Beloved Topics

1. Write on Paul D's manhood, particularly tracing his development.Write on Denver's significance, particularly tracing her development.
2. Follow a symbol in the book and try to make sense out of its significance--water, milk, long grass....
3. Work out the deeper meaning of one of the repeated phrases in the novel--"lay it all down", "hot thing", "love too thick"...
4. Interpret the meaning of the relationship between Sethe's family and the rest of the black community as it plays out in the novel.
5. Interpret what it means that Beloved gives birth to Sethe at the end of the novel?
6. Who is Beloved?

There were several more good ones that people are pursuing in class, feel free to write on a topic of your own, one of these or morph these into something that helps you write. 

Other Beloved Paper

RAPE! Can you imagine screaming for help, but no one hears you? If someone did hear you, would they stand frozen in their tracks or join in as the “ghosts without skin” and “figure out a way to tie them [your legs] up?” Or would they figure out a way to help you no matter how unbearable the pain? Can you imagine your entire life being “beloved in the dark and [the] bitch in the light?” White folks really are all the bad luck in the world when you have to live your entire life in fear. Unsure of who you are… where you came from… where your future will lead when “those white things have taken all I had or dreamed.” When this is your life, your reality, you do what you have to, to protect your family from the same turmoil that you experienced. Surviving something so torturous, constantly living in fear looking for answers of why, pushing through frustration and anger, and understanding the cowardess of the ones that left you violated and abandoned is what your legacy is all about, it is what will make you hold onto love that is unforgiving but understood.

Being raped of your dignity is one of the most horrendous things that can happen to a person. It can break your spirit and your soul. It damages you in ways that are indescribable to others, even if they have been raped themselves; each rape is independent of another. The triumph of a rapist, of a weakling, is to violate you physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Intrude upon you in ways that may seem insignificant to others, but not to you physically. No one wants a slave life; a life that ‘“had busted her legs, back, head, eyes, head, eyes… womb…”’ You truly have “nothing left to make a living but her heart.” But having nothing left but your heart; isn’t enough to live. It isn’t enough to give you the strength or the courage to move on. Moving on isn’t an option. Being free doesn’t matter. After being maimed and mutilated you are buried in your sorrows, in your pity, you are nothing. You are alone. All that’s left to do is run and hide… away from the world, away from you.

No more running from the truth. “No more running -- from nothing…” From the hurt, the pain, the suffering, from the legacy that is yours. The legacy that is you; that makes you… you. The legacy you leave behind is a fractured one. One with stories of half-truths, clippings from an old newspaper that one tries to pretend doesn’t exist. Your legacy begins to be that torture that a person feels, the reoccurring visions of being raped over and over again. Being raped in your dreams of your dreams; freedom, if given, no longer means a thing. Unable to heal, unable to escape unable to prevent things from happening. Just watching things happen, from the railing of a barn, in slow motion.  What you see makes no sense. You feel unworthy, like Halle, like nothing matters, like life is not worth living. Like you cant face anyone, not your children, not your mother, not your wife. You disappear inside yourself, inside the butter, covered in Sethe’s milk, trying to make sense of what he saw. When you feel this much pain, you feel justified in your response to it. Sethe felt deprived of her future. “The one set of plans she had made went so awry -- so completely she never dared life by making more.” For Sethe life had ended. She was alone. No Halle, he felt like he failed her. Just Sethe, her babies, and Baby Suggs… But the “white folks” threatened that too.

Sethe was always looking over her shoulder, always worrying if the white folks were lurking around the corner or in the shadows, waiting to hold her down… waiting to take her babies and do the same to them, waiting to violate her again and again. Violating her physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Making her ashamed of herself and of her body. Making her feel ashamed to experience pleasure or happiness. To make her feel like she is invisible; the girl with no lines in her palms and snakes as hair. Making her feel like nothing. That’s definitely no way to live, but for many, it’s a reality. Your personality, your consciousness, becomes split. On one hand you are a parent, a nurturer, just trying to love your family the best you can and provide for them the best way you know how given your circumstances, you are Sethe. On the other hand, you are a survivor, a warrior, always fighting your demons, trying to push through and find a way to move on without letting those same circumstances torture and break you; you are fragile… you are Beloved…

The stories you rememory are those of half-truths, stories that will break your heart, but leaves you stronger. No matter how difficult things are, or how difficult they become, you put your trust in your faith, your family, your strength, and your convictions, so that the legacy you leave behind is one that can be shared, not hidden away like some bad dream never to be spoken of, never to be shared. In order to get to a place that you can understand what is going on, you have to rememory the pain you felt. You have to be broken down. You have to be left alone. You don’t want to be forgiven. You want everyone to be afraid… you want to be justified. You want to protect her. Beloved. “Anything dead coming back to life hurts.” The person that it hurt though was Denver. Denver loved her mother, knew the truth but was “afraid the thing that happened that made it all right for my mother to kill my sister could happen again.” Denver needed help, she recognized her fear, and she got up the courage to ask for help, because although she had Beloved and she had her mother, she was still alone. The love that they shared was made for three, but only satisfied the two of them leaving Denver alone to fend for herself. Leaving Denver to step off the porch of life and begin the path for love, although unforgiving, understood.

Escaping the abandonment of 124 was more about how she left and how she left. Asking for help. Telling her mother’s story. Explaining how the past came to 124 to haunt Sethe and her choices. Explaining how she had become frustrated and tried to escape before Sethe and Beloved’s greedy love would chew her up, laughing. Feeling alone and empty when someone is next to you, no longer able to provide companionship or love to you, for themselves. Allowing them to whither away. Beloved wanted to torture Sethe, for leaving her behind, for not smiling at her, for killing her and keeping the others. Beloved was jealous, disabled, “understood Sethe’s rage, but not her reaction to it.” Not when it meant she was left behind. Alone. Unable to breathe, at the bottom of the water, looking at the diamond earrings, with the reflection of her mother, being raped, stripped, deprived of her mother. A baby, wanting to be loved.

To move on, it took Denver’s strength, the rememory of Baby Suggs’, and friends from the past to cast away Beloved. The spirit that was driving Sethe crazy, killing her, because she couldn’t forgive herself. Sethe didn’t understand what had happened to her. She didn’t understand that ‘“God take what He would.”’ He violated her to break her down, so that she could be restored. So she could use the reoccurring visions of rape and degradation to heal her. To help her realize her self worth. To give her the tools to be loved. Learning and appreciating to be happy, to enjoy what you have even with no support, to cry for help to face the reality that all love ain’t good love. But love is who you are, it’s the courage inside of you, it’s what heals the torture, the violation, it helps in overcoming the obstacles of the excruciating pain of waiting for love.

To be loved after being raped, after having your dignity and worth stripped from you is to understand your past. Embrace your legacy. Enjoy life. Enjoy someone that you can be “embarrassed to be that grown-up and that young at the same time.” Appreciate “when good people take you in and treat you good.” Know you are worth more than fifty bucks; know you are worth more than the milk in your breasts. Know that even though “slaves not supposed to have pleasurable feelings of their own…” it’s okay to “listen to your body and love it.” To be loved is to learn what pain means and to find a way to bring forth the rememory of your legacy with grace. Although the rememory of your legacy is not a story to be passed on, and it may not something to be proud of, it may be horrible and haunting, it is still the legacy that gives you character, that gives you purpose, and makes you the remarkable, wonderful, thoughtful person who is you. To be loved is to know that “I AM BELOVED and she is mine.” A person with a past, a person that survived having a busted heart, survived knowing that “if Sethe didn’t wake up one morning and pick up a knife, Beloved might; locked in a love that wore everybody out;” a selfish, greedy, unforgiving love. Through all of the things you had to live through, you recognized the parts that were clean, untouched by “the lowest yet.” You were able to lie through it all and get through to be here to be who you are. You are not a “little girl with a ice pick…”who “everytime a whiteman come to th-9e door she got to kill somebody…” you are a woman with a knife who defends your “beloved”, your daughters, your family, no matter the cost. Who knows “you your best thing” and you can NOW BE LOVE

new Beloved Paper

5/30/10

Continuous Falling

It was an early spring morning, and I was sitting forward in my chair in the MEW with Toni Morrison on the stage in front of me. It was question and answer period, and I had previously texted my dad asking if he had a question that he wanted me to ask for him because I know he loves Toni Morrison’s writing so much. His question was intriguing to me, yet at that point I had no idea what he was saying because I had not yet read Beloved. “Ask her what she thinks about saying that Beloved is a declaration to be loved.” In the end, I didn’t get my dad’s question answered, but I am going to try to answer a variation on that question: Why is it so hard to allow oneself to be loved? In Beloved, Toni Morrison depicts the lives of freed slaves during Reconstruction. Each of them has had many or all of the things they love taken away from them.  Sethe says, “to get to a place where you can love anything you choose—not need permission for desire—well now that was freedom.” While Sethe connects loving to freedom, Morrison’s novel also connects being loved to freedom and freedom to falling. Allowing oneself to be loved, means exposing yourself to falling, continuously falling. Falling, in this sense, keeps one connected to the present here and now.

When you allow yourself to be loved it keeps you grounded and connected to the people around you. This is exactly what Sethe was not able to do for most of the novel. After she recognizes Beloved, Sethe becomes so consumed by her that she forgets Denver even exists. This contradicts Sethe’s claim to motherhood that she previously so fiercely justified to Paul D. “It ain’t my job to know what’s worse. It’s my job to know what is and to keep them [this includes Denver] away from what I know is terrible. I did that” (194). But Beloved’s death is not freedom, Sethe’s only other choice for her children was slavery and that is not freedom either. So in Sethe’s situation, love could not liberate her children, it could only take them away from slavery. But now School Teacher is no longer there to take away her children, yet Sethe is caught up in her attempt to explain to Beloved why she killed her when there is no need for explanation. She is obsessed with making it up to her. Sethe longs to be in the here and now, she even claims after Beloved returns , “I’m here…Now I can look at things again because she’s here to see them too” (237). Sethe claims to have “thick love” because she will do whatever it takes for Beloved to be happy. “I’ll tend to her as no mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own children” (236). In this statement, she leaves out Denver, a child that she should share the same “thick love” with as well. Sethe wants to say that she is in the “here and now”, but she is unable to really “love thick” like she claims, because she is being manipulated by Beloved and her past (which are one and the same) and she is leaving Denver out of the equation.

There are few instances where we see Sethe truly present in her love, and one of those is when she is with Denver and Beloved skating on the frozen lake. In this scene Morrison repeats the phrase, “Nobody saw them falling” (205), over and over. They are fully free to live in this moment. The three women play on the ice, taking turns wearing the three ice skates and falling. “…All three-Sethe, Beloved and Denver herself—laughed till they coughed” (206). The purity of their happiness is there because it was not thought up, planned or forced, but because this is what they chose to do with their day. Laugh and love. On the frozen lake, the three women are able to fall but only when the water, the flow of past to present, is frozen. This image of water is important. “All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was (Toni Morrison).” Sethe’s freedom right now is her disremembering. She is most happy when her past can be frozen away from her present, when it is left dormant rather than coming back to invade her thoughts.

In contrast to the frozen lake, on the slave ship Africans were not allowed to fall or even help each other; none of them could receive love from one another because they were chained. “I cannot fall because there is no room to” (249, no punctuation) While they were enslaved they had no room to even be free to be loved, to fall. Of course black slaves loved one another, but they loved each other while the whites tried to beat and rape and take that love out of them. This literal inability to be loved continues on even after they are free from slavery.  Sethe and Paul D can’t seem to make room to fall yet, can’t handle the risk of exposing themselves to being loved, except for that brief moment on the frozen lake.

Paul D struggles a lot in the book with his freedom.  He is a freedman, but throughout the book he cannot grasp the ability to, “wake up and decide what to do with the day.” Paul D has not allowed himself to “love thick” because he has not claimed ownership of his freedom; he is confused about the new meaning of his manhood. He feels as though he can only be a man at Sweet Home because Mr. Garner called he and his brothers the Sweet Home men. Outside of Sweet Home, he can’t yet claim manhood for himself. In addition, Beloved imposed on his manhood by forcing him to touch her and by moving him around his own home. He didn’t know how to share any love that he had until he could claim his own freedom. And for him he had to leave Sethe to realize it. He kept his heart and ability to love, “In that tobacco tin buried in his chest where a red heart used to be. Its lid rusted shut. He would not pry it loose now in front of this sweet sturdy woman, for if she got whiff of the contents it would shame him” (86). So maybe “loving thin” is not a good or a bad thing; it just is not enough to be free. “So you protected yourself and loved small” (191). But by the end of the book when Beloved leaves 124, Paul D understands how he can love in the present, an act seen when he rubs Sethe’s feet and nurses her back to health.

To Baby Suggs, similar to Sethe, love also comes in the form of her children. During her life, she gives birth to eight children, all of whom are killed, taken or die at a very young age. Once her children are gone, she feels as though freedom is not possible because she cannot love like she desires. The freedom that Halle won for her is not worth it without the love she wanted to give to all of her children. “That child she could not love and the rest she would not. ‘G-d 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” (28). Her freedom is her ability to love, and that has been taken away from her. But instead of letting it cripple her, she uses it to command other people to be loved in the clearing. And she, I think, is the only person in the book who never has to learn to fall. She commands her community to be loved, to love all of their parts because the white men surely wouldn’t want to love them. “Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another” (111-112). Maybe she can command this because she is older and a little bit wiser, or maybe because she accepted her loss more than the others. The community struggles to find the reason of her specialness as well. “…They just wanted to know if Baby really was special, blessed in some way they were not” (185).  I think she was so special because she was able to claim the right for herself and her people to be loved. In the end though, even Baby Suggs could not withstand the white men taking away her grandchildren. Being loved, loving yourself, is not foolproof, but it is, as Baby Suggs says in the Clearing the only way to take your life back in the here and now.  

When I watch some of the older people in my family, I see that some have trouble balancing their inhibitions with their ability to allow themselves to be loved. But in this case, it is because they are so insecure that they don’t allow someone else’s love to fill them up and make them bigger. I’ve especially seen this affect my aunt. She was always very honest in her love, but she closed the door to allowing herself to be loved. Because she has shut that door, her love is empty and thin. She seems to be full of resentment and regret, and she continues to close herself off from being loved. Are the people we think of that have a hard time letting people love them, are those the same people that struggle with loving themselves? In my aunt’s case, I think this is valid because she feels much shame about her past. In contrast, Sethe and Paul D protected themselves against feeling shame.

From Beloved I have learned that being loved is a hard thing to do, especially when you are complicated. It is hard to expose the things that you alone have trouble dealing with. But similar to the frozen lake, you trust yourself to fall, and know that you need to allow yourself to be loved, you become more grounded in the here and now and connected to the people around you. Falling in this sense allows you to be fully present and it requires some level of acceptance of yourself. It involves being vulnerable enough to understand that you might fall, and when you allow yourself to be loved you might never stop falling. And by allowing yourself to be loved, you can claim ownership of your freedom.

Thinking back to the frozen lake, it is interesting that Sethe runs at Mr. Bodwin with an ice pick. She confuses past with present, jumping at the sight of the hat. Sethe never gets to use the ice pick on Mr. Bodwin; instead she ends up,  “running into the faces of the people out there, joining them and leaving Beloved behind…. They make a hill. A hill of black people falling” (309). I imagine, although it is hard to do, a hill of black people continuously falling. Close your eyes and try to imagine a hill of people falling in the yard 124. It is a hard image to fix in your mind or paint on a canvas, which is the way I also feel about allowing oneself to be loved. Sethe is finally able to be loved in this very moment when the women come into her yard for the first time since the time in the shed, and is “leaving Beloved [and her unbearable past] behind. Instead of leaving us with the image of Sethe going after Mr. Bodwin and her frozen past, Morrison leaves us with this image of the women in the yard of 124 loving Sethe, and Sethe falling with all the women surrounding her. I think Morrison is telling us that in order to be loved, you have to trust yourself enough to be continuously falling.