Responding and Reflecting Weber 2

Hello everyone. Thanks again for reading my second Responding and Reflecting blog.

Last time I talked about how Toni Morrison used her characters in Beloved to show how not everyone fits into the gender stereotypes.

Like last time, this time I have to talk about something that the book Beloved taught me through the Feminist Lens. This time around I will talk about how Beloved taught me the difference between desire for someone and an obsession over someone.

Formally, the definition of Desire is “a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen.” (google definitions, no real website to site) Desire can be defined through a wish to achieve something, but in the case of Beloved desire is mostly used as a sexual want for someone. Obsession is “an idea or thought that continually preoccupies or intrudes on a person's mind.” (google definitions)

If you were to describe the characters of Beloved I would describe Sethe as desperate and enslaved by her own mind, Paul D as in self denial and submissive, Denver as growing and lonely, and Beloved as obsessive and manipulative.

A lot of the book Beloved is based off of the desires of humans. The desire of men to have control over others, the desire of the slave masters to use the female slaves as toys for their sexual pleasure, the desire to be free, the desire to be healed, the desire to be looked at with love and the desire to be with someone and to not be so alone. For those that have read the book I am pretty sure that they would agree with me in this.

Now back to how there’s a fine line between desire and obsession. And the character that shows that difference the best is Beloved. Many would agree that one of the main themes of the book Beloved is about desire. But Beloved herself is a figure to show how you can take your desires and wishes too far, and that is how she crosses over to being obsessive. Now if she just had a desire for Sethe it would have been healthy, but Beloved shoved Denver away and manipulated Paul D into having sex with her. Beloved’s every day was taken up by Sethe. Everything Sethe has and was is what Beloved had to have and to be. She wanted to take everything that Sethe held dear and make her live through all of the pain that she had in her life. Beloved thrived off of Sethe’s misery and became healthier as Sethe became weaker. This is to show the readers where your desire for something becomes unhealthy. Desire becomes an unhealthy obsessiveness. When every single thought of yours is taken up by the want for that person. When you choose to take everything that is theirs. It’s unhealthy when it affects your own health, like gets you pregnant. It’s also unhealthy when it affects the lives of others, like taking a mother away from a daughter that needs her. And finally, when your object of desire takes a turn for the worst, like Sethe’s life force being drained from her and her drowning in depression at being forced to relive her traumatic experiences. This is what you call obsessive and the book Beloved shows that it is not healthy to be obsessive but desire is perfectly natural.