Something that I've found interesting in our transition from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to Toni Morrison's Beloved is the drastic shift of character depth from male to female. Conrad voiced some very strong opinions on womanhood and their value in society relative to a man. He rarely wrote women into the book at all, and when he did, they were witless, emotional, and dependent. They were mostly symbols and given little to no agency in their short cameos.
Though Morrison does not quite reduce her male characters to purely symbols, her depiction of men frequently comes off as one dimensional. They seem to be driven purely by lust and anger, and they never seem to have the emotional or mental grit that their female counterparts have. The Sweet Home boys take to cows because of a lack of women, Sethe's sons abandon her, Paul D can't ignore Beloved's shining, and Halle couldn't live with himself after he sees Sethe violated. It's clear that Morrison wants the women of the novel to be the models of righteousness and good, which is refreshing.
I like you analysis of the depth of characters! I never really noticed the lack of character the males had until you pointed it out. And I agree, it is very refreshing to read a novel that is focused more on the goodness of women, rather than their "ignorance" and "pettiness" as seen in other stories we have read such as Roman Fever.
ReplyDeleteI also thought it was really interesting that the men were portrayed like that. But yeah, it's really fantastic that the female characters are so fleshed out and complicated. Morrison is excellent and writing stories about women and their multi-faceted lives.
ReplyDeleteI agree that this is a big transition from one story to the other. In Heart of Darkness it talks about how women have no idea what they are talking about when Marlow mentions how his aunt thinks that the company is doing good. Now, in Beloved, I think that men are the ones who are shown to be narrow minded, as many seem to be focused solely on their anger and sexuality, while the women are characters that have much more depth to their characters.
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