Annemily's Blog

Toni Morrison uses the supernatural elements in Beloved to better show how her characters are haunted by trauma of the past. But including Beloved’s ghost doesn’t just help readers understand Sethe, Denver, and other living characters better, it also gives voice to Beloved and gives readers a pretty unique perspective into how the death of a baby affected the baby herself. I’m going to try to lay out what we know about Beloved’s personality and what motivates her. We know a fair amount about how Beloved feels about people. We know that she loves Sethe and wants to be around her and hear her stories. We know she hates Paul D because he detracts from Sethe’s attention to her. Beloved’s feelings about Denver seem more complicated. She spends a lot of time with Denver and Denver thinks she enjoys her company when Sethe isn’t around, but she doesn’t express a lot of affection for Denver. One of the main things we still don’t know about Beloved is why she returned. One possibilit...

We discussed both when Joe hits Janie and when Tea Cake hits Janie a fair amount in class. But we didn’t really get to discuss Chapter 15, in which Janie hits Tea Cake. The chapter begins with “Janie learned what it felt like to be jealous” (136). A woman named Nunkie has been flirting with Tea Cake and how Tea Cake flirts with her in return. When Janie finds Tea Cake and Nunkie wrestling for some tickets she goes home: “It wasn’t long before Tea Cake found her there and tried to talk. She cut him short with a blow and they fought from one room to the other, Janie trying to beat him, and Tea Cake kept holding her wrists and wherever he could to keep her from going too far” (137). The fight ends with Janie and Tea Cake having sex. First off, to me violence seems pretty out of character for Janie. We see her fighting verbally with Joe and expressing her opinion pretty forcefully with Tea Cake. I’d say that for the most part, she deals with problems with other people either throu...