Final Thoughts on Beloved // Reyes

 Final Thoughts on Beloved:


“Beloved” has been the most explicit book I’ve read at my time at St. John’s, and I’m so glad to have spoken about topics that usually aren’t talked about. When talking about Beloved, I think, this is what St. John’s is supposed to be: a place where people talk about what nobody talks about—where we come to understand the most unconventional and hidden things and our deepest feelings. In doing so we are forced to wake up—to look at history and life for what it truly is even if it is uncomfortable to do so.  


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One of the things that stood out to me most was when Sethe said that true freedom is the liberty to love whoever you want, as much as you want. Not only did this sentiment stick out to me because of my own desire for this kind of freedom, but also because of it's strangeness as a concept. Despite all the goodness and happiness that love entails, love is nevertheless yoke--a burden. Love gives someone power over you, and the greater the love the greater the vulnerability and chance of pain. 


In a way, then, love is a kind of enslavement. What can it mean that true freedom is to be able to love to the fullest extent; in a sense, to be enslaved to the fullest extent? 


Despite these questions, I see why Sethe chooses to define true freedom in this particular way. For someone who has so much love, yet has never been able to love her loved one’s fully, there is no greater freedom than to finally be able to show all that love—to set it loose and flood in all its force. It's a release and a letting go that is perhaps similar to the kind of letting go Sethe does at the end of the book. 


Comments

  1. Duong TrinhMay 21, 2021 at 12:54 PM

    Your blog post is reminding me of our last reading in Seminar concerning the subject of love. Love in Toni Morrison’s Beloved seems like a punishment. For example, being in love, Sethe chooses to bribe the cemetery guard with sex, instead of paying him money, to engrave “Beloved” on her daughter’s tomb. She even starves herself in guilt while begging for Beloved’s forgiveness. Her actions to express her love for the murdered daughter are pretty bizarre and self-harming. They show a lack of self-love.

    Without self-love, Sethe sacrifices her own life for Beloved’s benefit. Not loving herself, she can’t stay alive mentally, although she assigns honorability to her murderous decision, namely for the sake of her children’s good. The lack of self-love leads to her unawareness that she turns self-contradicted. Loving her daughter freely to the fullest extent, she at the same time is enslaving and torturing herself. Now that freedom and enslavement are intertwined, it makes all sense that Sethe has gone insane. In this contradictory situation, how can one like her get out of insanity while still believing that her self-enslavement is graceful, necessary, and not enslaving at all?

    Connecting this to the subject of love in Plato’s Phaedrus, I wonder why the lover is frightened of his beloved, a godlike representation to him. Plato accounts the lover’s worshipping the Beloved like a divinity as self-deprecation. The lover is obsessed with divine beauty because he is “not newly initiated and has become corrupted.” The more he looks at the beloved, the more dreadful he is. The dread comes from the contradiction between himself and the beloved. He is maddened by shame and that he can’t be proud of himself in front of his perfect boyfriend. Therefore, without self-love, one becomes insecure about one’s identity. To a thoughtful person, this insecurity could motivate his modesty and self-improvement to equal his beloved. However, getting accustomed to the oblivion of self by slave life and torturing herself in guilt, Sethe is prevented from searching for happiness. Not only for a previously enslaved person, but the lack of self-love also could be detrimental for everyone. How do we know if we are not enslaved unknowingly by our dreams, family education, and social expectations?

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