Beloved, more reactions and notes
Oct. 21st, 2006 04:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
beccaelizabethI'm reading the York Notes book on Beloved, and it is really rather annoying me. To start with I was wondering if I'd just read the book wrong, but now it annoys me, because I had a think and have concluded the Notes book is wrong instead.
While it acknowledges in passing that the text remains cloudy about if the woman called Beloved is the ghosty baby, it keeps on acting as if this was not only a foregone conclusion but the only right way to read it. This annoys.
I figured out why. Whenever Beloved is talking about her own self, whenever we hear from her what her story is, it doesn't match the baby story. It only matches the baby story when the others who made the baby story filter her through their perceptions. Like at the end of the book when they decide Beloved didn't really say stuff at all they just thought it. Well, maybe, but to the reader, Beloved said stuff.
Remembered clear enough guns, and smoke, and being brought over in a ship, and lots of dying. Not herself dying. The dark place was a ship full of dying slaves.
The notes talk about this as psychic race memory of how slaves were brought from Africa.
I don't remember any clue to say that they weren't in fact her own personal memories of that same thing.
But the notes talk about her as some kind of spirit of slavery.
Its like it denies her own voice and calls her Example Of Black Slave, and then doesn't notice this was a bad thing!
I thought this was the central badness - everyone have their own pain story, nobody hear anyone elses, write their story over the top of each other, make everybody crazy.
And if she *wasn't* a ghost, then the good and bad of the story gets turned upside down. There was a guy who wanted to get her a job, get her out into the community. When Denver does that later on the book and the notes both approve, so jobs and community are the way to a grown up stable self. But when the man wants to suggest it, Beloved chokes, and gets rushed away to be looked after, and they treat her like a baby some more. Now if she is a baby ghost, that works out. But if she is a grown up woman with some problems, that doesn't work at all. They're keeping her in their house, no going out, just like the slaves weren't allowed off the farm. They stop her doing her own work just like the owners did. They make her dependent just like the farm was on the guy that died. If Sethe dies that house falls apart, just the same way. Or as it works out, if Sethe stops doing the outside the house things. So if going out and growing up was right for Denver, why aren't the notes seeing that it could have been right for Beloved too? Find some other people that aren't crazy! Be taught how to look after herself - like Denver did with sharing chores, not like Sethe undid by being crazy about the baby ghost.
And then the 'exorcism'. I admit I'm influenced by things outside the text. I been reading for a while about bad things done in the name of exorcism. Hurt people to get the badness out of them, just like the owner did to the slaves to get them corrected. So I was really not liking the idea they'd go 'rescue' Sethe from Beloved. She wasn't a baby ghost! She was a person! No exorcism, no driving out, bringing in is key! Even the book shows it over and over - run away bad, run to good, ask for help best especially if they get it. So how come the notes just swallow that whole thing where Ella thinks an exorcism is needed? She isn't the only voice there. The teacher lady doesn't think that's smart at all. Doesn't the teacher lady opinion count?
If Beloved was not a ghost, if she was a sexually abused and brain messed up person, then that ending was where they drove a pregnant woman out naked into a world that hates her very skin, and that's no kind of good thing at all at all.
I thought the book was all broken because they start writing their stories into other people instead of trying to write more their own selves.
But the notes keep talking like they're saving themselves from a baby ghost and its like they're shutting out half the world to see it that way.
I realise that having written ghost stories myself it might seem strange to go all logic-skeptic, but once the woman turned up in the flesh and got pregnant she weren't any kind of ghost I ever heard of. Only life makes life. I realise there was some ambiguity, that maybe she was just swelling, but she were described as pregnant near the end, and we saw how she could be, and it all made much sense.
Seeing her as baby ghost requires a lot of twisty leaving stuff out. Where's the holes? All over. So she asked about diamonds - plenty other people have diamonds. So she knew a song - she been in that house long time by then and Denver told her plenty of stuff. Or maybe it was a song from the before place, misremembered. Lots of ways to fill that in.
But how to fit the slave ship memories into the baby ghost story? Baby ghost got no such rememberances of her own. Baby ghost in fact didn't ever grow up until they decided Beloved was her- always on the stairs baby ghost was crawling, always in the cake baby ghost had small hands. Since when did baby ghost grow up? Since never.
So it doesn't fit.
People just acted like it did and messed each other up by it.
All about misinterpretation.
I have only read the book once and might be getting bits plain wrong. If this was an essay I'd go back and reference it properly. But it is not an essay and I just blurt.
Now I should finish eating. I stopped half way to type and food is not so much hot by now.
While it acknowledges in passing that the text remains cloudy about if the woman called Beloved is the ghosty baby, it keeps on acting as if this was not only a foregone conclusion but the only right way to read it. This annoys.
I figured out why. Whenever Beloved is talking about her own self, whenever we hear from her what her story is, it doesn't match the baby story. It only matches the baby story when the others who made the baby story filter her through their perceptions. Like at the end of the book when they decide Beloved didn't really say stuff at all they just thought it. Well, maybe, but to the reader, Beloved said stuff.
Remembered clear enough guns, and smoke, and being brought over in a ship, and lots of dying. Not herself dying. The dark place was a ship full of dying slaves.
The notes talk about this as psychic race memory of how slaves were brought from Africa.
I don't remember any clue to say that they weren't in fact her own personal memories of that same thing.
But the notes talk about her as some kind of spirit of slavery.
Its like it denies her own voice and calls her Example Of Black Slave, and then doesn't notice this was a bad thing!
I thought this was the central badness - everyone have their own pain story, nobody hear anyone elses, write their story over the top of each other, make everybody crazy.
And if she *wasn't* a ghost, then the good and bad of the story gets turned upside down. There was a guy who wanted to get her a job, get her out into the community. When Denver does that later on the book and the notes both approve, so jobs and community are the way to a grown up stable self. But when the man wants to suggest it, Beloved chokes, and gets rushed away to be looked after, and they treat her like a baby some more. Now if she is a baby ghost, that works out. But if she is a grown up woman with some problems, that doesn't work at all. They're keeping her in their house, no going out, just like the slaves weren't allowed off the farm. They stop her doing her own work just like the owners did. They make her dependent just like the farm was on the guy that died. If Sethe dies that house falls apart, just the same way. Or as it works out, if Sethe stops doing the outside the house things. So if going out and growing up was right for Denver, why aren't the notes seeing that it could have been right for Beloved too? Find some other people that aren't crazy! Be taught how to look after herself - like Denver did with sharing chores, not like Sethe undid by being crazy about the baby ghost.
And then the 'exorcism'. I admit I'm influenced by things outside the text. I been reading for a while about bad things done in the name of exorcism. Hurt people to get the badness out of them, just like the owner did to the slaves to get them corrected. So I was really not liking the idea they'd go 'rescue' Sethe from Beloved. She wasn't a baby ghost! She was a person! No exorcism, no driving out, bringing in is key! Even the book shows it over and over - run away bad, run to good, ask for help best especially if they get it. So how come the notes just swallow that whole thing where Ella thinks an exorcism is needed? She isn't the only voice there. The teacher lady doesn't think that's smart at all. Doesn't the teacher lady opinion count?
If Beloved was not a ghost, if she was a sexually abused and brain messed up person, then that ending was where they drove a pregnant woman out naked into a world that hates her very skin, and that's no kind of good thing at all at all.
I thought the book was all broken because they start writing their stories into other people instead of trying to write more their own selves.
But the notes keep talking like they're saving themselves from a baby ghost and its like they're shutting out half the world to see it that way.
I realise that having written ghost stories myself it might seem strange to go all logic-skeptic, but once the woman turned up in the flesh and got pregnant she weren't any kind of ghost I ever heard of. Only life makes life. I realise there was some ambiguity, that maybe she was just swelling, but she were described as pregnant near the end, and we saw how she could be, and it all made much sense.
Seeing her as baby ghost requires a lot of twisty leaving stuff out. Where's the holes? All over. So she asked about diamonds - plenty other people have diamonds. So she knew a song - she been in that house long time by then and Denver told her plenty of stuff. Or maybe it was a song from the before place, misremembered. Lots of ways to fill that in.
But how to fit the slave ship memories into the baby ghost story? Baby ghost got no such rememberances of her own. Baby ghost in fact didn't ever grow up until they decided Beloved was her- always on the stairs baby ghost was crawling, always in the cake baby ghost had small hands. Since when did baby ghost grow up? Since never.
So it doesn't fit.
People just acted like it did and messed each other up by it.
All about misinterpretation.
I have only read the book once and might be getting bits plain wrong. If this was an essay I'd go back and reference it properly. But it is not an essay and I just blurt.
Now I should finish eating. I stopped half way to type and food is not so much hot by now.
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no subject
Date: 2006-10-21 04:09 pm (UTC)I see two possible roots for the problems you're having here. First, Toni Morrison is working from a base of southern folk tales where the thing you most object to- the dead child returning to life and causing havoc- is an archytypal event. It's not logical, but human beings are not logical beings.
Second, much of the story-telling in Beloved exists in dialogue with two older books: Uncle Tom's Cabin and Gone With the Wind. Being unfamiliar with those stories complicates appreciating the ways in which Morrison engages the two conflicting white myths about slavery and freedom: first, that white abolitionists were the primary movers in bringing slaves out of the south, and second, that most masters were beneficent/most slaves were happy in servitude. The book is a political polemic in the form of a Dead Child tale, and there are points where the two messages are at odds (and, let me say, there's a whole other layer of feminist polemic, but I expect you got that one).
Julia, it's a complicated and self-important book, and personally I'd rather read "Boondocks" strips
no subject
Date: 2006-10-21 07:32 pm (UTC)I can sort of see in the other characters that dead-comes-back is archetypal to them, but I thought I saw in the book that it weren't what was going on.
Having half the argument be not in the book, I can't read that half.
*sigh*
I guess there will be stuff in class. And I reckon I can apply the theory tools we've been studying to this book, pretty much.
Is just... frustrating feeling like I read it upside down or something.
thanks