Beloved & Autobiography of My Mother

The interaction of love and resistance is a major theme of both Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother and Toni Morrison's Beloved. Kincaid's Xuela and Morrison's Sethe are women whose fiercely independent positions on love and determined grasping for freedom set them apart from the rest of the communities in which they live. They resist being drawn into compromises with the forms of slavery that they find around them and the forms of their resistance are dictated by the nature of their experiences with love. Xuela completely rejects love of all kinds and only comes close to it once, when she briefly falls in love with a stevedore. But Sethe's love for her family is the principal focus of her life. Their very different attitudes, however, stem from the same source--the absence of their mothers--and both women connect the ability to love with freedom. This connection, in the view of these determined characters, offers the individual two choices: one must either reject love if freedom is impossible or, if one embraces love, one must resist any constraints on the freedom that will allow it to flourish.

Both women draw conclusions based on the deprivation they experienced by not receiving their mothers' love. Xuela finds herself set aside by her father, unloved by those who care for her, and hated by her stepmother. She decides, therefore, that just as love has been withheld from her, she will return this same treatment to the rest of the world. Xuela concei

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African American people, "feeling their fun and sorrow along with her own, which made it better," is nearly everything because it represents the conditions in which love is capable of growing and nourishing her family (Morrison 95). But Sethe experiences this freedom for only 28 days before schoolteacher returns to her life and precipitates the tragic events. Yet she did not need the 28 days to know exactly how precious the conditions of freedom were to her. She had directed all her thoughts and energies to surviving her terrible river crossing and Denver's birth in order to be able to ensure her children's welfare. And when the reversal of all her efforts seemed imminent she decided that she would suffer one more terrible thing in order to protect her children from slavery. Xuela, however, is born into a society that no longer allows slavery. She attends school and leads a life that would seem like paradise to Sethe. Yet Xuela also sees how slavery still has a hold on the people around her--all kinds of people--even when it no longer exists. Her father, who is impressively successful in terms of gaining wealth, is a symbol of the way the slavery of the past lives on in the present. He is half black and half Scottish and

Category: Literature - B