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Crash Course: English Literature, Slavery, Ghosts, and Beloved: Crash Course Literature 214 - YouTube (1)

Slavery, Ghosts, and Beloved: Crash Course Literature 214 - YouTube (1)

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and today we're going to talk about Beloved.

MFTP: Mr. Green, Mr. Green! I actually like this book.

Yeah, I know you do, me from the past, because I'm you. So you read Song of Solomon in class

the year that Tony Morrison won the Nobel Prize and that summer you read Beloved, the

first, like, proper good book you ever read for fun.

Although in the case of Beloved, I suppose one uses the term 'fun' loosely.

So Morrison says in a foreword to the novel, "I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown

ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the

book's population." And that worked for you, me from the past. You were scared and upset

and also suddenly turned on to the idea that good novels were not just hurdles that you

had to jump over in order to get a high school diploma.

Good books could also be, like, ways into better understanding of the lives of others

and history and race and consciousness and what the real difference is between those

who walk on two legs and those who walk on four.

MFTP: Yeah, I don't know, it was pretty good. Wasn't that good.

Aauugh you're ruining it, me from the past, we were having a moment there.

MFTP: It's just kind of confusing, like, I couldn't figure out, like, if Beloved was a real ghost or not...?

Ugh, you just have this special gift for asking the least interesting possible question about everything we read!

If you take a hard line on the question of Beloved's quote unquote 'realness', or even

spend too much time thinking about it, you're missing the point. I mean there are clues

in the book that speak to each perspective. Some that suggest that Beloved is the ghost

returned in human form, and others hinting that she is a woman who has recently escaped

sexual slavery and exploitation who happens to just call herself Beloved.

We're not supposed to know definitively whether Beloved is really real, I mean isn't that

the nature of ghosts? And it is her ghostliness that makes her such a brilliant embodiment

of all those disremembered and unaccounted for. Ultimately,

Beloved is a symbol for the 60 million and more lost in slavery whose stories and names we will never know.

[Theme Music]

So critics often call good novels, like, 'beautiful' and 'haunting', but Beloved—both the character

and the novel—are actually haunting. For me at least, when I'm reading this novel,

my pulse begins to quicken as I feel the presence of unsettled wronged souls beneath and around

me. I mean, there are so many untold fates and stories in this novel, right?

There's the 14-year-old boy who lives alone in the woods and never remembers living anywhere

else; there are the other Pauls, the men on Paul D's chain gang; Sethe's mother; Halle.

Beloved embodies the disremembering that is woven into life and art in the United States.

I mean Morrison's story is fiction, it's full of improbabilities and ghosts, but it's also

one of the most powerfully convincing depictions of slavery I've ever read. Because in the

process of what Sethe and Paul call 'rememory', we're confronted with the reality of what

love looks like in a world of twisted conscience, and we're finally left with the unassailable

resiliency of human beings to continue in the face of all attempts to dehumanize them.

"Definitions belonged to the definers, not the defined," we read in Beloved, but in a

world where slaves were defined as inhuman—I mean, in this story they're compared to hogs

and cattle and horses—they find ways to humanness anyway. And that is what made slavery

untenable, not Abraham Lincoln, not Harriet Beecher Stowe, but slaves themselves, unnamed

and unknown, who resisted and persevered, and therein lies the hope in this very, very sad novel.

So let's start with mothers. The mother-child relationship is mythologized as, like, the

most important among humans and most other animals, but in the context of slavery, as

Morrison writes, "Unless care free, mother love is a killer," and that is not meant figuratively.

So, the central character of Beloved is Sethe, and she was raised basically motherless in

a system of slavery that intentionally disrupted mother-child relationships. Like baby Sethe

is fed by another woman's milk, for instance, which is one of the reasons that having her

own milk stolen by the white men who abuse her is so horrifying to her.

Children were often sold separately from their mothers, marriages were not recognized, and

in the era of the Fugitive Slave Act, even in freedom Sethe's children were still claimable property.

And when your children literally do not belong to you, what does it mean to be a mom?

Sethe's main mentor for mothering is her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, but her life has also been profoundly

disrupted by slavery's breaking of family. In all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe's

own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone

loved, who hadn't run off or been hanged got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought

back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen, or seized.

So Baby's eight children had six fathers. What she called 'the nastiness of life' was

the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because

the pieces included her children.

So Sethe stands in this disrupted line, but she tries to resist by holding onto her family.

She gets all her children across the Ohio River to freedom from the slave farm Sweet

Home where they were born, and she carries one in her womb on swollen feet to freedom,

but when the slave-owner comes to Ohio 28 days later to claim them, she takes them out

back to the woodshed to kill them all before he can take them. She only manages to kill

one, sawing through its neck. "If I hadn't killed her," she says, "she would have died."

When explaining this to the Beloved who has wondered into her life in the flesh, she goes

deeper into what she did and the intergenerational destruction that slavery put upon the mother line:

"My plan was to take us all to the other side, where my own mam is. They stopped me

from getting us there, but they didn't stop you from getting here. You came right on back

like a good girl, like a daughter, which is what I wanted to be and would've been if my

mam had been able to get out of the rice long enough before they hanged her and let me be one."

Sethe never got the chance to be a daughter, but she does get to be a mother, and the intensity

of her mother-love is incomprehensible to everyone else— to her remaining daughter, Denver;

to her lover, Paul D; to her entire community who ostracizes her.

"Your love is too thick," Paul D says to her.

He feels that she didn't have the right to decide her children's future, to deny them

a future; he thinks her inhuman. "You got two feet, Sethe, not four." But what does

it mean to have two feet in a system aimed at breaking families and individuals apart,

especially women, who were not meant to be mothers and daughters, but cattle and calves?

This is made very explicit early in the novel when it's said that sex with a slave woman

was not, for Halle, so different from sex with a calf.

To be a mother, and to allow her daughters to be daughters, Sethe has to escape the system itself.

First, for her, this means escape to the north and then, when that fails, it means escape to the other side.

As Sethe responds to Paul D's accusation of too-thick love, "Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all."

So, what, ultimately, is the truly human response to this oppression?

What is the proper response of the two-footed creature? Okay, let's go to the Thought Bubble.

So when Beloved begins, Sethe and Denver's house is haunted by the ghost of the dead

baby, and then Paul D, who lived with Sethe at Sweet Home, arrives and in short order

begins a relationship with Sethe, rids the house of the ghost, and takes Denver and Sethe to a carnival.

And then the adult Beloved wanders into their house 18 years after the already crawling baby was killed.

We slowly learn of Paul D's past, including his horrifying time being abused in every

way imaginable on a chain gang, and of Sethe and Denver's isolated life in the house they

share, while Beloved consumes more and more of Sethe's life. After Paul D finds out that

Sethe killed her baby, the Sethe-Beloved-Denver dynamic goes from somewhat weird to truly terrifying.

They consume each other and each others' stories, and as Beloved grows larger,

Sethe grows ever smaller. Even Denver is eventually locked out from Beloved and Sethe's mutual obsession.

The novel moves among many perspectives: third-person; close in on Baby Suggs or Denver or Paul D

or Sethe; and then in moments, first-person from various perspectives. And it also changes

tense from past to present, as if the past isn't really past, especially to the women

in the novel. They cannot lock it away and move on. Sethe's attempt to kill herself and

her family saves them all from a return to slavery, but she can't escape it. As Toni

Morrison later said in an interview about Beloved, "You can't let the past strangle

you if you're going to go forward. But nevertheless, the past is not going anywhere." Thanks, Thought Bubble.

So Beloved ends on a somewhat hopeful note. I mean, there's an attempted murder, but in

the context of Beloved, that's actually fairly hopeful.

Denver begins to care for herself and she sees clearly both the value of holding on

to the mother line and the danger of holding on to trauma. And then there's Paul D, who

once had less freedom than a rooster called Mister, who's seen rape and death and dehumanization,

who along with his fellow slaves has been made to feel like quote "Trespassers among

the human race, Watchdogs without teeth; steer bulls without horns; gelded workhorses whose

neigh and whinny could not be translated in a language responsible humans spoke."

Paul D believed that to survive such a world, you protected yourself and loved small. He picked

the tiniest stars out of the sky to own. "A woman, a child, a brother?" he thinks,

"A big love like that would split you wide open."

"Anything could stir him," we read, "and he tried hard not to love it." But Sethe helps

him to see that quote, "To get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not

to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom." And he, in return, encourages

Sethe to imagine a future, saying to her near the end of the novel, "Me and you, we got

more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."

So in the end, Denver has learned to stand on her own two feet and Beloved has moved

on, only after the entire community has come to Sethe to forgive her. And Paul D opens

himself up to big love, to thick love, to the love of Sethe, because quote, "he wants

to put his story next to hers." And in his love, he describes what all the characters,

who all love each other in their own ways, do for each other. He says, "She is a friend of my mind.

She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order."

Slavery, Ghosts, and Beloved: Crash Course Literature 214 - YouTube (1) Schiavitù, fantasmi e amati: Corso accelerato di letteratura 214 - YouTube (1) Escravatura, fantasmas e amada: Curso intensivo de literatura 214 - YouTube (1) Kölelik, Hayaletler ve Sevgili: Crash Course Edebiyat 214 - YouTube (1) Рабство, привиди і кохана: Експрес-курс з літератури 214 - YouTube (1)

Hi, I'm John Green, this is Crash Course Literature, and today we're going to talk about Beloved. مرحبًا، أنا جون غرين. هذه سلسلة Crash Course في الأدب واليوم سنتحدث عن رواية "محبوبة".

MFTP: Mr. Green, Mr. Green! I actually like this book. سيد غرين! يعجبني ذاك الكتاب في الواقع.

Yeah, I know you do, me from the past, because I'm you. So you read Song of Solomon in class أجل، أعرف ذلك يا أنا من الماضي، لأنك أنا. أنت قرأت "نشيد سليمان" في المدرسة

the year that Tony Morrison won the Nobel Prize and that summer you read Beloved, the في السنة التي ربحت فيها توني روبنسون جائزة نوبل، وفي ذاك الصيف قرأت "محبوبة"،

first, like, proper good book you ever read for fun. وكان أول كتاب جيد تقرأه للاستمتاع.

Although in the case of Beloved, I suppose one uses the term 'fun' loosely. وإن كانت كلمة "استمتاع" في حالة رواية "محبوبة" غير دقيقة.

So Morrison says in a foreword to the novel, "I wanted the reader to be kidnapped, thrown تقول موريسون في مقدمة الرواية، "أردت أن يُختطف القارئ

ruthlessly into an alien environment as the first step into a shared experience with the

book's population." And that worked for you, me from the past. You were scared and upset وهذا نفعك يا ذاتي القديمة. فقد كنت خائفًا مضطربًا،

and also suddenly turned on to the idea that good novels were not just hurdles that you وأدركت فجأة فكرة أن الروايات الجيدة ليست مجرد عوائق

had to jump over in order to get a high school diploma. كنت مضطرًا لتخطيها للحصول على شهادة الثانوية.

Good books could also be, like, ways into better understanding of the lives of others يمكن أن تكون الكتب الجيدة طريقة لفهم حياة الآخرين بشكل أفضل

and history and race and consciousness and what the real difference is between those والتاريخ والعرق والوعي والفرق الحقيقي

who walk on two legs and those who walk on four. بين من يمشون على اثنين ومن يمشون على أربع.

MFTP: Yeah, I don't know, it was pretty good. Wasn't that good. لا أدري. كان كتابًا جيدًا، لكن ليس لهذه الدرجة.

Aauugh you're ruining it, me from the past, we were having a moment there. لقد أفسدت الأمر يا ذاتي القديمة، كانت لحظة حميمية.

MFTP: It's just kind of confusing, like, I couldn't figure out, like, if Beloved was a real ghost or not...? كان كتابًا مشوشًا، فلم أفهم إن كانت "محبوبة" شبحًا حقيقيًا أم لا.

Ugh, you just have this special gift for asking the least interesting possible question about everything we read! كم أنت موهوب في طرح أقل الأسئلة إثارة للاهتمام على الإطلاق عن كل شيء نقرأه!

If you take a hard line on the question of Beloved's quote unquote 'realness', or even إن أخذت سؤال ما إذا كانت "محبوبة" حقيقية أم لا بمحمل جدي متشدد،

spend too much time thinking about it, you're missing the point. I mean there are clues أو حتى قضيت وقتًا أطول من اللازم بالتفكير فيه فقد فاتك المغزى.

in the book that speak to each perspective. Some that suggest that Beloved is the ghost

returned in human form, and others hinting that she is a woman who has recently escaped وغيرها يدل على أنها امرأة هربت مؤخرًا

sexual slavery and exploitation who happens to just call herself Beloved. من العبودية الجنسية والاستغلال وأسمت نفسها مصادفة "محبوبة".

We're not supposed to know definitively whether Beloved is really real, I mean isn't that لا يُفترض بنا أن نعرف قطعيًا ما إذا كانت "محبوبة" حقيقية.

the nature of ghosts? And it is her ghostliness that makes her such a brilliant embodiment أليست هذه طبيعة الأشباح؟ وسماتها الطيفية هي ما تجعلها تجسيدًا رائعًا

of all those disremembered and unaccounted for. Ultimately, لكل المنسيين والمهمَلين.

Beloved is a symbol for the 60 million and more lost in slavery whose stories and names we will never know. "محبوبة" ترمز في النهاية للـ60 مليونًا الذين ضاعوا في العبودية ولم ولن تُعرف أسماؤهم ولا قصصهم.

[Theme Music] "موسيقى الشارة"

So critics often call good novels, like, 'beautiful' and 'haunting', but Beloved—both the character يصف النقّاد الروايات الجيدة عادة بكلمات مثل "جميلة" و"آسرة"، لكن "محبوبة"، الشخصية والكتاب على حد سواء،

and the novel—are actually haunting. For me at least, when I'm reading this novel, آسرة فعلًا. بالنسبة إلي، عندما أقرأ الرواية،

my pulse begins to quicken as I feel the presence of unsettled wronged souls beneath and around فإن نبضي يتسارع بينما أشعر بالأرواح المظلومة المضطربة حولي من كل ناحية.

me. I mean, there are so many untold fates and stories in this novel, right? هناك مصائر وقصص لم تُروى في هذه الرواية، صحيح؟

There's the 14-year-old boy who lives alone in the woods and never remembers living anywhere فهناك صبي عمره 14 سنة يعيش وحده في الغابة ولا يتذكر أنه سكن أي مكان آخر،

else; there are the other Pauls, the men on Paul D's chain gang; Sethe's mother; Halle. وهناك الآخرون المسمون "بول" في مجموعة المساجين التي ينتمي لها "بول دي" وأم "سيثا" و"هالي".

Beloved embodies the disremembering that is woven into life and art in the United States. تمثل "محبوبة" النسيان المنسوج في كيان وفن الولايات المتحدة.

I mean Morrison's story is fiction, it's full of improbabilities and ghosts, but it's also فقصة "موريسون" متخيلة، فيها الكثير من الأشباح والأشياء غير المعقولة،

one of the most powerfully convincing depictions of slavery I've ever read. Because in the ولكنها أيضًا إحدى أكثر القصص التي قرأتها في حياتي إقناعًا في تصويرها للعبيد.

process of what Sethe and Paul call 'rememory', we're confronted with the reality of what

love looks like in a world of twisted conscience, and we're finally left with the unassailable

resiliency of human beings to continue in the face of all attempts to dehumanize them. على المواصلة في وجه جميع المحاولات لانتزاع إنسانيتهم منهم.

"Definitions belonged to the definers, not the defined," we read in Beloved, but in a مذكور في الرواية أن "التعريفات كانت سمة المعرّف، لا المعرَف عنه."

world where slaves were defined as inhuman—I mean, in this story they're compared to hogs

and cattle and horses—they find ways to humanness anyway. And that is what made slavery

untenable, not Abraham Lincoln, not Harriet Beecher Stowe, but slaves themselves, unnamed وليس "هارييت بيتشر ستو"، بل العبيد أنفسهم،

and unknown, who resisted and persevered, and therein lies the hope in this very, very sad novel. العبيد غير المعروفين وغير المذكورين الذين قاوموا وصمدوا، وهنا يكمن الأمل في هذه الرواية الحزينة جدًا.

So let's start with mothers. The mother-child relationship is mythologized as, like, the فلنبدأ إذن بالأمهات. العلاقة بين الطفل وأمه تكاد تُعطى طابعًا أسطوريًا

most important among humans and most other animals, but in the context of slavery, as فهي أهم علاقة بالنسبة للبشر ومعظم الحيوانات الأخرى، لكن في سياق العبودية، تقول "موريسون"،

Morrison writes, "Unless care free, mother love is a killer," and that is not meant figuratively. "ما لم يكن مرتاح البال، فإن حب الأم قاتل." وهي لا تقصد ذلك مجازيًا.

So, the central character of Beloved is Sethe, and she was raised basically motherless in الشخصية الرئيسية في رواية "محبوبة" هي "سيثا"، التي تربت بغير أم

a system of slavery that intentionally disrupted mother-child relationships. Like baby Sethe في نظام عبودي كان يُمزّق علاقة الأم بطفلها عمدًا.

is fed by another woman's milk, for instance, which is one of the reasons that having her

own milk stolen by the white men who abuse her is so horrifying to her. من قبل الرجال البيض الذين يؤذونها كان يؤرقها كثيرًا.

Children were often sold separately from their mothers, marriages were not recognized, and

in the era of the Fugitive Slave Act, even in freedom Sethe's children were still claimable property. وحتى بعد أن نالت حريتها، كان أطفال "سيثا" ما يزالون ملك لشخص آخر يمكنه المطالبة بهم.

And when your children literally do not belong to you, what does it mean to be a mom? وعندما لا يكون أطفالك لك، فما معنى الأمومة؟

Sethe's main mentor for mothering is her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs, but her life has also been profoundly إن مرشدة "سيثا" في أمومتها هي حماتها، "بايبي ساغز"، لكن حياتها هي أيضًا تأثرت سلبًا بشدة

disrupted by slavery's breaking of family. In all of Baby's life, as well as Sethe's بتفريق العبودية لعائلتها. طوال حياة "بايبي"، كما حياة "سيثا"،

own, men and women were moved around like checkers. Anybody Baby Suggs knew, let alone كان يتم تحريك الرجال والنساء كما لو كانوا قطع شطرنج. كل من عرفته "بايبي ساغز"، ناهيك عن كل من أحبته،

loved, who hadn't run off or been hanged got rented out, loaned out, bought up, brought ولم يهرب أو يُشنق، إما تم تأجيره أو إعارته أو بيعه

back, stored up, mortgaged, won, stolen, or seized. أو أعيد أو خُزّن أو رُهِن أو رُبح في لعبة أو سُرِق أو احتُجِز.

So Baby's eight children had six fathers. What she called 'the nastiness of life' was لذا، فكان لأبناء "بايبي" الثمانية ستة آباء. وما أسمته "بذاءة الحياة"

the shock she received upon learning that nobody stopped playing checkers just because كانت الصدمة التي تلقتها إذ أدركت أن أحدًا لم يتوقف عن لعب الداما

the pieces included her children. لمجرد أن أولادها كانوا حجارة فيها.

So Sethe stands in this disrupted line, but she tries to resist by holding onto her family. تنشأ "سيثا" إذن بهذا الجو العائلي الممزق، لكنها تحاول المقاومة عن طريق التمسك بعائلتها.

She gets all her children across the Ohio River to freedom from the slave farm Sweet

Home where they were born, and she carries one in her womb on swollen feet to freedom, وتحمل واحدًا منهم في بطنها على قدميها المنتفختين لبر الحرية.

but when the slave-owner comes to Ohio 28 days later to claim them, she takes them out لكن عندما يأتي مالك العبيد لأوهايو بعد 28 يومًا لاستعادتهم،

back to the woodshed to kill them all before he can take them. She only manages to kill

one, sawing through its neck. "If I hadn't killed her," she says, "she would have died." "وقالت: لو لم أقتلها لماتت."

When explaining this to the Beloved who has wondered into her life in the flesh, she goes عندما شرحَت ذلك لـ"محبوبة" التي دخلت حياتها على هيئة بشر،

deeper into what she did and the intergenerational destruction that slavery put upon the mother line: فإنها تشرح ما فعلت بتفصيل أعمق وكذلك الدمار الذي يطال الأجيال الذي تعيثه العبودية في علاقة الأم بأبنائها.

"My plan was to take us all to the other side, where my own mam is. They stopped me فتقول، "كانت خطتي أن ننتقل جميعًا للجانب الآخر، حيث أمي.

from getting us there, but they didn't stop you from getting here. You came right on back لقد منعوني من بلوغه، لكنهم لم يمنعوك من الوصول إلى هنا.

like a good girl, like a daughter, which is what I wanted to be and would've been if my عدتِ كطفلة مطيعة، كابنة، وهذا ما أردت أن أكونه وكنت لأكونه

mam had been able to get out of the rice long enough before they hanged her and let me be one." لو أن أمي استطاعت الخروج من الأرز قبل أن يشنقوها ويتركوني وحدي."

Sethe never got the chance to be a daughter, but she does get to be a mother, and the intensity لم تحظ "سيثا" بفرصة أن تكون ابنة، لكنها حظيت بفرصة الأمومة،

of her mother-love is incomprehensible to everyone else— to her remaining daughter, Denver;

to her lover, Paul D; to her entire community who ostracizes her. ولا مجتمعها كاملًا الذي ينبذها.

"Your love is too thick," Paul D says to her. يقول لها "بول دي"، "حبك غليظ جدًا."

He feels that she didn't have the right to decide her children's future, to deny them وهو يعتقد بأنها لم تمتلك الحق في تقرير مصير أبنائها

a future; he thinks her inhuman. "You got two feet, Sethe, not four." But what does وحرمانهم من مستقبلهم، ويرى فعلتها لاإنسانية. "لديك قدمان يا "سيثا"، لا أربع."

it mean to have two feet in a system aimed at breaking families and individuals apart, لكن ما معنى أن يكون لك قدمان في نظام يهدف لتفريق الأسر وتمزيق الأفراد

especially women, who were not meant to be mothers and daughters, but cattle and calves? وخصوصًا النساء اللواتي لم يكن الغرض منهن أن يكن أمهات أو بنات، إنما ماشية وعجولًا؟

This is made very explicit early in the novel when it's said that sex with a slave woman

was not, for Halle, so different from sex with a calf. لا يختلف عن ممارسته مع عجل.

To be a mother, and to allow her daughters to be daughters, Sethe has to escape the system itself. كي تكون أمًا، وتعطي لبناتها فرصة أن يكونوا بنات، يتوجب على "سيثا" الهرب من النظام كله.

First, for her, this means escape to the north and then, when that fails, it means escape to the other side. ما يعني أنها ستهرب للشمال، وعندما لا ينجح ذلك، فإنها تهرب للجانب الآخر.

As Sethe responds to Paul D's accusation of too-thick love, "Love is or it ain't. Thin love ain't love at all." ترد "سيثا" على اتهام "بول دي" لها بغلاظة حبها، "إما أن تحب وإما أن لا تحب، الحب الرقيق ليس حبًا."

So, what, ultimately, is the truly human response to this oppression? فما هي إذن الاستجابة الإنسانية الحقة لهذا القمع؟

What is the proper response of the two-footed creature? Okay, let's go to the Thought Bubble. ما هي الاستجابة المناسبة من مخلوق بقدمين؟ لننتقل إلى فقاعة التخيل.

So when Beloved begins, Sethe and Denver's house is haunted by the ghost of the dead في بداية رواية "محبوبة"، يكون منزل "سيثا" و"دينفر" مسكونًا بشبح الطفلة الميتة،

baby, and then Paul D, who lived with Sethe at Sweet Home, arrives and in short order

begins a relationship with Sethe, rids the house of the ghost, and takes Denver and Sethe to a carnival. ويُخرج الشبح من المنزل ويأخذ "دينفر" و"سيثا" لمهرجان.

And then the adult Beloved wanders into their house 18 years after the already crawling baby was killed. ثم تدخل "محبوبة" البالغة منزلهم بعد 18 سنة من مقتل الطفلة التي كانت تحبو.

We slowly learn of Paul D's past, including his horrifying time being abused in every

way imaginable on a chain gang, and of Sethe and Denver's isolated life in the house they وحياة "سيثا" و"دينفر" المعزولة في بيتهما،

share, while Beloved consumes more and more of Sethe's life. After Paul D finds out that

Sethe killed her baby, the Sethe-Beloved-Denver dynamic goes from somewhat weird to truly terrifying. تصبح العلاقة بين "سيثا" و"محبوبة" و"دينفر" مرعبة جدًا بعد أن كانت غريبة.

They consume each other and each others' stories, and as Beloved grows larger,

Sethe grows ever smaller. Even Denver is eventually locked out from Beloved and Sethe's mutual obsession. حتى دينفر تصبح معزولة خارج هوس "محبوبة" و"سيثا" المشترك.

The novel moves among many perspectives: third-person; close in on Baby Suggs or Denver or Paul D تُروى القصة من وجهات نظر متعددة، بصيغة الغائب من وجهة نظر "بايبي ساغز" أو "دينفر" أو "بول دي" أو "سيثا"،

or Sethe; and then in moments, first-person from various perspectives. And it also changes

tense from past to present, as if the past isn't really past, especially to the women وكأن الماضي ليس ماضيًا حقًا، خصوصًا للنساء في الرواية.

in the novel. They cannot lock it away and move on. Sethe's attempt to kill herself and

her family saves them all from a return to slavery, but she can't escape it. As Toni لكنها لا تستطيع الهرب منها.

Morrison later said in an interview about Beloved, "You can't let the past strangle

you if you're going to go forward. But nevertheless, the past is not going anywhere." Thanks, Thought Bubble. ومع ذلك، فإن الماضي باق." شكرًا يا فقاعة التخيل.

So Beloved ends on a somewhat hopeful note. I mean, there's an attempted murder, but in خاتمة "محبوبة" فيها شيء من التفاؤل. أجل، هناك محاولة قتل،

the context of Beloved, that's actually fairly hopeful. لكن مقارنة بباقي الرواية، فإن هذا مُبشر بالخير إلى حد ما.

Denver begins to care for herself and she sees clearly both the value of holding on

to the mother line and the danger of holding on to trauma. And then there's Paul D, who

once had less freedom than a rooster called Mister, who's seen rape and death and dehumanization, والذي رأى الاغتصاب والموت والاستعباد بعينيه،

who along with his fellow slaves has been made to feel like quote "Trespassers among والذي، إلى جانب رفاقه العبيد، عوملوا وكأنهم "دخلاء على الجنس البشري،

the human race, Watchdogs without teeth; steer bulls without horns; gelded workhorses whose

neigh and whinny could not be translated in a language responsible humans spoke." للغة يفهمها البشر العاقلون."

Paul D believed that to survive such a world, you protected yourself and loved small. He picked آمن "بول دي" بأنه كي تعيش في هذا العالم عليك أن تحمي نفسك وتحب على قدر صغير.

the tiniest stars out of the sky to own. "A woman, a child, a brother?" he thinks, كان يختار أصغر النجوم في السماء ليملكها. يقول لنفسه، "امرأة، ابن، أخ؟

"A big love like that would split you wide open." حب كبير كهذا قد يصرعك."

"Anything could stir him," we read, "and he tried hard not to love it." But Sethe helps ونقرأ عنه، "كان أي شيء يحرك مشاعره، وكان يحاول جاهدًا ألا يحب ذلك."

him to see that quote, "To get to a place where you could love anything you chose—not لكن "سيثا" تساعده على رؤية أنه، "أن يستطيع أن يحب ما يختار،

to need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom." And he, in return, encourages

Sethe to imagine a future, saying to her near the end of the novel, "Me and you, we got

more yesterday than anybody. We need some kind of tomorrow."

So in the end, Denver has learned to stand on her own two feet and Beloved has moved في النهاية، تتعلم "دينفر" أن تعتمد على نفسها، أما "محبوبة" فتمضي في طريقها،

on, only after the entire community has come to Sethe to forgive her. And Paul D opens لكن بعد أن تكون القرية بأكملها قد أتت لتسامح "سيثا".

himself up to big love, to thick love, to the love of Sethe, because quote, "he wants

to put his story next to hers." And in his love, he describes what all the characters, وفي وصف حبه، يصف ما تفعل جميع الشخصيات

who all love each other in their own ways, do for each other. He says, "She is a friend of my mind.

She gather me, man. The pieces I am, she gather them and give them back to me in all the right order." تجمع أشلائي وتعطيني إياها بالترتيب الصحيح."