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.