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April 03, 2007
Response to Characters
First of all, some interesting trivia:
-Sethe lives in 124 Bluestone Road. Beloved was published in 1987. 1987-124=1863, the year that the Emancipation Proclamation was signed.
-Beloved is the third of four children and also the only one known to be dead. If one were to assign the children numbers based on the order they are born, one would get 1, 2, 3, and 4 (Denver is four). Take out 3, since Beloved is dead, and you are left with 124. (Thank you, Wikipedia).
WARNING: SPOILER MAY OR MAY NOT FOLLOW. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.
While reading Beloved, I found it rather hard to find much sympathy for Sethe’s character. At the same time, I couldn’t help but feel that Morrison was staring at me, disapproving the whole time by my lack of compassion for her protagonist. To me, it seems that Morrison, in a sense, undermines her own work. In one scene, the reader is presented with all of the horrors and atrocities involved in slavery, especially those visited on Sethe (such as the stealing of her milk). However, the reader is later presented with (pardon my assumption) the insanity experienced by Sethe. Her actions, despised even by other freed slaves, cast a stigma on her character that I found difficult to dispel. Her following pride tends to make her character somewhat loathsome. Still, despite all of this—and having read the forward in the “red-cover” copy of Beloved—I couldn’t help but feel that I was supposed to be feeling bad her (and not only for her presumed mental condition). Hopefully, this isn’t just me being unsympathetic. Does anyone else feel this way about Sethe or other characters?
(By the way, for those who have gotten further in the book, I despise Beloved).
Posted by gdejongh at April 3, 2007 10:25 PM
Comments
Well. Here's the thing. I think we're supposed to see Sethe in her full complexity. I agree that she is totally "unlikable" at points of the book. However, can you blame her? She has created this entire world through mental repression (both concious and subconcious) in order just to survive. I can see how one might argue that this is simply pitying, or feeling sympathetic, towards her mental condition. I would argue, if one were to say this, that a person is not serperable from either their mental condition or (especially) the circumstances which have shaped their mental condition. In this way, I was able to find some compassion for Sethe but I agree with you about Beloved.
Posted by: premonp at April 4, 2007 09:40 PM
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