Text: Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved by Palma E. Barnett
Critical Lens: Feminist Lens
In the article of Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved by Palma E. Barnett, Barnett starts to talk about how Sethe was raped and how she does not want anyone to touch her children. Barnett talks about how Sethe was a free woman, from slavery, but she was scarred from the abuse and rape that she’s been through. “While Morrison Depicts myriad abuses of slavery like brutal beatings and lynchings, the depictions of and allusions to rape are of primary each in some way helps explain the infanticide that marks importance; the beginnings of Sethe's story as a free woman” (418). Even though Sethe was free, Barnett describes how men looked at Sethe as a woman to have sex with. She used “allusion to rape,” which means that the men dream of raping her, and they did not do anything to her. By looking at this word, “allusion to rape,” shows how many people look at Sethe differently and they want something from her, other than using her as a slave.
Barnett says, “Sethe kills her child so that no whitman will ever “dirty” her, so that no young man with “mossy teeth” will ever hold the child down and suck her breasts” (251, 70, 418). Barnette was trying to say that Sethe killed Denver and Beloved, because she does not them to get raped from men. Sethe does not want Denver and Beloved to go what she went to. Instead of letting them live, she killed them, so she would not have to see them suffer, like how Sethe did, when she was a slave. Barnett was trying to say that Sethe been through lots of stuff when she was a slave, because she had no power to say anything and she has to stay quiet about it.
I find your explanation of what Barnett was saying in the reading is very captivating. Drawing upon the conclusion that Sethe did this to her children because she did not want the horrible things that happened to her to happen to her children. I think that this concept brings up the very important ideas about how women will do anything for their children because of their maternal instinct.
ReplyDeleteIt is sad to know what Sethe is capable of doing, especially murdering her children. To end their suffering and to not suffer like she once did.
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