Comparison of Feminist Lens: Beloved #2

For this last blog, I decide to compare my feminist views on Beloved by Toni Morrison with another feminist article. This article was The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison's "Beloved" by Barbara A Schapiro, a college student from Rhode Island.

In this article, Barbara A Shapiro writes about the emotional and physical consequences a slave faced after they were released into the free world in Beloved. She mentions multiple times how past slaves that are eventually released will never be mentally released from their tragic pasts in plantations.

She later mentions the character of Beloved and how she significantly affects the novel, and why her traits are unlike any other characters. Barbara says, “Beloved Does not delve into the roots of white domination,but there is a suggestion of fear and inadequate selfhood underlying the problem”. In this short phrase, the writer of the article expresses how she believes Beloved evokes fear in others, and does not feel like white people have any rights over her. Beloved leads the analysis of the feminist lens in an opposite direction. Women are not suppose to evoke fear in others, and black women in this time had no reason to believe they were equal or just as good as the whites.

Barbara also brings up the character of Setha had no mother figure, only what others had told her about her mother. The article says, “When she becomes a mother herself,she is so deprived and depleted that she cannot satisfy the hunger for recognition,the longed for "look," that both her daughters crave.” This phrase is trying to say that Sethe was so obsessed with this idea of being the long-loving mother she never had that she never got the chance to listen to her children and pay attention.

I completely agree with all of Barbara A Schapiro’s article, the character of Beloved is a mystery during the entire novel and complete opposite of what most view a women as. I also agree with the fact that Sethe is driven by an obsession of mothering her children protectively.