To me, the concept of love in Beloved seems to be more of a heavy stone that's tied to someone's feet before they're thrown in a lake to, as the said, "swim with the fishes". Beloved pits Love as something that is hazardous to all those who chase its gilded tail. As found out in the whole Neighborhood Feast scene, where we find that slaves should not be prideful- but rather remorseful, hopeless, and above all, to respect and obey the very people that remind them of who they are.
Considering Love is a trait that is beaten out of slaves of this time, it is indeed odd to see Sethe cling diligently towards it when all others have simply given it up; even going as far as doing unimaginable distinguished horrors upon her own children because of said love; as Paul D. sad: "Your love is too thick"-- We cannot imagine the horrors that must be so great to feel the importance to defend those who cannot defend themselves by utilizing the very ideal that we strive to evade and safeguard them from: Death.
How powerful can love be? A mother, a sworn protector of the life she bears, finds herself depriving her very own investments of the very thing she had given them in the first place. In knowing what awaited her, is love such a thing that should be disregarded on spot?
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I agree with you, steve, about love being something of a heavy concept in the novel. I had never thought of it that way before because we usually see love as a saving grace of sorts, not as the cause of all the misery. If you think back to "Their eyes were watching God", though Janie's exspectations of love were high, it wasn't looked at as a bad thing that she wanted to love. When we look at "Beloved", every mention of love brings an omnipresent dark cloud over the scene.
ReplyDeleteI'm a little confused by what you were saying at the end of your first paragraph, about the feast and us learning that slaves should be remorseful and hopeless. I think it was more that the other former slaves were resentful of the way Baby Suggs was celebrating having her whole family together, and celebrating it at all for that matter. Their attitude toward her pride was due to fact that they fould no reason to celebrate having the family together because they knew that even though they were former slaves, what they heald near and dear could still be taken from them. But i get your general drift.
I don't know that all slaves had given up on love all together at this point in history. In the novel, slaves still had the capasity to love, but they learned that it was a dangerous thing to use if not in moderation. Halle certainly loved Sethe when they were at Sweet Home, and Paul D. later on did the same at 124. So, the ability to love was not gone, just the freedom and luxery to enjoy and use it willingly.
I think that it is a very interesting poin that Sethe had tried to take the life from those which she gave it. Like I had said in my blog, we will never know how horrible slavery really was so it is very hard to connect with. I will also never know what it is like to be a mother, which I think has an effect on Sethe's actions. Had she not birthed the children herself and know them from an external source, would she have acted exactly or similarly to the way she did?
ReplyDeleteWe define love as something that makes people happy and cheerful, the best feeling in the world. Tess, when you say that the ability to love was not gone, I totally agree, but love is something that is expressed by only the person who feels it. They were not allowed to express their love only as slaves, so now that Sethe is not at Sweet Home anymore, she has the freedom and luxery to enjoy love as she pleases.
As I had stated in my post, we are unable to know what would be a logical and, for lack of a better word, "correct" choice in dealing with what Sethe had to do in order to protrect her children from slavery. Since we don't have to have the feeling of fear towards being captured and brought into salvery, we really can only speculate about what Sethe must have been thinking and feeling that caused her to try kill her children, and in Beloved's case, succeeded.
ReplyDeleteThe concept of being able to love but unable to express that love is an important and relevant theme in "Beloved." The white slave owners would use anything they could to keep the slaves in their control, especially hurting them physically and emotionally. If the slaves showed any short of affection towards anyone or anything, the slave owners could then take that person or thing and use it as leverage to control the slaves. As mentioned throughout the novel, love was dangerous for slaves because it meant that there was something that the slave owners could take away from them.