Are African-Americans Freed From Their Past? A Reflection By Lindsey Bogott

As I have been reading Beloved through the new historical lens, I keep on thinking about a quote Maya Angelou once said: “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” I find this quote to accurately represents not only how the Beloved characters feel about their lives, but for the real African-Americans who straddled their lives between prejudicism and freedom.

Like Sethe and Paul D, many African-Americans had to cope with the scarring memories of life in slavery, and I find it deeply courageous of those reflect on their past, because it brings up painful memories. However like how Maya Angelou said in her quote, once a person looks back on the painful memories, they can eventually free themselves from their haunting past.

Yet when it comes to painful past historical events such as slavery, it can be a difficult subject to talk about and understand, especially if you are one that has never dealt with prejudice firsthand. People need to be educated on slavery in order to make sure it never happens again and realize the impacts that slavery has left on our society. For example there is still discrimination in our modern day society. Blacks are often subjected to poorer living conditions and there are still many hate crime with the way people are being treated based on their race, such as the recent Ferguson incident. This is why one can argue that even though slavery lasted between 1619-1863, prejudice that came forth in those times is still continues today.

For this reason, I believe that is why Toni Morrison wrote Beloved. As a child on the Civil Rights Era, she found parallels between slavery and the fight for civil rights. She wanted to bring to attention how African-Americans struggle with living in America, and how they were never completely free from 1863-1965, from their formative past, and if she wrote this book today, she may have made the argument that African-Americans are still not completely free from their past.

While I cannot relate to this 100%, I have had my past shape how others have viewed me. For instance I struggled a lot in school before coming to Summit, failing the majority of my math and science classes. My middle school friends would make fun of me for not being as smart as them, causing my self esteem to fall. Even today when I can’t pass the occasional math content assessment, the haunting memories of struggling in math catch up to me, making me feel as if I can never push through the struggle.

I understand this example isn’t nearly as relatable to how minorities feel about pushing forward for equality, but I feel that everyone has something from their past that haunts them. With this realization, I look forward to reading if the Beloved characters can finally move on from their past and channel Maya Angelou’s quote on moving forward from the unforgettable past.  

Revealing the Past - A Close Reading by Lindsey Bogott

“By the time I woke up in the morning, she was in line. If the moon was bright they worked by its light. Sunday she slept like a stick. She must have nursed me two or three weeks-that’s the way the others did. Then she went back in rice and I sucked from another woman whose job it was. So to answer you, no. I reckon not. She never fixed my hair nor nothing. She didn’t even sleep in the cabin most nights I remember” (Morrison 72).

This passage from chapter six of Beloved is when Sethe is speaking to Beloved and Denver about her mother and childhood, briefly. Beloved, the sick girl the mother and daughter are taking care of, asks Sethe if her mother had ever styled her hair. Because of the ages of Beloved and Denver, both have been raised immune to the lifestyle of slavery and have parents that would rather not pass down their hardship stories to their children because they want them to be happy. This is also in parallelism to Toni Morrison and her upbringing. Like Denver and Beloved, she grew up not fully experiencing discrimination because of how her parents moved away from the segregated South to Ohio in pursuit of a happier life. So as the two girls are inquiring on Sethe’s childhood, Morrison can identify with the curiosity of the two girls, wanting to learn more about the past.

So Sethe goes into what she recalls from her early childhood on the plantation she was raised on. As she tells her story about how her mother worked and never had time for her, the reader can tell that she is not exaggerating the loss of the motherly bond because it is historically accurate. Slaves worked six days a week, sun up to sun down. The only day slaves got off was Sunday, the day of rest. Slave families were not treated with the same rights as white families. Relationships between parents and the children were often tarnished and the plantation owners would not allow them to even sleep in the same cabin most nights. Yet in contrast, slave owners did allow mothers one to two weeks off to nourish their child, however that ended as soon as the owner saw that the baby was healthy enough, therefore diminishing the mother-child bond.

By not having a traditional bond between mother and daughter left Sethe feeling not completely loved, even though she understands the slave life. This can be seen through her tone because she feels the need to defend her mother as she speaks to Beloved and Denver. She wants them to realize how lucky they are to have a woman like her to be able to take care and love them.

This passage, in my opinion, illuminates why Sethe acts the way she does. She wants to be caring, nourishing, and sheltering towards her daughter from the evils of the past and to take advantage of the future.This is the same with Morrison’s parents as they had to endure the hardships of oppression and discrimination in the South, which is why they fled to Ohio for safety, raising Morrison in a state where she can be free from the physical and emotional hardships. As a result this passages reveals that all minorities want the best for their children and to forget the past hardships. They also hope that their children do not have to endure the same burden, as seen with Sethe and Toni Morrison’s parents.

Why did I choose the Psychoanalytic lens? By Sierra Nelson-Liner

When I heard that we would be reading Beloved  by Toni Morrison I honestly didn't know what to expect. With no prior knowledge to the novel I thought back to what Ms. Lorde had told us. She explained that it would be a somewhat traumatic read. At first I thought about reading it through a feminist lens because I do enjoy looking at gender roles and how they continue to transform over time, but I thought I could predict what the gender roles would be in Beloved based off of the time period and the topics it would cover. This brought me to the conclusion that I wanted to use a psychoanalytic lens to read and reflect on Beloved.  I thought that any book with such a variety of subjects had to have some interesting and complex characters... so why not try and figure out why they act the way they do?

This attitude about looking at human behavior spurred when I took AP Psychology my sophomore year in high school. In the class I learned everything from what it meant to be “normal” to why people fall in love. I became obsessed with reading into people’s backgrounds and how it  affected their past, present, and future actions.

Following the completion of the class I began to apply my newfound knowledge to the literature I was reading. From Shakespeare to Nathaniel Hawthorne to J.K Rowling—I began focusing in on characters and assessing their behaviors. This helped me gain a better understanding of not only the plot of the story, but the significance of each character and what affect each one typically had on the reader and their perspective. I hope to gain a similar understanding while I read Beloved.

Why I Chose the Feminist Lens by Gennesis Ayala

For this assignment, I chose to read Beloved using the feminist lens. The feminist lens interested me more than the other lenses because I believe that gender plays a large role in past and present society. Feminism has always been a big controversy that has interested me specifically because I feel like I am involved in the movement because I am a woman. My previous experience with this lens was when I read Desiree’s Baby. I first read this story without the feminist lens and saw more of the side of the book where is was almost like a curse to be African American during the time period of the book. By using the feminist lens while reading this short story, I got to see the more of a side of how women were treated and viewed as in the past. I believe that in past society, gender played a huge roll. Woman did not have the same rights that men did. In todays society, a lot has changed, but I believe that women are still seen smaller than men. I also considered using the marxist lens because it is similar to feminism, but instead of setting people apart by gender, it set people apart by social class. By the end of this project I am hoping to see and learn the many other ways that people interpreted the book using their lens.

Why I Chose the New Historical Lens By Lindsey Bogott

For as long as I can remember, history has always fascinated me. There is something about learning how the past builds up to create the present and how the present will one day be considered the past that makes me think about the world in a more abstract way. I tend to always find myself thinking: How have my past actions shaped the present? What am I doing now that will affect the future? What I love about these questions is that the answer is not always there. There is a sense of oblivion, which sparks curiosity. So when it came down to picking a critical lens to analyze Beloved by Toni Morrison with, it almost seemed as a no brainer to pick the new historical lens. However it was difficult to pick between feminist and new historical, mainly because I love the feminist lens and find myself always reading books, articles, movies, music, and so on through that lens. Yet I wanted to challenge myself and realized that my notorious feminist lens can be broadened through the new historical lens by using the two lenses at the same time to gain a deeper understanding of the critically acclaimed novel by learning how historical events across all spectrums have shaped Morrison and her characters. Using what I have learned in past history classes and in my free time of googling random historical events will be to my benefit as I embark on this journey of reading Beloved through the new historical lens.

Why I Chose The Feminist Lens by Madison Schmidt

By looking at Beloved through a feminist lens, I will be focusing on the ways the text reinforces and/or undermines the role women play in society economically, politically, socially, and psychologically. Because reasons behind characters’ actions are very interesting to me, I was struggling while trying to decide between a psychoanalytic and feminist lens, however ultimately ended up choosing a feminist lens and am looking forward to incorporating behavioral analysis while looking through a lens of feminist criticism. What is interesting about this lens to me is being able to really look closely at the portrayal of relationships based on gender, and think about what these interactions and portrayals affect the way the author, Toni Morrison, is trying to depict the role women play in society. In this text, I expect it to be interesting to see how a female writer, Morrison, portrays female characters in the story - as well as male characters/their interactions with females - in contrast to the way a male author might. I will be specifically looking at which traits are assigned to which characters, and the relationships people from different genders form with each other.