zBlogging the Literary Life - AP College English

Essay!

So I picked the #13 essay prompt question and immediately thought of Beloved. I was surprised when I read our blog that other people had chosen to do schoolteacher and others because of my immediate reaction. I'm saying that Beloved is a representation of the past and its effects on people, as well as the ignorance of and the stubborness of the community to change and accept the end of slavery. Does that sound alright? I just don't know if I can classify Beloved as a villian, considering she does help Sethe to remember and confront her past. What is everyone else doing?

Prompts

I'm not sure about you guys, but im totally torn between which prompt to use.

When we made up different thesis' in class, that helped a lot, and gave us lots of good ideas. But I want to write about something that I have a lot to say about. What are some of your guys' ideas?

The prompt about the villian seems straightforward, with schoolteacher, but i'm not too fond of him, and don't want to write an entire paper about him.

I was thinking of focusing more about the concept of love, like mothers' love, in the story. There are a lot of specific moments in the book where loving people is brought up, such as how much you should love people, why they do, etc., so im thinking of tying that into a thesis. What are all your ideas?

Strange Fruit

When we first got the assignment to bring in a song that we think is a poem, I thought of Strange Fruit which was written by Lewis Allen and first recorded by Billie Holiday.  I knew we were going to have to share them though and I didn't want to bring such a sad song into class, but I highly recommend downloading this song sung by Billie Holiday or Nina Simone.  I am posting the lyrics below so I am warning you now that it is sad but it can help us gain more perspective on some of the passages we read in Light in August and in Beloved.  Let me know what your reactions are...

                                  Strange Fruit

Southern trees bear strange fruit,
Blood on the leaves and blood at the root,
Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze,
Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.

Pastoral scene of the gallant south,
The bulging eyes and the twisted mouth,
Scent of magnolias, sweet and fresh,
Then the sudden smell of burning flesh.

Here is fruit for the crows to pluck,
For the rain to gather, for the wind to suck,
For the sun to rot, for the trees to drop,
Here is a strange and bitter crop.

Villian/Schoolteacher

In response to our prompt for the Beloved paper I have decided to use Schoolteacher as the villian who strengthens a theme in the novel.  While I am not sure about this I believe that Schoolteacher is used as a counterpoint to slaves' old owners.  While the old owners were paternalistic and seemed to treat their slaves comparatively well, the Schoolteacher treats them as if they are animals.  Torture, killing, and mental abuse are his weapons to denegrate them.  However horrible his actions, one of the slaves says that he cannot see a differance between this owner and the old paternalistic one.  Because of this the reader can understand that the author intended to show that while the two types of slavery have differnt practices they are essentially the same thing. What do you think?

"Mr." Paul D

So I would like to explore a subject that hasn't really been touched upon much in our discussions in class. I feel like we've discussed all the main characters in great detail but I feel like a major part of Paul D's mentality was left out of discussion. There is no doubt that Paul D has quite a loaded history that causes him to question the functionality of society, but how does it really affect him?

We've discussed Paul D's reservations on how love should be dolled out-- how his history shapes questions of weather things are worth loving, but I feel like there is a greater analysis of Paul D to be had. To me Paul D has one of the most intriguing struggles with his identity in the novel. I feel like Morrison really allows the reader to be in Paul D's head throughout the whole novel, getting a close up look on the effect slavery really had on him and how that past effects his present.

When Paul D. is telling Sethe about Mister, we discussed how Paul D, with his iron bit, is forced to feel more like an animal than the rooster, but what makes it worse is the Roosters name, Mister : "Mister was allowed to stay what he was. But I wasn't allowed to stay what I was. Even if you cooked him you'd bee cooking a Rooster named Mister. But wasn't no way I'd ever be Paul D. again, living or dead" (86). When Schoolteacher came to sweet home a mentality of male inferiority was truly planted in him. He started to question if he was allowed to be man, if he was man enough. Seeing Mister, he began to think that even a rooster was more man than him, because he will always be a "Mister".

In Chapter 13 (I think, or somewhere around there) Paul D. goes on to contemplate how Sweet Home men where only men at Sweet Home. When Beloved begins to move him he begins to, again, lose faith in his manhood and wonder if Schoolteacher was right. Even later in that same chapter Sethe thinks that Paul D is resentful because "They were a family somehow and he was not at the head of it" (155).

Anyways my point is that Paul D. Struggles with more issues than maybe were fully represented in class. I think that the way he views himself says a lot about society, even thinking that he doesn't want to have to tell Sethe, to think "I am not a man"(151). Not only does slavery emasculate Paul D, but, I think, it is the pressure on men in society to be "manly" that scares him from thinking he is not man enough. Thoughts? 

"The real Hell is your life gone wrong."

I noticed towards the end of the book, when Beloved and Sethe appear before the crowd of women, how Beloved is suddenly referred to as "he." Though the women describe Beloved as a beautiful, radiant, pregnant-looking woman, they use the pronoun "he." It's as if all the women really believe that Beloved is an incarnation of the Devil himself.

That seems to fit because Sethe was sort of trapped - or tricked into being trapped, since she was there by choice but just didn't know or think to break away - in the house with Beloved. Beloved was slowly sucking the life out of her, torturing Sethe by refusing to accept her incessant apologies and explanations.

It reminded me of a line in the movie What Dreams May Come that says, "The real Hell is your life gone wrong." In the movie, a woman commits suicide after her children and husband die, and she is stuck alone in Hell, which for her is a decrepit version of her home, going insane with the weight of her sorrow. (It's not a completely depressing movie, and I don't want to give anything away for those of you that still have to see it.)

Similarly, Sethe is trapped in her own Hell, denying the fact that her life is going wrong and will be irreparable if she doesn't escape. If Denver and the other women hadn't saved her, I think Sethe would have died in that house still feeling guilty and sorry and regretful, and (going with the superstitious beliefs of people in this story) her spirit would never have found rest. Maybe she would even haunt the house in the way Beloved's spirit did.

Morrison Should Not Have Written This Book

I'm not actually bashing Morrison.  Here's what I mean:

One of the themes I keep drawing from Beloved is that the past, especially slavery, is permanent.  There's the idea of rememory and how nothing ever really dies (43).  Beloved haunts Sethe and 124 just as slavery haunts us even today -- put another way, the ghost of slavery will always exist in human memory, a perpetual thorn in our sides.  There's more, but that's the basic idea.

Morrison's answer seems to be that we have to look forward, not backward.  Although the past will never die, preoccupying oneself with it, as Sethe does, eventually leads to your life being drained away from the present into the past.  Paul D tells Sethe at the end that their problem is that they have too much yesterday and not enough tomorrow.  Bottom line: the past is the past.  Acknowledge, and then move on.  Applied to slavery, Morrison would be arguing that fretting forever about the legacy of slavery in America is harmful, and that we have to move forward.  Again, there's more evidence for this interpretation, but I think this is an arguable claim.  Read the last chapter as it would relate to slavery and see if you agree with me.

If that's true... why did Morrison write a book largely concerned with slavery if the way to move beyond slavery is avoid focusing on it?  I don't get it.  The effect of writing the book is entirely at odds with the lessons it presents.  It's a bit like getting rich from writing a book about the harmful effects of our material culture.  It would seem that if Morrison is dedicated to recovering from the history of slavery, which presumably she is, she would by her own advice avoid slavery as an important topic in a novel.

And when Morrison switches from "It was not a story to pass on" to "This is not a story to pass on," (324) I think she is actually talking about the novel Beloved.  Stories like Beloved, she seems to be saying, should not be passed on, for the reasons discussed above.  So why is she passing them on?

Pie

As we all know, Baby Suggs loves to bake pies. As we also know, my group loves to bake pies. What amazing pies they were. Anywho, I was thinking about the purpose of the pies that Baby Suggs bakes. And I wonder, what do the pie's really represent? They are obviously a source of "nourishment" but what else could they be?

Give Me an Ending! (Morrison is a cheater)

The ending of Beloved reminded me of the beginning of the 1986-1987 season of "Dallas."
They killed the main character, Duffy, off the show in the 1985-86 season but they then realized that they had gone too far.  The 86-87 season starts with Pam, another character, dreaming the entire prior season, meaning that Duffy is still alive.  This is called a "deus ex machina" and I call it a cop-out.  (I don't watch Dallas, Family Guy made fun of this in the humorous episode titled "Da Boom" or something like that.)
Morrison introduces the incredibly complex character that is Beloved but then decides that...heck, let's just say it never happened!  No resolution needed. 
Sure, we can all say that "it adds to the ethreal/supernatural/creepy/whatever vibe," but I think that this compelling of a story deserves a resolution that is longer than one page.

I wonder what the comments to this post will be...

Put Our Stories Next to Each Other

In our discussions of Beloved over the past few weeks, we've talked a lot about the need for individuals to confront their personal pasts. I think it is equally important, however, for us to think about the role of the COMMUNITY in overcoming history. As Baby Suggs says early in the novel, every house has it's own ghosts, and everybody suffers from hauntings of the past. History is complex, and personal histories often blend together to create collective histories. Consequently, it takes the support of many people--and not just the strength of one individual--to truly overcome what has happenned and look forward to the future.

The community's exorcism of Beloved from 124 helps illustrate this point. When the thirty women arrive at Sethe's house, Denver waits alone outside. Yet, as Morrison writes, "When they caught up with each other...the first thing they saw was not Denver sitting on the steps, but themselves. Younger, stronger, even as little girls lying in the grass asleep..."(304).  The women see themselves in Denver because they share her past. Slavery haunts networks of people, and so the entire community has an interest in facing Beloved.

So as the thirty women band together--singing, praying and linking arms--they join Sethe and Denver in an effort to confront their collective past. When Sethe mistakes Mr. Bodwin for the schoolteacher, we see that she her mindset is stuck back in time. Rather than repeating her old mistake, however, Sethe does what she wishes she had originally done, racing through the streets to fight her "attacker." The community, too, refuses to repeat their old mistakes. At Baby Suggs' party many years ago, they didn't want to warn Sethe that the schoolteacher was approaching, but now, they take action to stop her from making a terrible mistake. Denver, Ella, and the others chase after Sethe and pull her away from Mr. Bodwin. With everybody supporting one another, all of the individuals in Beloved are able to not only remember history, but also learn from it.

Everyone has ghosts, and we all need to work together to heal and grow from them. At the end of the novel, Paul D looks at Sethe and realizes that "He wants to put his story next to hers," and that is exactly what me must all strive to do (322). People need to understand that we all share a history, and we need to talk about it or do whatever we can to face it together.