Beloved
I awake each day in my middle-class white suburban home and look around the world with a detached attitude. Bombings in far corners of the globe, and biological warfare threaten humanity daily, yet I conduct myself as if the state of affairs outside of suburbia has no impact upon my world. I carry this aloof attitude with me to school everyday where now, once required to read Toni Morrison's Beloved, I struggle to understand a part of this world beyond the suburbia in which I live. Reading and re-reading sections, I cannot fathom the feelings of desperation and affection that Sethe experiences as she runs the blade of the saw over her own child's throat. Eluding me is the hell that each sunrise forces Paul D to deal with during his days on Sweet Home. As I explore the pages of Toni Morrison's Beloved, I find the novel rusted shut. This is a story of an escaped, black, slave woman, who feels a love for her children, so intense, that she can justify murdering them in order to protect them from a greater evil. This is a story about the inhumane conditions in which slaves were forced to endure during their lives. This is a story that I have trouble relating too. My background, as a white, middle-cl
ass male yields no easy path by which I can connect to this novel. The emotions involved in this story are, much like Paul D's tobacco tin, rusted shut within the pages, keeping me always, at arms length. The total loss of hope that Paul D feels in his time in Alfred, Georgia is impossible to understand. Never in my short, and now seemingly trouble-free life, have I ever spent my days, "Singing love songs to Mr. Death"(109). Or felt that, "Only when she (Life) was dead would they (the slaves) be safe"(109). This total despair, or rather abandonment of despair and acceptance and eager anticipation of doom that Paul D lives with is something that I cannot relate to. His struggle, I have generically read about ever since I learned that Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but the stories I had read were not even remotely similar to the tales Toni Morrison describes Paul D as having experienced. This world Morrison depicts is not one of the hope that the Underground Railroad provides, or of songs of "Following the Drinking Gourd." This novel is about a slave's life, and the absolute hell that was each new day. Mothers do not ever take saw blades to their children's throats. This seemingly cold-hearted manner in which Sethe "liberates" her children seems to be a complete fabrication by Morrison to further highlight the hellish life of the slaves in America. This is not so. Once it is understood that this part of Beloved is based upon a true incident, then the story becomes all the harder to comprehend. This story, written by an author who is retelling the tale of a woman motivated by love to end her children's life yields no path for empathy to travel between the story and myself. Sethe is portrayed as feeling a love so deep for her four children that she would opt to end their existence rather than allow her children to live the life she experienced at Sweet Home. Here, a huge barricade is erected in the way of my connecting with the story. A mother's love for a child is something I am completely unfamiliar with. The closest I imagine I could compare Sethe's plight to, would be loving my pet enough to put her down, upon seeing her suffer, and knowing her existence would only be harder with time. With the two paralleled however, my dilemma seems petty to that of Sethe. A love for a pet hardly seems comparable to a mother's love for her child. Struggle as I did to discover what Sethe was feeling when she saw
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1688
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)
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