This essay is about how the roles of black women as enslaved persons are portrayed. Women have been socially and politically oppressed for centuries, even to this day in some parts of the world. They were deprived of (or denied) rights and social roles were imposed on them, which were mainly limited to their own home as wife and mother. As problematic as this
situation was or still is in some cases and areas, it becomes more problematic when not only gender poses obstacles, but also origin or race. In the early 19th century, but especially after the Civil War, women in the USA came together and founded organizations and associations concerned with social welfare (especially for women) (Banner 100).
Over the decades, more movements, organizations, and associations followed, working for political and social equality and equal rights for women, as well as fighting for rights, and mostly successfully from today’s point of view (at least in the Western world). Despite these feminist movements fighting for equality, there were inequalities in the movements, namely race. A distinction must therefore be made between white feminism and black feminism. Toni Morrison contributed to drawing attention to black feminism with her novels or with the help of her female protagonists. This is also the case in her fifth novel Beloved published in 1987, in which, in addition to the main motif of slavery, other motifs such as trauma and memory, but also black feminism and womanhood are included.
The protagonist Sethe lives together with her daughter Denver and with the ghost Beloved, who is her killed daughter. With the help of memories, flashbacks, and dreams (or nightmares), the story tells what the protagonist experiences during her time as an enslaved woman among other things, how she is able to escape slavery, what happens (also immediately) after her escape and how she deals with her memories and her past. In this process, (sexual) abuse, oppression of the enslaved females, and the difficulties of motherhood – always in addition to the agonies of slavery and racism – can be found in the novel.
Table of content
THE DRIFFERENCE OF WHITE AND BLACK FEMINISM
DIFFERENCES OF THE ROLE OF WHITE AND BLACK WOMEN IN THE SOCIETY OF THE 19TH CENTURY
PHYSICAL ABUSE AND MENTAL OPPRESSION
MOTHERHOOD, SLAVERY, AND IDENTITY
CONCLUSION
WORKS CITED
Black Feminism and Womanhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved
Women have been socially and politically oppressed for centuries, even to this day in some parts of the world. They were deprived of (or denied) rights and social roles were imposed on them, which were mainly limited to their own home as wife and mother. As problematic as this situation was or still is in some cases and areas, it becomes more problematic when not only gender poses obstacles, but also origin or race. In the early 19th century, but especially after the Civil War, women in the USA came together and founded organizations and associations concerned with social welfare (especially for women) (Banner 100). Over the decades, more movements, organizations, and associations followed, working for political and social equality and equal rights for women, as well as fighting for rights, and mostly successfully from today’s point of view (at least in the Western world). Despite these feminist movements fighting for equality, there were inequalities in the movements, namely race. A distinction must therefore be made between white feminism and black feminism.
Toni Morrison contributed to drawing attention to black feminism with her novels or with the help of her female protagonists. This is also the case in her fifth novel Beloved published in 1987, in which, in addition to the main motif of slavery, other motifs such as trauma and memory, but also black feminism and womanhood are included. The protagonist Sethe lives together with her daughter Denver and with the ghost Beloved, who is her killed daughter. With the help of memories, flashbacks, and dreams (or nightmares), the story tells what the protagonist experiences during her time as an enslaved woman among other things, how she is able to escape slavery, what happens (also immediately) after her escape and how she deals with her memories and her past. In this process, (sexual) abuse, oppression of the enslaved females, and the difficulties of motherhood – always in addition to the agonies of slavery and racism – can be found in the novel.
This essay is about how the roles of black women as enslaved persons are portrayed. The oppression of this then will be discussed with the help of passages from the novel in order to show how Morrison manages to emancipate her female characters in Beloved from an oppressive society of values and to what extent. Ultimately, the aim is to convey the significance of Morrison’s novel not only for (oppressed) black women, but also for the history (of feminism) in the USA. Therefore, the exact distinction between white and black feminism is made, as the two should not be directly equated. What follows is a short summary and comparison of the role of white and black women in 19th century society. Finally, violence and oppression are discussed, as well as motherhood and slavery, and it is made explicit to what extent the characters, but especially Sethe, fight their way out of these sexist, misogynist and racist as well as inhuman situations and conditions, and how they have succeeded in emancipating themselves from an oppressive society.
THE DRIFFERENCE OF WHITE AND BLACK FEMINISM
Before going into the analysis of the points mentioned above, the difference between white and black feminism will be examined in more detail. “Generally, “feminism” has meant the advocacy of the rights of women” (Banner vi). Today you can add that feminism is also about the emancipation of women. In this case both movements – black and white feminism - are concerned with gender equality or equal rights. The significant difference here, however, is that black feminism not only struggles with gender equality, but also with racial equality. Basically, both movements want to achieve the same goal, ending female oppression, but they each have different starting points. White women mostly fight against traditions that demand that the role of women is limited to the domestic sphere (Angle 6). They fight to be allowed to work, for the right to education, for political participation, etc. Black feminists want to achieve basically the same thing, but they are not only oppressed by white men, as white women are, but also by black men, by white women and even by white children “giving new meaning to ‘forced domesticity’” (6). Additionally, and ultimately, they fight for the creation of “a political movement that not only struggles against exploitative capitalism and … the “racialized construction of sexuality”, but that also seeks to develop institutions to protect what the dominant culture has little respect and value for – black women’s minds and bodies” (Taylor 18-19). Furthermore, black women had to fight for their freedom from slavery. A burden and tragedy that white women did not have to suffer. Taylor sums up that “[c]ollectively, their [black women’s] feminism was more expansive than the agenda put forth by white women, in that specific social, economic, and political issues facing African-American communities were incorporated into a theoretical paradigm that today we call black feminism” (18).
According to Trace, there are two other points necessary to distinguish the two movements of feminism, “The pain endured by Black women in ante- and postbellum America is one reality that differentiates them from white women; another is the strong bonding among black women that has facilitated the oral transfer of myths from one generation to the next” (Trace 15). The pain or suffering of the female characters is a common thread throughout the novel due to their experiences, which will be shown in more detail below. In addition, Morrison’s novel also features the passing on of, in this case, stories and memories from one generation to the next through the grandmother and mother-in-law Baby Suggs to Sethe and she in turn to her daughters Denver and Beloved.
DIFFERENCES OF THE ROLE OF WHITE AND BLACK WOMEN IN THE SOCIETY OF THE 19TH CENTURY
Not only is it important to draw an accurate line between white and black feminism, but the social, domestic, and historical roles of gender differ between the two races. Nevertheless, they did have one aspect in common, and that is the patriarchal system to which both, white and black women, must submit. In Morrison’s Beloved, it is the schoolteacher who represents not only the enslavers, but who also represents “the prominent patriarchal forces that seek to enslave the bodies and minds of women” (Daniel 3). But it is important to mention that when I speak of patriarchy here, I mean white patriarchy, to be precise.
The difference between the two races lies in the spheres. The white woman of the 19th century was subordinate to her father and later to her husband. Her social role was limited to the domestic (Keil 35) because patriarchal societies demand the limitation to “traditional female roles that are related to the family, above all the roles of daughter, wife, and mother. These roles were typically defined in a strict, traditional way” (Daniel 9). While their husbands worked, the women had to take care of the household and raise the children. The social role of black enslaved women was not limited to the domestic only, but “the ‘dual burden’ of slave women [consisted] of hard labour in the plantation economy combined with childbearing and household production in the slave community” (Bush-Slimani 83). The inferiority of black women to black men, as mentioned in the previous chapter, as well as to the white community, is noticeable here.
Black enslaved women were then equal to black men when it was about “field work on large plantations where they shared the arduous conditions of life and labour” (84). However, the difference between them was the additional role that enslaved women held: the “women’s reproductive role … and their lives [that] were affected by the complex structures of both African and European patriarchy” (84). Thus, in this regard, it can be summarized that black enslaved women historically assumed the oppressed role of the enslaved female and at the same time had to assume the traditional (oppressed) role of wife and mother, which often led to the fact that “[t]he conflicting demands of reproduction [(childbearing)] and production [(labour)] arguably placed them under psychic pressures and contradictions not experienced to the same degree by free women, or, indeed, slave men” (84). We see these consequences in the novel in almost all black female characters, especially Sethe, whose trauma develops for various reasons (slavery, abuse and torture, problems encountered as a daughter, mother, and wife). In the novel, Sethe takes on the roles of woman, daughter, wife, mother, lover (later with Paul D) as well as enslaved. All roles, which are often interlinked, bring with Sethe – but also the other female black female characters – various problems and negative experiences. These problems are explained in more detail in the following subsections. But all the problems and negative experiences have one point in common: they have arisen primarily because they are women AND enslaved.
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