« Weylin's Control: A Social Negotiation? | Main | Cultural Consciousness »
March 30, 2007
Kindred vs. Beloved
When I started reading Beloved, I did not realize that I read the novel before. Although I do not remember much about it, the reading came to me very easily. As I was reading Beloved, I kept comparing it to Kindred. First, Kindred portrays the perspective of a modern woman whereas Beloved portrays the perspectives of those who lived that time. Second, in Beloved, the protagonist lives the time after Civil War whereas in Kindred, the protagonist goes back to the time before the Civil War. Third, Kindred seems to portray the racial issue of black and white whereas Beloved seems to portray the issues rising among the pre-slaves who must live through their horrific memories.
These comparisons allowed me to see that Kindred and Beloved are two different stories dealing with the similar topic of slavery. Yes, Kindred still portrays the terror and the horror of slavery, but its main character is a character who determines not to fall completely under the "spell" of slavery. She allows the life of slavery to rule her life as long as it still respected one aspect of her, of her indepedence in sexuality. Beloved, on the other hand, portrays the horrorfying memories of the characters with which they must live through. They cannot even consider their horrors dreams or unreal like Dana and Kevin did; it is too real and too close. Their memories are too vivid. In Beloved, the characters must live to rebuild what have been lost and destroyed, especially the sense of self. More intersting is the fact that even after the Civil War, discrimination and mistreatment were not just memories but reality, still haunting them endlessly.
To me Kindred was like a fiction whereas Beloved is like reality. Both have the elements of fantasy, time traveling and ghost, but the purpose of those fantastical elements are vastly different. Time traveling only considers the survival of self, the ghost deals with the survival of others. Dana travels time as a way to preserve her ancestors and herself; the ghost appears as a sad evidence of the evils in the world. I, then, wanted to ask myself a question: which of the two worlds am I living in? Am I living in the memory of the past, trying to build my present based on it, or am I living in the present, trying to deal with the situations by upholding to something that I cannot compromise? Am I living the present, thinking the past dreamlike, or am I living the present, trying to erase the past and failing to do so? And what are the consequences of living in such a way?
Posted by kimkyoun at March 30, 2007 02:41 PM