final project: synthesis

Both novels, Beloved and Uncle Tom’s cabin, try to show how slavery affected people. They are different in a sense that Uncle Tom’s Cabin is narrated in a white persons point of view as where Beloved is narrated through an African Americans point of view. We can see the difference in these two novels. Uncle Tom’s Cabin tries to almost sugar coat the horrific events of slavery and there are many gaps and silences. Beloved fills those gaps and silences and is a very real novel not holding back any horrific truth from slavery events. At the end of Uncle Tom’s Cabin they move away and we don’t really get to follow their story on how slavery affected them afterwards. Beloved shows not only how slavery really was at the time, but how deeply it affected everyone years later.

We can take what happened in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and bring it to the time frame of Beloved and see how the events that happened in the time period of Uncle Tom’s Cabin still affected people years later. In thinking of it this way, Beloved crosses over from the time period Uncle Tom’s Cabin took place to the place where her family ended up. Beloved brought those memories to the present time. In my Uncle Tom’s Cabin blog project I reflected on how Eliza did not stop running till she got to Canada. She did not stop in the north because no one in the north was safe, because no African American was safe in the north. This comes into play in Beloved. The text says, “ Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a…woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other…. Right off it was clear, to schoolteacher especially, that there was nothing there to claim”. We can see that even in the North, Sethe’s children were not safe, and she did what she did because she thought what she was doing was saving them, saving them from all the horrific things she had been through, so they would never have to go what she had been through. These horrific things that drove Sethe do to what she did and cut “Beloved’s” life short were not mentioned in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. We can see how the perspectives of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Beloved differ.

In my Critical Commentary I talk about the character of Beloved and what role she plays. I wrote about how Morrison gives a voice to the “unspeakable”. I think the character of Beloved helps play role in showing how slavery still affects people. Slavery is abolished but the horrific things still happened, and you can’t change it or forget about it. You can only move forward. Slavery has affected Sethe in a way that can’t be undone. She had killed her child to prevent her child from having to endure the pain of slavery. This outcome slavery had on Sethe’s life would haunt her for years after. Beloved helps aid Sethe in not forgetting about what happened when she was in slavery and how it affected her, but helping her move on.

We can see that slavery affected Sethe and even her dead daughter who haunted Sethe and then, who I think, came to the present as Beloved. We can still see in 2015 that the impact of slavery is still around today, through racism. Some may take racist comments and even jokes lightheartedly; but for many it’s a different story. Racist comments and jokes are not okay. They show that we still have a barrier between equality as we did in the past. In the news article I read, a sophomore in college told of how she was beat up when she was a child for being black. Everyone had a different experience with slavery back then and we still have different experiences today. Treating people differently based on race in 2015 brings back the painful memories of how people were treated differently in horrific ways back then. I think what we can take from Beloved is to keep moving forward and learn from the past. There may be racism still today but we can take our imperfect time period now and learn from it as well, and hopefully one day have a colored blind nation where every race is treated equally.