Reading Beloved has given me the opportunity to see how the world looks through a finer lens. Instead of separating society into lower, middle, and upper class, I realize that the lower class can be divided into much more specific sections: women in the lower class, mothers in the lower class, men in the lower class. Classes can be drawn across gender lines, occupation, economic status, and social status.
In realizing that classes can be divided into many more categories, I have seen that there is much greater depth to life and generalizing even an extremely fine subclass can be guesswork at best because of the variation present within it. This has contradicted my viewpoints in the past as I tend to see the world in a very black and white fashion. I feel that reading the book has helped me enlighten myself and develop buance in my viewpoints.
For example, reading mothers as slaves. I see that slaves easily have their own class that is below the lower class as their decisions are even more limited. When comparing mothers to slaves it becomes immediately apparent that a mother has many of the limitations and lack of freedom that a slave does. Thus mothers in every other class is now a separate subclass with their own beliefs, desires, and restrictions. And if we think of women as separate even from that we now have 3 categories per previous class. If we now include sexuality as a divider within class we get exponentially larger number of classes. This demonstrates that there are an infinite number of way to divide classes until you reach the individual as a class unto themselves. This is the ulitmate goal as the role of classes is one that only serves to subjugate those below you.
I really like your comment on how the most basic labels can be divided further to deepen our understanding of society and interactions between people as a whole.
ReplyDeleteI like how you state that social classes sole purpose to have other dominate people beneath them because even to this very day that tends to be the case in America as well as Third World countries.
ReplyDeleteThis is very interesting. I knew about the harsher conditions women faced in many categories than their male counterparts (as well as trans people or people with sexualities other than straight), but I didn't think about it in a stratified class system. It also seems like this smaller and smaller class division could apply to the LGBTQ+ community, where some people whose own sexuality is denied deny the existence of asexuality, and where there are some exclusionary trans people who don't think a person is trans unless they experience dysphoria in their birth body. I will definitely be thinking of this when considering divisions in the community from now on. Thanks for sharing!
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