Feminist Lens: Analyzing Text #2

In this section of the book, Morrison shows that women can be just as aggressive and protective as men. They are capable of any good or bad act they want and gender does not matter. Gender roles are clearly switched in Beloved because She portrays an aggressive women capable of murder to getting her way, and this was not common in that time period.

A male’s common role in a household is to protect and work for their families. While a woman's role is to cook, clean, and take care of their children. In the novel, Beloved by Toni Morrison the female role is swapped with the male role.The novel takes place at a time where the male role is by far more superior than the female role. It was believed that women needed a male to survive. The main character Sethe is a former slave and a loving mother who is determined to keep her children safe from the world. Since she suffered as an enslaved child, she is extremely protective over her children.

In this novel, Sethe is both the male and female role combined.Before, Paul D formed a relationship with Sethe, she proved she didn’t need a man in her life to survive on her own. Sethe decided to isolate herself from the people in her community because she felt like she can support her family on her own.

Towards the end of Beloved, Sethe’s protective skills go over board. Her past experiences as a slave that was sexually abused,forced her to do the unthinkable to her child, kill.

“I did it. I got us all out. Without Hale too. Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. Decided. And it came off right.” (190).  In this phrase Sethe refers to the murder of Beloved. Sethe slits the throat of her eldest daughter proving women were capable of violent acts.

Beloved Comparison to Another Feminist Text

In the article, “Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved: A Psychological Reading” by Sandra Mayfield, the novel Beloved is analyzed in depth by the feminist lens. I am currently examining this text for the feminist lens myself, I am very excited to reveal Mayfield's views and how they relate/oppose to my own.

This article first focuses on how Beloved “deals with both the suffering and the creativity of slave mothers”.Sandra Mayfield later mentions multiple black female experiences from slavery to freedom and how they wrote a book about them completely different from Sethe's experience in Beloved. She also brings in a perspective of another writer who studied Women that lived through the evolution of slavery by the name of Alice Walker. In her collection of essays she discusses how african american women from the south were very resourceful before and after slavery. She also suggest that these women were “artist” who even after the hardship of slavery found the ability in themselves to write, sing, compose music, and write novels. Sandra Mayfield then compares Toni Morrison's interpretation of african american women with other writers. Mayfield concludes that women like Sethe used their tragic/suffering pasts to become caring mothers.

I do not completely disagree with Mayfield's views. Although I do believe someone’s past can mold your personal current life, I do not believe it makes you a creative, better mother. Slavery was a very traumatic experience for all African American women, some might not get over. Not all enslaved women had children, or even kept those they once had. Having a child is a large responsibility that they might not want as a free person outside the walls of slavery.

The character of Sethe is very mothering, however that is because she never had a mother of her own that she actually knew.

Responding And Reflecting on Beloved

A person’s memories and past can often disturb their ways of life. Tragic occurrences experienced by others are influential factors on the choices people make everyday. In Beloved by Toni Morrison, there are multiple characters displayed that act a certain way because of their dreadful pasts.

Setha is the protagonist of Beloved, and a former slave who hardly knew anything about her mother. Setha is determined to prove her competent motherhood skills, however a past incident does not let her fully achieve this goal.

As I analyzed Beloved through the feminist lens, I saw how the character of Setha was mentally abused by her own “flashbacks” throughout the text. These unpleasant  flashbacks tied her to her dreadful past. Even after she was no longer a slave, she did not feel like a free person.

When Seth was young and lived in the planation of Sweet Home in Kentucky, she was raped by the nephews of Schoolteacher(her master at the plantation). Constant sexual and physical abuse forced Setha to think differently after her time as a slave. This incident from her childhood sparked her to have tough love for the men in her life and her children as well. At one point of the novel, Paul D thinks to himself “Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love” (chapter 4). This phrase shows how slavery impacted these characters in the book negatively. They began to think that if you loved something too much it was bad. Past traumatic incidents can force anyone to believe their life must be exempted from certain things. In this case it was loving something too much, because it was something Paul or Setha were not used to.

Critical Lens (New Historical Lens) Close Reading Entry #2 - B.H

On page 28 of the book Beloved, it gives the reader a passage of what had happened to Baby's eight children, most of which were taken away from her. According to Sethe, their people were "moved around like checkers." It meant that slaves were always moving from one location to another because their owner wanted something like lumber or money. Baby's children either got rented out, loaned out, bought, stored, won, stolen, or seized. They were moved to every location around Baby, at random times her children would move to a different location. It never stopped, as these people loved playing "checkers." Using the New Historical lens, we can see this passage gives us insight about how slaves were separated from their families and how slaves were treated as "objects" more than humans. Baby had six different husbands each of which were traded off, taken away from her. At that time, slaves were used as "objects", they were traded off and were used for working in the fields. They were commonly moved around to other owners if the previous owner needed something like money or lumber. The owners didn't care if the slaves were separate from their families. All they wanted was money, greed took over their lives.

Toni Morrison, at the time, wasn't separated from her family. Slavery was illegal during the early 1900s but there was still discrimination against African-Americans. Her father, John Solomon, moved his family from the South to stay away from sharecropping and the violence against African-Americans. Nonetheless, there was still discrimination around the U.S but The South was way worse. There was separation by color in public areas, treated differently by their race, and received hate words everyday. Even though at the time Morrison was living in wasn't worse being African-American than in the 1800s, she still had discrimination as a part of her life growing up in school and in public.

Critical Lens Close Reading: Beloved -Janet Gil

The novel Beloved by Toni Morrison focuses on portraying a haunting age in American History, slavery. In the 1800’s African Americans had no rights. They were treated as animals, forced into hard labor. Women's rights were slim to none. White women were the ones who cooked and had children, while African American women were forced to do various amounts of difficult household work, including  have more children to be sold into slavery. African American woman slaves were seen as vulnerable so they were often raped by men. Woman were seen as objects, not people that could obtain any knowledge or even beliefs.The novel Beloved displays this incredible twist where social roles between genders are switched.  

When the character of Paul D is raped and seduced by Beloved, the female aspect portrayed in this book changes.

After this incident, Paul D questions his masculinity, “if schoolteacher was right it explained how he had become a rag doll-picked up and put back down anywhere anytime by a girl young enough to be  his daughter”( 124).

Schoolteacher was the Slave Owner after Mr. Garner at the Sweet Home plantation and was extremely hard and racist towards his slaves. Every slave that was at Sweet Home during his ownership remembers his cruelness. His negative actions affected Sethe and Paul D even after they were free people.

This quotation exemplifies the idea that men were not the only ones that could demand sexual attention, woman can as well. For this reason, Paul D feels weak and less masculine. Paul D relates his shameful feelings to when he was a slaved man and was told what to do. Although Beloved was a women, she manages to control Paul D. Toni Morrison begins to portray women as strong individuals capable to have some power over men.

Why I Chose the Psychoanalytic Lens:

The lens I chose is the lens of psychoanalytical.  I chose psychoanalytic because not only is it the one I find the most interesting, but also the one that I think provides the most insight into characters and the message each character is trying to send, deliberately or not.  Beloved is a book set in pre- Civil Rights, a time where equality was a notion far from the imagination.  Civil Rights didn’t take place for a little less than a 100 years later, this is how behind society was in terms of equality when Beloved is depicted.  Yet, the people that started Civil Rights were only a couple generations away from slavery, from the time period that Beloved depicts.  These people were the pre, pre initiators of Civil Rights.  These were people that persevered through even more limited rights and equalities than those that fought Civil Rights.  These people had to persevere through being treated as a nonhuman.  That is mindblowing.  Try getting a raise from a boss that doesn’t think you deserve it, and then try getting the ability to sit at a dinner table with someone who doesn’t think you’re a human.  The difference is night and day and more.  Yet, they succeeded.  How? This is what intrigues me.  More than anything, this is what intrigues me: how? This is what I think the psychoanalytic lens give me more insight into.  That subconsciously, these people were trying to change the world they just didn’t know on the scale they were doing just that.

What am I trying to get out of this project? Thats a tough question because I believe that sometimes the destinations that are created from empty roads are greater than those planned out.  I don’t have a foreseeable desire out of this desire.  I want it to give me greater insight of me as a person, and my country and the outlook of racism in this country.  But beyond that, thats why I do the project.

Feminist Lens: Janet Gil

Women are supposed to cook and do housework.Women are responsible for raising children. Women are not as strong as men.

Although it is 2015, gender inequality is still a global issue. Stereotypes have managed to influence how people view women’s capabilities. This is not okay.

For my AP Literature class I will be reading the well-known novel Beloved by Toni Morrison. I decided to analyze this text with the Feminist critical lens because I can relate too the difficulties women must handle to overcome judgement. This lens interests me much more than other lens because it has to do with an issue we still face today. Since this novel takes place in the 1870's, women have close to no rights, especially colored women. I think it will be fascinating to analyze how Morrison portrays Women in Beloved.
One of the other lens I considered was the Historical Lens. In this lens you are required to pay close attention to a text because you have to determine the time period it is taking place in. Finding around the time the text place in helps you tie back to other historical events like the Holocaust, or World War 2, eventually allowing you to receive a much better understanding of the text. However, I hope that by choosing the Feminist lens I will learn more about character interactions when reading anything.