efficient for the company. They are regularly evaluating the function of the company by board of meeting. These organizational requirements are creating a committee to make an appropriate structure for this company that are influence their conditions and need. This governance requirement also influences to set flexible guidelines for the effective functioning for the company. The company forecast means which organizations deliberate and arrange for the future. It incorporates thinking the future results of this organizations decision. It depends the organizations full future, the future products outcomes, the future operations and programs, future infrastructure of this organization. MXI (2010)To take the company forecast, it sometimes solves many questions that are arising of this company. These questions may be companys future profit that is loss or gain, their product demand growing in the competitive market, etc. The most important forecasting is the financial change forecasting. It helps the organizations to take right decision in right time. For this reason, organization can prevent their financial loss. By taking change forecasting, they can increase their product quality and reach their target product within a short time. In order to shape strategic option, the Starbucks company forecast changes by ensure unanimity of purpose within the organization. And provide a basis, or standard, for allocating organizational resources and establish a general tone and organizational climate. And serve as a focal point for individuals to identify with the organizations purpose and direction and to deter those who cannot from participating further in the organizations activities. This also specifies organizational purposes and the translations of these purposes into objectives in such a way that cost, time, and performance parameters can be assessed and controlled. It is also facilitate the translation of objectives into work structure involving the assignment of responsible elements within the organization. Starbucks are coming with variety of premium coffee retailer with other snacks and sandwiches. They have worldwide network of over 37 countries that are well impression and good image from many other coffee shop. This network skill provides this company a high prominent power than other coffee company. This company currently strong depend on the United States market depended. It generally target and competitive with middle and high earners coffee houses. As example of Bulgaria market that valuable market place for this company. Another reason that is Bulgaria is the membership of the early stage in European Union. Another valuable market place is in Sweden, where many other coffee shops are failing in competition with Starbucks. Starbuck (2007) 3.2 The Appropriate strategies for emerging, maturing and declining competitive positions are described in below: Get a new global market first. Trying to gain market share from well entrenched competitors is exceptionally difficult. Invest in new technology. Successfully firms in the 1990s are going to utilize the most efficient technology. Consider alternative sourcing. Locate manufacturing facilities in low labour cost areas of the world. Install the right managerial system. Ensure that managers in foreign markets understand the culture and languages in host countries. Take early losses if necessary. Sacrifice short term profit for long term rewards. Join forces with competitors. Collaborate with competitors who have expertise in other parts of the value chain. Johnson ( 2008) 3.3 Any uncertain happen in a company is called risk that is impact of this company. The risk will be coming from different sides that are organization strategic risk, risk of finance, operational risk and compliance and legal risk. Lynch (2005) These risks are impact in every company look like in Starbucks. Most of the impact is coming from the financial risk. Because finance is main backbone of any kind of business. In operational risk impact the daily activities of this company. Risk impact can be categorized in low medium and high. In high risk impact are serious risk in funds, reputation and operation. And in medium risk impact is significant risk occurring of fund, reputation and operation. And in low risk impact is less significant impact of those fields that is mentioned above. Success of a business depends on the product and services that are provided to the customer in the competitive market on a global basis, not in the local thinking. Any company or organization is going to be loose position, if they are not keep patch with the competitive market and good range of product price. In the world every remote and every corner of the world are cover by the global market that is called globalization. Cultural, industrial policies, joint venturing, and exporting are important in the strategic management process of international firms. As a world economics and consumption patterns become increasingly similar and interrelated, political and economic changes represent major changes major opportunities for or threats. scribd There are different kinds of stakeholders that are impact on a company. scribd The primary stack holders that are customers and suppliers without those any company have no existence. And the secondary stakeholder is the community without this company can be exit. And there are another stake holders are active stake holders and passive stake holders that means active stake holders are employees and managers and passive stake holders are local community and government of this country. Stake holders are impact the companys present and future strategies in different ways. The external impacts are from competitors, customers, market situations, product suppliers and from local government. And the internal impacts are coming form company management, manager, stuff or employees, etc. To understand the impact of the stake holders in a strategic business management and planning its need priorities of the stake holders that are low and high power impact of stake holders. The high impact of sta ke holders means where company are fully engage about this impact. And low power impact where company have no concern at all about this impact. The business activity of the Starbucks Company is wide range. They operating in the many number of the countries and where environmental factor is play an important role. They need proper respond about environmental factor and need to make strategic planning. Every factor is coming from different channel, so its need to flexible responding to existence of this company. As we know that, Starbucks the world famous premier company in the coffee world. They always try to purchase their raw material that is coffee bean must be in high quality for this why they can serve the consumers the best coffee drinks. They believe that they need always happy of their customers that are depending on the future of the company and reputation of the company. A successful strategic management and planning are depend on supports from all sides that external, internal, and discipline in the company, motivation of the employee, hard working from all managers and employees. That is depending on the size and type of organizations, other management issues could be equally important to successfully strategy management in a company.

Explore Owen’s Use of Metaphor in Mental Cases Essay

Mental Cases, written in 1918 by Wilfred Owen, explores the damage and deterioration of the minds of soldiers as a direct result of the First World War. Owen’s determination to make known the horror of war mentally is evident throughout; his use of facts increases his ability to shock – it is his tactic almost. He describes in absolute detail the horrendous, physical symptoms of mental torment and emphasises that it was not only physical injury that left its mark, but that memories made such an impact that it could reduce men to wrecks. The use of metaphor; a figure of speech in which a term or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable in order to suggest a resemblance, will be explored further throughout Owen’s poem ‘Mental Cases.’ Whilst it is clear almost immediately that Owen intends to shock the reader, it also becomes evident that his aim is at once more refined and more complicated than that simple desire to shock. It is through his use of metaphor that he achieves this; if he simply intended to alarm the reader he could state in simple terms the psychological effect on these soldiers, but by using metaphor he explores their psyche in a much more visceral, provoking and sensory manner. The reader is taken aback by the words that Owen uses, but the real shock is essentially confirmed through his use of metaphor. The reader feels a deeper sense of just how horrific the situation is for these soldiers. The use of the words ‘flying muscles’ create images of fragility and gore but the use of ‘shatter’ as a metaphorical description of these muscles has a deeper impact; it is the external imagery that generates the primary shock. But it is through the use of metaphors such as ‘These are men whose minds the dead have ravished’ that we perceive a much stronger sense of their suffering. The idea that the dead can inflict so much agony and fear into the lives of these ‘set-smiling corpses’ is a horrific one. And yet through this one metaphor we can appreciate the pain of their suffering so much more than through the actual, numerous images that scar their minds. One gets the impression, while reading this poem that ‘these’ men are directly in front us. They lose their individuality and identity but through Owen’s use of direct speech to the reader we feel their presence strongly. Through Owen’s use of intense imagery and metaphors we are able to feel a nuance of what ‘they’ must feel in their unstable, traumatised predicament. â€Å"Sunlight seems a blood – smear; night comes blood black; Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.† These connotations of death, injury and loss surround their every waking and sleeping moment. It is not possible for these men to now know any different than the explosion of bombs, the raining of gunfire and the screaming of the dying, the smell of the dead, ‘Always they must see these things and hear them.’ The personification of pain, misery, memory and the dead all add to the sense of personality loss of these men. Misery ‘swelters,’ they are men that the ‘Dead have ravished,’ ‘memory fingers in their hair of murder.’ These men are not their own; they are conflated into mere ‘things’ through the metaphorical personification of abstract nouns. The form of the poem could be seen as a metaphor in conjunction with these men’s loss of identity; there are instances throughout the poem that could be related to anything but war but are then drawn back to the idea of battle. â€Å"Ever from their hair and through their hands’ palms / Misery swelters. Surely we have perished/ Sleeping, and walk hell; but who these hellish? It is the ambiguity of these ideas that connects with the ambiguity of the men. Mental Cases could also be seen as an extended metaphor of purgatory. Purgatory, as believed in the Roman Catholic Church, is a state in which the souls who have died in grace must expiate their sins, a place or condition of suffering, expiation or remorse.[1] Perhaps it is Owen’s way of emphasising the injustice of their sufferings; they have done nothing but good for their country and are now being ‘rewarded’ with the same handling of those souls in purgatory. Those souls who have sinned and now, only subsequent to their deaths are learning to be truly good again in order to save themselves from an infinity in Hell. Another argument could be that it creates feelings of liminality – these men are locked in something entirely different to anything we know, another world. The archaic use of the word ‘wherefore’ provides a certain biblical weight to the moral insinuations of their conditions. These ‘purgatorial shadows’ sit in a metaphorical hellish existence, the tortured gesticulations of their ‘drooping tongues,’ ‘jaws that slob their relish’ and their ‘baring teeth’ create an image of dehumanisation for the reader and through the effective use of metaphor we can relate these images of disability to the shell-shocked men, enabling us to conjure up an easier image, one that we are more accustomed to. The images of the disabled are a part of our daily life whereas those of the shell-shocked have probably been witnessed never by the reader. Owen’s employment of androgynous characters in the first stanza with the use of ‘these,’ ‘they’ and ‘their’ could be metaphorically symbolic of the Harlequin, first introduced in Dante’s Inferno. The Harlequin, a clown-like figure with hardly recognisable human qualities, is a genderless being who is tormented with a mental incapacity in Dante’s purgatorial ‘land.’ The ‘drooping tongues from jaws that slob their relish’ and the Harlequin share those inadequacies of the mind and are linked by a ‘human’ form that is somewhat distorted – the Harlequin through the use of cosmetics, reversible and without them, recognisable, these others by the perpetration of war and trapped with them forever. Dante’s Inferno and Mental Cases do also bear other resemblances through the use of metaphors; in part one of Dante’s Inferno, creative punishments are used to inflict a mental an d psychological pain on the protagonist. It is a pain which is purely vindictive and designed to inflict an emotional agony. This is one of two types of punishment that Dante uses. The first he borrows from forms of medieval torture and is physically agonising to the victims, the second is the punishment for sins committed. The ‘multitudinous murders that they once witnessed’ are the torturous punishments that are bestowed on these ‘purgatorial shadows,’ but it is the punishment for sins committed where the similarities must come to an end. Yes, like Dante, these men appear to be living in a limbo, a purgatorial existence, but because we know nothing of their previous sins, we cannot pass any judgement on whether they deserve to be where they are or not. The use of this metaphor continues to create these feelings of loss and opacity. Owen’s ability to make his words physical is achieved through the use of metaphor. While some would argue that it is his intense imagery that feeds our imagination, others would say it is his capacity to connect catholic ideas with the torment of these men to create metaphors that allow us to comprehend their situation. While he manages to convey this sense of loss, agony and torment, he does so in a way that screams detachment to an almost harsh level. Throughout the poem, his sympathy is essentially non-existent; it is important to note that he does not sympathise with these men as such but states why they are as they are. We see this ‘tactic’ to shock after his use of the metaphor in the third stanza, lines 3-4; â€Å"Sunlight seems a blood – smear; night comes blood black; Dawn breaks open like a wound that bleeds afresh.† This is then justified, almost as if even the poet himself cannot quite comprehend the extremity of their situation; as though he must write it down in its most brutal form in order to understand fully the extent of these men’s perdition. The whole poem, it could be argued, is in this way a metaphor in itself. The poet’s inability to comprehend fully the post-war effects on these men, results in a wording that reflects the mental capacity of the disabled; brutally honest, forthright and with no sparing of emotion. We witness his ‘explanation’ post metaphor; ‘Thus their heads wear this hilarious, hideous, awful falseness of set-smiling corpses.’ It could, however, be argued that Owen is simply using this approach to present to the reader the stigma of shell-shock. Throughout WW1, shell-shock was considered to be a neurological illness and, as a result of the war, something that should be pitied, apologised for and something that should not lead to the social outcast of its victims. This did not, however alter the treatment of these victims. It was easy to pity them from afar but when confronted by them, people would have been uncomfortable, uneasy and awkward. This would arise from the inability to converse with the afflicted, the appearance of their ‘fretted sockets’ and ‘’hideous awful falseness.’ Owen, it must be understood is not like these healthy but distanced people; he embraces the soldiers pain and converts it into a metaphor so vivid, enabling us to understand more their predicament. In conclusion, Owen’s use of metaphor is used to such a successful extent, that it allows the reader to imagine a type of person inflicted with the horrors of war in a way that would not be possible otherwise. It is, I feel, important to re-iterate the significant difference between imagery and metaphor. Yes, Owen’s use of powerful imagery is used effectively, but it is through his use of unrelenting metaphor that we receive an insight into the broken, dishevelled minds and bodies of the shell-shocked soldiers of World War One.

Critical Analysis of ‘Prelude’ by Katherine Mansfield Essay

Catherine Mansfield revolutionized the 20th Century English short story. In her works, she breaks away from the tradition of plots and endings. Her works are open-ended. She is the earlier writer who used the technique of stream-of-consciousness in her writings. Where, Plot is secondary to characters. Her prose gives a vivid and strong picture of ordinary lives. Her literary creations are masterpieces in the sense that they raise discomforting questions about identity, belonging and desire. She is a writer from New Zealand who retains the memories of her childhood spend in her country. ‘Prelude’ is a modern short story by New Zealander Mansfield. There are noteworthy autobiographical elements in ‘Prelude’. The theme and the characters are composed on the persons, she has known in her own life. The readers get a glimpse in to the minds of the characters. She uses extensive imagery from nature to hint at hidden layers of meaning of human life. As a literary work of art, ‘Prelude’ is a written narrative fiction, where there is a third-person narrator who is not in the story but an outsider observing from a distance. Character dominates over the plot. The story actually is a vivid picture of psychological state of mind of the characters. From the definition of narration by Ismail S Talib, we find that it is dualistic in nature. It consists of two elements: story and discourse. The story is the content and the discourse is the arrangement, emphasis or magnification of any of the elements of the content. In Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’, there is a story and the discourse is the journey from one consciousness to another. Finally emphasis is on analysing human mind. Regarding the end of narrative, in this regard, Chatman has said: ‘No end, in reality, is ever final in the way â€Å"The End† of a novel or film is’ (1978). There is another form of narrative where the end is not clear or explicit. It is ‘open end’ fiction. From the late nineteenth century onwards, this form has been extensively used by writers. According to the narrative theory, there is internal as well as external setting. External is the location where the action takes place and internal is the psychological state of the person. ‘Prelude’ deals with the psychological state of mind of Burrell family. According to this theory, there are different types of narrator. One of the types is third person-omniscient ‘who can move from place to place and backwards and forwards in time, and does not merely concentrate on the consciousness of one character’. In ‘Prelude’, it is the third person narrator who gilds from one consciousness to another in the course of the story. There is another concept in this theory; schema which ‘is a collection of the generic proper ¬ties of a meaningful category which is stored in a person’s memor ¬y for future retrieval’. In’ Prelude’, the author relies on her memories of life spend in her native country for her composition. The theory states that some characters are driving force behind some plots. Similarly, in ‘Prelude’, the plot will collapse without the characters in it. The characters bind the story together. The story is all about the expectations, inner turmoil, happiness and unhappiness of the adult characters. Modernism is a continuous project that incorporates within itself all serious change and progress. Modernism became a distinct cultural movement in the fist of twentieth century. The philosophic foundations of modernism are traced to the period between Marx Einstein. Darwin in his book â€Å"The Origin of Species† (1859) propounded the theory of evolution which is seen as an important step towards the development of modern mindset. The theory attacked the traditional beliefs regarding God. Next on the line was Freud’s theory of dreams. He considered dream as a â€Å"product of repressed desires† which created a stir in the realm of ideas. The concept of a definable unified normative self gave way to discontinuous, divided self. Self was then considered as the hidden designs of the unconscious. Psychoanalysis paved the path towards quest for self-knowledge. Short story evolved as an autonomous genre and became an important medium of expressing the petty and small truths and lies of human existence. The story developed from depicting the realism of life to more being allusive, ambivalent and self-reflexive. According to the book ‘Modernism’ by Peter Child, the meaning of the term ‘Modernism ‘is variously defined: as a genre, style, period or combination of all three. It stems from the term ‘modern’, taken from Latin word ‘modo’ which means anything ‘current’. The modernism in prose represents consciousness, perception, emotion, meaning and individuals’ relation to society in the form of internal monologue, stream-of-consciousness, irresolution and other techniques. In the phrase of Ezra Pound, ‘make it new’. By expressing the sensibilities of the time: of the city, of war, mass production and communication, New Women and aestheticism. It is expressed in compressed and complex form of literature. In literature, the focus shifts from broader moral concerns of society to deeper psychological problems of the individual, from external details of the events to their finer internal dynamics, and from a telescopic perspective of reality to a microscopic view of it. Another aspect of modern literature (form of art) as we find from the book ‘Modernism’ by Peter Child is that it is extremely compressed in the sense that it should be read with attention which is normally reserved for philosophy and poetry. Short story as a genre falls under written narrative fiction. Fictional narrative may refer to real people, actual places and events but it cannot be used as evidence of what happened in the real world. This story is a fictional narrative based on real life experience of the author. Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) is one of the few authors to attain prominence exclusively for short stories, and her works remain among the most widely read in world literature. .Her works are noted for their themes relating to women’s lives and social hierarchies as well as her sense of wit and characterizations. As a writer, she placed great emphasis to individual than to society. Her works are open-ended in the sense that it does not have a formalized ending to it. In her work ‘Prelude’, she applied the technique of ‘stream-of-consciousness’. She created her story on revealing the mental conflict of characters rather than the development of plot. The core idea raised by the story is that the narration delves in to the minds of the individuals. The tale does not have a conventional plot where the story unfolds through a sequence of events but focuses on a crisis or a mental conflict. We enter an individual consciousness to another. We get a glimpse of the mental state of the personas. In the course of the narration, very little ‘happens’ but the story gives us a vivid picture of personal crises that crucially affect each character’s internal well being while leaving the atmosphere of amiable, conventional family life intact. Kezia is a very imaginative child who find Parrot prints on the wallpaper as real parrots who ‘persisted in flying past Kezia with her lamp’. She also witnesses the killing of a chicken. Kezia’s unmarried and desperately timid Aunt Beryl is unsatisfied with her life and never shows her real self to others. Linda, Kezia’s mother pregnant with yet another child at times wishes to abandon the whole family and not even say goodbye. She visualizes her feelings for her husband in small packages, where she loves and respects her husband in one time to hate his later. His husband is a business tycoon who wants his roots in the country, which is the reason for their move from their town to their country home. He wishes for a son of his own. Modernism as Peter Child writes in his book is break away from convention. Katherine Mansfield’s brief life was also a lesson in casting off convention. Famously, Mansfield remarked ‘risk, risk everything’. She was rebellious in nature. She could not accept that all women have definite future of waiting for a husband as she wrote in one of her letter to her school friend when she was sixteen. In ‘Prelude’, Katherine explores the possibilities and discovery of the wide canvas of human life in the small domestic world of the Burrells. In the story, she questions the traditional believes of society, where a woman has the duty of getting married and bearing children for the family as Linda Murrell. Or the vacant side of a woman’s life where she stays at home and does the household chores. She has no profession of her own and no freedom of movement as in the case of the character of Aunt Beryl. Mansfield is a New Zealand writer. In her short life she has travelled to England and France but she had her roots firmly grounded in her native land. She uses her memories of childhood in her writing. He molds her characters on real people, places and even inscribes the colloquial speech of the country. ‘Prelude’ is a recount of one of the move her family made from their city home, from Tinakori Road in Wellington to Karori, five miles away to town. She reveals the insecurity and instability of her childhood connected with this repeated shift from one home to another. The portrayal of Linda Burrell is a depiction of her mother Annie Dyer, who has been described as ‘delicate and aloof’. Mrs. Linda Murrell is a character who keeps herself detached from the running of the household. It is her mother who runs the house. She has a neglecting attitude towards her daughters. She remains with her own dreams and expectations holed in her bedroom. She remains secluded from her family even when she is in midst of them: we find her on the easy chair rocking in the same room, where her husband and her sister are playing a game of crib. As she watches them, she thinks ‘how remote they look’. The character of Mr. Burrell is based on her father, Harold Beauchamp, who was a successful merchant. Mr. Murrell is a successful business man. He is a pompous man who prided himself of having a bargain regarding the new land which he now own. Rather than direct detail, her images stress on suggestion and implication. In Prelude she uses the images of plant aloe and birds to reveal the working of the mind of human beings.. The image of a rich young man under Linda’s window may imply that she wants to escape from her family and the rich household of her husband. The image of a child with bald head and bird may hint that she is overwhelmed with the burden of bearing one child after another. She likes the aloe so much because it has sharp thorns which restrict a person from coming near it. Also because it flowers every hundred years, Katherine Mansfield is the centre figure in the development of modern short story. She was born in New Zealand but spend much of her adult life in Europe. In the course of her adult life, she tried to extricate herself from the dominance of her family. She also removed herself from the expectation of society regarding women of her class. Her attitude towards life casts its shadow on her literary works. She writes without a conventional plot. Rather she concentrates on a particular point or crisis. She uses themes which are universal like isolation of man, the traditional role of men and women in society or the conflict between love and dissolution. The images in her works, elaborate farther the death of human psychology. References: Katherine Mansfield: Significance as a Writer [Internet], Katherine Mansfield Birthplace Society. Available from: < http://www. katherinemansfield. com/mansfield/signif. asp> [Accessed 31 August 2007] Akshaya Kumar. (2001) The icons of modernism with Euroamerican bias [Internet], available from: < http://www. tribuneindia. com/2001/20011216/spectrum/book1. htm> [Accessed 31 August 2007] Eric Eldred. â€Å"Prelude. † by Katherine Mansfield (1888-1923) [Internet], available from: [Accessed 31 August 2007] Peter Child. Modernism [Internet], available from: [Accessed 31 August 2007] Katherine Mansfield: Short Story Moderniser [Internet], available from: [Accessed 31 August 2007] Manfred Jahn. (2005) Narratology: A Guide to the Theory of Narrative [Internet], available from: [Accessed 31 August 2007] Ismail S Talib. Narrative Theory [Internet], available from: [Accessed 31 August 2007]

Sexuality and the Grotesque in Toni Morrisons Beloved Essay

Sexuality and the Grotesque in Toni Morrisons Beloved Grotesque images of rape, murder, and sexual abuse are recurring throughout Toni Morrisons novel Beloved. The ideals of the white oppressor, be it murder, rape, or sexual abuse were powerful forces that shaped the lives of many of the characters, especially the character Sethe. Rape and sexual abuse are two grotesque instances expressed throughout the novel. The most often referred to is the incident when Schoolteacher?s nephews stole Sethe?s breast milk but many other incidents included Paul D was forced to felicitate prison Guards on the chain gang every morning. Ella is locked up and repeatedly raped by a father and son she calls ?the worst yet?.†¦show more content†¦Violence and murder was also present throughout the novel, mostly caused by Schoolteacher. Schoolteacher burned Sixo, one of the sweet home boys, alive after attempting to escape. Paul A Garner, another sweet home boy, was tortured killed and hung ?headless and feetless? after being caught during escape. And after Sethe told on the boys who stole her breast milk to Mrs. garner, Schoolteacher ordered one of them to ?open up her back?. The beating she received from the nephews left a tree shaped myriad of scars ?with a trunk, branches, and even leaves? (Beloved 16). Another atrocious yet ?justifiable? murder was Sethe?s murder of her baby Beloved. ?Sethe kil ls her child so that no white man will ever ?dirty her,? so that no young man with ?mossy teeth? will ever hold down the child and suck her breasts? (Barnett 68). Her justification was to save Beloved from being returned to a life of slavery, rape, and murder. Another grotesque, a spiritual representation, was shown the character Beloved. ?The character Beloved is not just the ghost of Sethe?s dead child, she is a succubus, a female demon and nightmare figure that sexually assaults male sleepers and drain them of semen.? (Barnett 68) The character Beloved is able to take on different shapes to different people and haunts their dreams. At first driven out by the strong willed Paul D ?Beloved