Prompt:

Read at least one article/essay of academic literary criticism about your text or lens (as provided by your teacher). Ideally, the article should be a reading of your text through your chosen lens, but if such a thing is not available, other types of essays will suffice.

Write a short response (300-500 words) in which you summarize the advanced interpretation of the text, and then compare it to your own reading and understanding of it. You do not necessarily have to agree or disagree with the academic literary criticism -- explain how it has informed (or not informed) your own reading.

Author Nicole Coonradt highlights some highly insightful and meaningful connections in Beloved  that before reading the article, and even with close reading, would have been unnoticed. Just as she noted in “To Be Loved: Amy Denver and Human Need - Bridges to Understanding  in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, Amy Denver acts as a direct foil to Sethe, highlighting the similarities between the two and magnifying  the traumatic events described in fragments and various time frames by Sethe, as they are seen reflected in Amy. While this completely alters the reader’s perspective of Amy’s role in the novel, it has an even more abstract connection, specifically to the Marxist lens.

The main focus of Coonradt’s article describes Amy’s character in a much higher role than is directly stated given her brief presence through in the book. However, through a great number of examples and specific characteristic and abstract connections between Amy and Sethe, the theme always tied back to how the two are separated only by race. Race is the primary difference between the two, making Amy not only a perfect foil, but also a symbol of what it looks like to break down the connection between upper-class caucasians and lower-class blacks. She is just another Sethe. Coonradt points out that while other slave narratives do not include the most graphic and traumatic details of the life as a slave, Beloved does, which highlights how Morrison breaks down boundaries to create a slave narrative where the reader can sympathize and feel the discomfort of slaves and not just be a bystander reader, as many other authors allow since the reader is automatically privileged to be a class above any slave from that era. The author continues on this tangent to narrow in on Amy Denver, as her character insists that readers re-evaluate the slave narrative by recognizing that white’s were enslaved as well. Therefore it is not only that the novel itself pushes the boundary of class differences between the reader and the characters by creating discomfort, but also uses a minor character as a basis for examining how natural and problematic it is that society solely associates blacks with bottom of all class slaves and whites with everyone above them.

This made it very clear how many levels there are to this book, and how slavery can mean so much more than just what is taught in school. Morrison attempted to demonstrate how creating even a small difference, such as including a white indentured servant, can serve as a large social commentary. Slavery, by Coonradt’s analysis, has shaped societal class divisions that continue to exist today.