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Example research essay topic: Baby Suggs Critical Analysis - 980 words

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Erica Baurmeister was the author of the first critical analysis that I read. In her brief review of the book she says that Beloved is no longer the traditional novel. In this book slavery has torn apart ones own heritage and the death of a baby creates such a rage that it literally rocks the house. Bauermeister describes Beloved as being written in bits and pieces then smashed like a mirror on the floor and left for the reader to put together. The stories circle, swim dreamily to the surface, and the become suddenly clear and horrifying. Bauermiester concludes her article by saying that, because of the extraordinary, experimental style as well as the intensity of the subject matter, what we lean from them (the characters of the novel) touches at a level deeper than understanding.

The second critical analysis that I read was written by Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos, a professor from the Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. The focus of her essay was to show the way in which Toni Morrison develops the idea that maternal bonds can stunt or even stop a woman from developing her own sense of self. Toni Morrisons Beloved is the first piece of literature that is of book length that examines the dangers of mothering to the mothers own sense of self. The bonds of mothering are what differentiate womens lives from mens.

Recently many books have been published on the psychological, sociological, and even the clinical aspects of mothering. There is often a dark and painful side of motherhood that many people do not see or recognize. This theme is also present in Morrisons Bluest Eye. Pecola becomes pregnant in her early teens through incest with her father. Her pregnancy abruptly brings abuse to her from the community, which eventually sends her over the edge into permanent insanity before she can even develop her own sense of self. The teenage mother is often erased from society and can not solidify her own sense of self.

Morrison said in a national broadcast shown after she received the Pulitzer Prize that motherhood is not history. It is a timeless, a historical force with all the glories and limitations that pure nature imposes, even when camouflaged by its many cultural versions. This critic believes that Morrison could relate more to the mother half of the pair in this story: meaning Sethe, and not Beloved. Beloved explores this theme first off in Baby Suggs, the mother-in-law of Sethe. Baby Suggs basically brings herself to the face of death when she experiences American cultures denial of her daughter-in-laws mothering. When Sethe's motherhood is brought to a halt, so is the grand mothering of Baby Suggs.

Because Sethe's slave owners attempt to repossess her and her family she makes a split second decision to kill her own children rather than allow their souls to be engulfed by slavery. The institution of slavery and the evils of the historical time deny Sethe her mothering and destroys the natural cycles of maternal bonding. The fact that the first child killed is a girl is significant. For Sethe to kill her daughter is like killing her own best self. It is like killing her best self and self-gendered fantasy of the future. The act is like killing time itself; especially its bad fortunes, which the daughter, as a potential mother symbolizes.

Killing her child forces Sethe's mind outside of her body. Her mind is not lost, but by the end of the novel she has certainly abandoned her mind as a source of how to live and cope. One comment made by the author of this article was that, Morrison denies Sethe even the ability to fantasize about her future in terms of suicide, which in its destruction of self means at least that a self has been acknowledged. I thought this was an interesting way of putting it.

Sethe really lost her sense of self, so much that she could not even consider suicide because there was no self to be killed. Demetrakopoulos then goes on to compare Beloved to books written about the Holocaust. First she compares it to And the Sun Kept On Shining. In this story the author lost her entire family and then is stripped of her humanity in a Nazi death camp. Then she makes a comparison to Resnais Night and Fog and Shoah.

In these he ironically lingers on beautiful landscapes more than the setting where the Jews were slaughtered and buried in mass graves. In Morrisons novel, Sethe marvels at how the beautiful landscape of Sweet Home recurs more often than as the slaughterhouse it eventually became. Nature erases atrocities, but this allows humans to repeat them. To fully understand the extent to which Sethe's maternal bonds almost destroy her we must recognize the life stages that her daughter Denver passes through. By the end of the story Denver comes to embody the history that Sethe so resists entering. Demetrakopoulos says that Denver actually midwives two female souls into the toils of adult individuation -her mother Sethe's as well as her own.

Denver is the one who can help save Sethe from her deadly bond with Beloved. Even though Denver is the daughter who will help save Sethe, she is not the daughter that Sethe fixates on. It is thru Beloved that Morrison develops the deadliness of maternal bonding for Sethe. Beloved gradually absorbs her mothers very life and flesh.

Sethe is denied normal motherhood by the culture that surrounds her, and carries mother instinct to an absurd and grotesque length. There is a principle called enantiodromia that says any natural force suppressed will gain demonic force by the time it finally bursts forth. This principle is a rule of life in this novel. Ultimately, this rich novel examines the death of the maternal in a woman, so that her Self might live.


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Research essay sample on Baby Suggs Critical Analysis

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