sauvegarde Essai Gender Beloved

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3. Discuss the ways in which one or two twentieth-century American texts engage with questions of ONE OR TWO of the following:

c. gender


When it comes to gender, in more than one way Beloved is a novel without balance. The main characters – Sethe, Dever, Beloved, Baby Suggs, Amy – are all female, interacting almost exclusively with each other, living in 124 almost like in a womb. In the place where fathers, lovers, sons should stand, there is a huge void. The male characters are part of the background, but not of the main storyline, and when they are they are pushed away, on the fringe of the women's lives. Nevertheless, most of the men in this book have a more positive and less controversial role than the women. They bring balance, support, opening and strength, but are rejected, with the result we know : Sethe and Beloved falling into insanity. It feels like if men have been around, things could have turned out differently. Male are not given enough credit in this novel, and I am going to try to give them back some, focusing on the African Americans and leaving aside Mr Garner, Mr Bodwin, Sawyer and the Schoolteacher, although exploring their function could be very interesting.


One of the main things that male characters are bringing, is an opening to the world. In her article about Fathers and Boundaries, Doreen Fowler discusses 'the critical role in Beloved of a father figure or third party in helping to form boundaries that both distinguish an autonomous subject and allow for alliances with others.' 1 In other words, without a father figure or a third party, the mother and her child are locked in their own world, not distinct from each other. They need someone's intervention to part them in order to become two separated human beings, and to form new bounds with other people. This is something that could have never been achieved in the overly feminine world of Beloved, and especially at 124. When Paul D. Garner arrives at the house, Denver has not left the yard in years, and both herself and her mother do not have any social contacts : it is even said that 'there had been no visitors' 'for twelve years' 2. No wonder the young girl immediately considers him as a threat : she has been living alone with Sethe and her ghost sister since her brothers flew ; she is the only child her mother has left, and they have a deep connexion. So she tries to compete with Paul D for Sethe's affection. [insert quotation here] But he is the one who truly moves things forward by making them go to the carnival. Sethe is at first ill-at-ease, and she does not even know how to dress, wearing a full church outfit when the summer heat is hardly sustainable. But then, seeing their three shadows on the ground holding hands, she begins to realize that they could have a life. 3 Not a new life, but simply a life, because what they had before could hardly be called so. It was almost a pre-life, in a cocoon that Sethe built for her and her daughter. This carnival day shows her what could be, if she was willing to let Paul D bring them into the world. But instead, after meeting Beloved, she acts with her like with her own daughter, and defends her against him. She absorbs her, whereas Paul D was trying to distinguish the mother from her children by being her lover. And he does not want to be a part of her, he wants to 'put his story next to hers' 4, which is a healthier way to connect with someone. These steps of differentiation and then of entry into the society are usually a natural evolution of the relationships inside a family, but for slaves in the nineteenth century things never worked out the way it should. The reason Paul D had to step up and shake things at 124 is because the biological father was unable to perform this role5. Halle was a great son to Baby Suggs, but he abandoned his own family. He never even saw his youngest daughter, who spent her life waiting for him. 6 His absence hurts her, and she cannot even claim it because 'only those who knew him […] could claim his absence for themselves'7. So that is why she acts so possessive with her mother first, and then with Beloved ('She's mine, Beloved'. But despite her father's absence, and although it would never fill the void it left in her, she always had someone else watching over her : Stamp Paid. He is a clearly underrated character, and he has been present during all Sethe's life as a free woman. First, as a member of the underground railroad, he helps her cross the Ohio river and makes sure that one-day-old-baby Denver is warm and comfortable by wrapping her well into a coat. Later that year, he saves her from her mother's murderous frenzy, he 'snatched the baby from the arc of its mother's swing.'9 This event made him feel closely linked to Denver, and he never stopped caring about her. At the very end of the novel he takes her side while talking to Paul D : 'Lay off Denver, Paul D. That's my heart. I'm proud of that girl', and then insisting 'I'm proud of her. She turning out fine. Fine.'10 So even if they have no actual contact during the main storyline, he has always been there for her. From her perspective, she remembers him as 'an old man with white hair called Stamp'11, one of the two people she knew personally.