{"id":807,"date":"2021-10-06T21:48:32","date_gmt":"2021-10-07T01:48:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/?p=807"},"modified":"2021-10-06T21:48:32","modified_gmt":"2021-10-07T01:48:32","slug":"do-we-control-our-bodies-or-do-they-control-us","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/2021\/10\/06\/do-we-control-our-bodies-or-do-they-control-us\/","title":{"rendered":"Do We Control Our Bodies or Do They Control Us?"},"content":{"rendered":"

One major pattern I\u2019ve noticed in Toni Morrison\u2019s novel Beloved <\/em>is the emphasis on questions surrounding bodily autonomy.\u00a0 The work questions whether the characters have control over their own bodies and also whether some seem to exert control over other characters\u2019 bodies as well as their own.\u00a0 A clear example of this emphasis appears when Baby Suggs describes being free for the first time.\u00a0 She states, \u201c\u2018These hands belong to me.\u00a0 These are my <\/em>hands\u2019\u201d (Morrison 166).\u00a0 Morrison continues this thread saying, \u201cNext she felt a knocking in her chest and discovered something else new: her own heartbeat\u201d (166).\u00a0 When Baby Suggs truly acknowledges her own freedom, she feels in control of her own body for the very first time and can claim it.\u00a0 As an enslaved person, she had little control over her body and therefore, feels a physical difference once free.<\/p>\n

There is a complex relationship with bodily autonomy in this work.\u00a0 Morrison emphasizes bodily control in passages like the one mentioned, while also highlighting how other characters seem to lack control or lose control in brief moments.\u00a0 When Sethe sees Beloved for the first time, she is suddenly overwhelmed with the urge to pee and can barely control her body.\u00a0 She describes this sudden problem as \u201cunmanageable\u201d (Morrison 62).\u00a0 Again later, Sethe feels as though she is being choked.\u00a0 With no one around her, she cannot seem to force her own airway to clear.\u00a0 This can be attributed to ghosts or supernatural behavior, but even still, Morrison emphasizes a helplessness that characters seem to face in terms of their own body, while others have more freedom.\u00a0 Perhaps, the question of bodily autonomy can be taken even further to follow the main mystery of the novel, which surrounds the death of the baby.\u00a0 At the end of the reading for this week, we learn that Sethe killed her own child, Beloved, and had planned to kill the other children when the white men arrived.\u00a0 Children are in a sense an extension of the parents, a piece of a mother lives inside her child.\u00a0 Therefore, when Sethe kills Beloved, she is partially killing herself, or a part of her own body.\u00a0 This can be extended further to question whether the act changes Sethe\u2019s physical appearance somehow.\u00a0 When Paul D looks at the newspaper, he repeatedly states, \u201cThat ain\u2019t her mouth\u201d (Morrison 181).\u00a0 He may be in denial about Sethe\u2019s actions, but he does claim that the mouth of the woman photographed looks different than the one he remembers.\u00a0 The actions Sethe took against her child, an extension of her own self, perhaps, altered the state of her body.\u00a0 The forced control Sethe enacts perhaps leads to her future feeling of helplessness and lack of bodily autonomy, such as the moment when she is strangled.\u00a0 Her body seems to have agency, yet rebel against itself, and change without her control.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One major pattern I\u2019ve noticed in Toni Morrison\u2019s novel Beloved is the emphasis on questions surrounding bodily autonomy.\u00a0 The work questions whether the characters have control over their own bodies and also whether some seem to exert control over other characters\u2019 bodies as well as their own.\u00a0 A clear example of this emphasis appears when … Continue reading Do We Control Our Bodies or Do They Control Us?<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3893,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[145909],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-807","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-2021-blog-posts"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3893"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=807"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/807\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=807"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=807"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.dickinson.edu\/403lit\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=807"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}