Beloved Blog Post #3

Beloved is becoming more and more intense. More metaphoric, but a little easier to read. There is so much I could talk about in this blog post, but I’ll choose to single in on a couple of main points that stood out to me the most. 

There is a ton of imagery going on in pages 32 and 33 of the text. The top of page 33 reads, “As soon as one strip of husk was down, the rest obeyed and the ear yielded up to him its shy rows, exposed at last. How loose the silk. How quick the jailed-up flavor ran free. No matter what all your teeth and wet fingers anticipated, there was no accounting for the way that simple jot could shake you. How loose the silk. How fine and loose and free.” Upon reading it, someone may be confused about what’s really going on in this passage. I have an idea of what’s going on, but I’m not 100% sure if that’s the case. What I gather from this piece of text is this: sexual engagement. I come to this conclusion because of the use of phrase, “How quick the jailed-up flavors ran free.” What I believe the author is referring to is the sexual excitement of a woman, who in this case would be Sethe. According to the text, Sethe is an irresistible woman who was wanted by just about every man at Sweet Home. “It had been hard, hard, hard sitting there erect as dogs, watching the corn stalks dance at noon. The water running over their heads made it even worse.” These guys practically LUSTED after Sethe. 

Another thing that stood out to me was the way the book pulls the reader in; the use of imagery and metaphor helps with this. There’s a particular scene where Sethe is in what I believe to be the wilderness, and she’s in labor with Denver. This is how some of that labor is described: “But she could not stop, would not stop, for when she did the little antelope rammed her with horns and pawed the ground of her womb with impatient hooves.” If Sethe were to stop pressing forward, baby Denver would showcase this disapproval by literally FORCING Sethe, by causing her extreme pain, to keep going. What also aided in Sethe not giving up on living; she was worn out from the labor, was the voice of Amy, the white girl who found her lying down own the ground. “The sound of that voice, like a sixteen-year-old boy’s, going on and on and on, kept the little antelope quiet and grazing. During the whole hateful crawl to the lean-to, it never bucked once...It was the voice full of velvet and Boston and good things to eat that urged her along and made her think that she wasn’t after all, just a crawling graveyard for a six-moth baby’s last hours.” (41, 42). The fact that Sethe did not give up on her self and her unborn child, even when it seemed like all was lost, shows the love that she has for Denver. 

So far Beloved is becoming an interesting piece of text. It’s still hard to read at times, but I find that reading it aloud is making it a little more understandable and easy to follow.