1. Discussion
“Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Ghosts and Memories in the Narratives of African-American Women“ by Elizabeth Fox-Genovese tells the story of the women’s experience of slavery as a mother and for their children. Not many people share the accounts of what happened to women because “many [find] it difficult to write [about] it from a subjective perspective- from the ‘inside’” (pg. 1). It was common for women slaves to be sexually exploited by white men who were often their masters. Shockingly however, it was thought that black male slaves predominantly sexually abused women slaves. From a women’s perspective “the worst of sexual exploitation is that “he” treated me as a thing- not as a unique object of his desire, but as an indifferent object of his lust” (pg. 3). Since the 19th century people have claimed that slavery was worse for women than for men, do you agree or disagree with this statement and why?
Chapter 4 “not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there” by Avery Gordon is about “lingering inheritance of racial slavery, the unfinished project of Reconstruction, and the compulsions and forces that all of us inevitably experience in the face of slavery’s having even once existed in our nation” (pg. 139). Under the terms of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, a slave that runs away but is found must legally return with the owner and be a slave again, this is an example of lingering inheritance because once slavery is in your family line it never leaves. An example of the compulsions and forces that people experience from being a slave is explained in the piece when Gordon discusses that Sethe tries to kill her children so they do not have to endure the horrid life of a slave. This inhumane action of trying to kill her own children is triggered because of the awful life she had when she was a slave at Sweet Home. How does Gordon connect Beloved to the unfinished project of Reconstruction?
Avery Gordon’s Haunting and Sociological Imagination addresses many of the same points the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison does. Both discuss in detail what it was like for a slave striving to be free and the aftermath effects from a life of slavery. In Beloved Sethe risks everything to save her family from a life of slavery. When Sethe escapes she says, “I did it. I got us all out. Without Halle too. Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own. Decided. And it came off right, like it was supposed to” (Morrison 162). Being a former slave has many detrimental effects. When Sethe was a slave at Sweet Home she was raped by a schoolteacher. In chapter 26 Sethe mistakes Mr. Bodwin for a schoolteacher and runs toward him about to attack, but the community stops her before she has the chance to. In Gordon’s piece she says that “slavery has ended, but something of it continues to live on,… such endings that are not over is what haunting is about” (Gordon 139). In Beloved, this is a great example of Sethe being able to escape slavery but its ability to continue haunting her. This is because Sethe is unable to face what happened in the past. Her failure to confront the past is preventing her from moving forward with her life and is the reason she constantly has flashbacks to her life as a slave at Sweet Home. Gorgon discusses how “Beloved also problematizes the retrieval of lost or missing subjects by transforming those who do not speak into what is unspeakable” (Gordon 150). In the novel the house 124 on Bluestone Road is used not only as a setting but it also used as a character. Morrison writes, “124 was spiteful. Full of baby’s venom” (Morrison 3). The house serves as the origin of Beloved when she crosses over to the real world to torture her mother and also as a place her spirit haunts her family members.
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2. Discussion
Elizabeth Fox Genovese’s lecture entitled, “Unspeakable Things Unspoken: Ghosts and Memories in the Narratives of African-American Women“ focuses on how stories that should remain unspoken, such as that of slavery, are remembered through the narratives of past memories. She uses Toni Morison’s Beloved to show how the unspeakable treatment of women during times of slavery affected their minds even after freedom. She uses this novel to analyze and compare, stating, “I turned to Beloved for a plausible, if imaginative, representation of the feelings of some women who endured slavery, and like Sethe, continued to bear its scars” (Genovese 3). She relates the affect slavery had on Sethe as a woman, by using the role of a mother to describe her infanticide, “Had that that baby been killed in the name of the too-thick love that sought to put her beyond the claims of slavery? Or had she been sacrificed to her mothers fierce determination to define her own identity as a mother” (Genovese 17). How do you feel Sethe handled the situation with her children? Did you think she did the “motherly” thing to do by seeing death as the only way her kids can truly escape slavery?
In chapter 4 “Not only the footprints but the water too and what is down there” by Avery Gordon, he recounts how a fugitive slave escaped from her new owner with four children, but is later found and demanded to return back under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. She attempts to murder all her children but only successfully kills one. She performed this action in order to prevent her children from having to go back to the life of slavery that she recently escaped. This is an example of the “lingering inheritance of racial slavery” (Gordon 139), showing how the memory of slavery will always come back to haunt her, it is something that cannot be escaped. Why do you feel Gordon went so in depth with providing us the background information to the Margaret Garner case? I personally feel that it was not really needed, for it was the explanations afterward that really made me understand the method of haunting in the novel.
The novel Beloved by Toni Morrison is a prime example of Avery Gordon’s points and ideas presented in Haunting and the Sociological Imagination. Gordon states how “in Beloved, we are forced to contend with what may be the exemplar of ‘fictional pretenders to the real thing,’ that is, ghosts” (Gordon 151). This is relevant to the novel in that the ghost of Beloved manifests herself in front of Sethe, what this does is remind Sethe of the actions that she has done in the past. It is possible that this ghost is only the “rememory” of her passed actions coming to confront her. Rememory is another topic that Gordon focuses on that is proven to be true in Beloved. This is seen near the ending of the book, where Sethe steps outdoors with Beloved in front of a crowd of people, and sees a familiar hat (Morrison 306). She immediately attempts an attack on this man [Mr. Bodwin] because he is wearing a hat similar to Schoolteacher’s when he tried to take back her and her children. This is a perfect example of rememory. Gordon backs this up by stating “A woman recognizes a hat, a knot of half-signs, which weaves a story, binds the time of the now with a hungry past, and marks a limit, No” (Gordon 163). The haunting in Beloved comes from the remembrance of events from that past that stay with a person forever. In the case of Sethe, it is memories of slavery, memories of murdering her daughter, now manifested back in the form of the spirit Beloved, and the memories of the men who tried to bring her back to slavery, causing her to perform the deed which puts into question her role as a mother.
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