Gender in Beloved

One of the things that really makes Beloved stand out as a slavery novel is that it features such complex (and numerous!) female characters. Most of the greatest slavery related books, such as the works of Frederick Douglass and Uncle Tom's Cabin by Harriet Beecher Stowe, and written about males and often from a male perspective.

Even without considering the racial factor in Beloved, the fact that it is a book by a woman about a woman told from a woman's perspective and that it's become such a well-respected novel is astonishing. A quick look at the statistics of most major literature awards, particularly those for exclusively adult literature, reveal that the books about women and by women receive the least honors. Predictably, books by men about men receive the most.

At the core of this matter is the simple problem that the world is taught to see things from a man's perspective. This is often called the male gaze. Non-male individuals are constantly surrounded by men's stories - created by men, starring men, and from a male perspective - so they learn to accept it and appreciate male stories. Men, however, are hardly ever forced to appreciate women's stories. Even when stories are about women, they're often created by men and for men, thus creating a story that isn't sincerely female or true to the female experience.

Beloved is a perfect triple threat: it's written by a woman, about women, and told from a female perspective. This gives it the ability to approach the topics of slavery and racism from a perspective that isn't usually heard.

When we learn about various types of discrimination in history, we usually learn about one at a time. There was sexism, then there was racism, then there were a few little squabbles over sexual discrimination. The fact of the matter is that all of these types of discrimination have coexisted and overlapped all throughout the course of history. During the fight for women's rights, women of color were often left behind - and later, during the fight against racism, the same thing happened. The recent movie Stonewall is an excellent example of this one-minority-at-a-time mentality; the true heroine of the Stonewall riots, a latina trans woman, was replaced with a white gay man. Apparently, seeing people who fell into two minority categories at once was just too much for the American public.

That's why I think Beloved is such an important novel - it unflinchingly tells the story of those who are doubly wronged, and thus doubly forgotten.