1. Warming up with three good things and our old friend, Foster:
"If we only understand Beloved on the surface level, Sethe's act of killing her daughter becomes so repugnant that sympathy for her is nearly impossible. If we lived next to her, for instance, one of us would have to move. But her action carries symbolic significance; we understand it not only as the literal action of a single, momentarily deranged woman but as an action that speaks for the experience of a face at a certain horrific moment in history, as a gesture explained by whip scars on her back that take the form of a tree, as the product of the sort of terrible choice that only characters in our great mythic stories--a Jocasta, a Dido, a Medea--are driven to make. Sethe isn't a mere woman next door but a mythic creature, one of the great tragic heroines." (Foster 91)
Take a look at the shifts in point of view in Chapters 16, 17 and 18.
- How would you describe the point of view(s) in each chapter?
- Why do you think Morrison structures it this way? What's the purpose of each chapter?
- Other ways of thinking about the above question: Why not just tell the story from Sethe's point of view? How is the story being filtered?
- How does the point of view affect the way you perceive Sethe? Does your perception shift throughout these chapters? Do you agree with Foster that Sethe comes across as a great tragic heroine?
2. Engaging in a Socratic seminar on Beloved, Chapters 16-18
3. Wrapping up with questions, epiphanies and kudos
HW:
1. For tomorrow (Nov 28): Bring in a hard (or electronic) copy of the poem you've chosen for your paper/project. You will write your metacognitive in class this day.
2. For Wednesday (Nov 29): [ADJUSTMENT] Please read the first half of Chapter 1 in Part 2 of Beloved. No reading ticket necessary.
3. For Friday (Dec 1): Finish Chapter 1 in Part 2 and complete a reading ticket for Socratic. Your ticket can encompass the entire chapter or focus on the second half--whatever works for you. Here's a challenge if you need one: Try focusing on a minor character.
3. Wrapping up with questions, epiphanies and kudos
HW:
1. For tomorrow (Nov 28): Bring in a hard (or electronic) copy of the poem you've chosen for your paper/project. You will write your metacognitive in class this day.
2. For Wednesday (Nov 29): [ADJUSTMENT] Please read the first half of Chapter 1 in Part 2 of Beloved. No reading ticket necessary.
3. For Friday (Dec 1): Finish Chapter 1 in Part 2 and complete a reading ticket for Socratic. Your ticket can encompass the entire chapter or focus on the second half--whatever works for you. Here's a challenge if you need one: Try focusing on a minor character.
Heads-up! December 6-7: Poetry papers and project are due.
Is she a tragic heroine? No, making Sethe look like a crawler rather than a walker makes it seem as though she is not a tragic heroine. It is very hard to understand what she is going through and why she did it because of the fact that she is black, a slave, and this is something we simply can’t relate to. Toni Morrison portrays her more as a heroine because right before she goes to kill her kids it starts talking about hummingbird wings to make Sethe seem like an angel. Paul D saying she had four legs instead of two was a way to call her an animal. On the other hand, Morrison made the situation very straight forward, it showed that she did something, and explained why she did it. This created moral ambiguity as for the reader not to be able to determine if it was truly right or wrong. Paul D calls Sethe a crawler because she is dependent upon another person or something else. She doesn’t have that independence. Crawling is something that shows you have given up your own purpose because you cannot move forward. This is why Sethe isn’t a heroine because she doesn’t control her own actions, she only depends on others. The Crawling is more related to Sethe being called an animal which still shows the helplessness, but also proves that she reverted back to an animal state of mind where she kills her children rather than having them live through the cruelties of the world. The moral of the book is not to say that bad things are okay because slavery caused them, but in this case it is the only way that Sethe saw fit to protect her kids. Sethe acted way too proud to not willingly do it, she had some piece of conscious that said she should do it. The morals that we look at are based upon the options that people have, and we don’t know what other options Sethe had so it is hard to judge what she did. It was Sethe’s motherly instinct to do this. Sethe made it a very simple and straightforward idea. The baby ghost is almost accepting of what happened in this case. The baby ghost is not angry but is almost saying that it was supposed to happen. This creates a judge and jury for Sethe in a different form. Sethe’s actions were only caused by the culture she was surrounded by, but there was also a higher motive in that she is defined by everything that she cannot be. Heroism is more personal than universal. Everyone has different heros, there have been bad people that are viewed as heroes because other people think those bad things. A person may not be completely heroic, but their mannerisms are heroic. Conditional heroism is controversial because someone who has bad morals and shares those with others isn’t good. A hero is not someone who does something. Sethe can do things that aren’t the best option without being heroic. Morrison purposely wrote the story this way to create a dilemma. She could have wrote it in a way that it was no big deal, and it could have been written in a way that shamed Sethe, but it was written to create dilemma within the reader. She uses Paul D to show that there is no way that it is right, but there are more than one side to the story. We look at it as Sethe denying her motherly instinct when she kills her children, but it truly was her motherly instincts that made her kill her children. Paul D points out that her love is too thick. Her love is so thick for her children that she doesn’t want to see them suffer. Sethe could have seen it more as freeing her children rather than killing them. All the images of birds that are presented show that she is trying to make a flight towards freedom for her kids. Thin love in this case would have been keeping the kids alive even though they would have had to go through a terrible future. Sethe doesn’t have a good model as to what love is. She always sees the white people who have others raise their kids for them rather than ever pay attention to them. And seeing this she loved her kids to the point of no return.
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