Beloved

  In the novel Beloved many different kinds of cultures collide and not just your typical white or black conflict. There are many different kinds of different cultures that can effect characters in different ways. The idea of love and the different interpretations of it was the foundation of the story and the most important idea. There were also collisions of beliefs when it comes to slavery, parenting, a mother daughter relationship, American culture, love, spirits and especially the interpretations of values.

    This book was written in the time period where slaves still existed in the South and the characters were trying to escape. The main character Sethe lived on a farm with five other slave men and their owner Mr. Garner was pretty nice to them compared to other slave owners. “A boss who showed him them how to shoot and listed to what they had to say. A mistress who made their soap and never raised her voice.” Although this may not seem like your standard perception of love, their slave owners actually treated them like people and cared about them. This has an effect on the slaves throughout the story, they would look back on their days as a slave and the owners that they actually cared about. Some were disapproving of how kindly they treated their slaves, but they continued to anyway and it showed that people can be loving and nice even when it is looked down upon.

    One of the major cultural conflicts in this book was the way that the main character Sethe loved and took care of her children. She ending up killing one of her kids, justifying it as “how if I hadn't killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her” In Sethe's mind, she didn't want her children to be “dirtied” by white people, and she thought they were coming to kill one of her kids. “Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing- the part of her that was clean.” This cultural conflict really effected Sethe and her other daughter Denver because they lived without talking to other people in the town for 18 years. Sethe's morals were definitely out of the normal idea of love and parenting and everyone shunned her because of that. You could tell that she loved her kids, and before you find about her killing one of them, you see her as that loving mom who was always trying to do what was best for her kids. As you read the book, the author makes you begin to question her love and sanity, but she just had a different idea of what love and caring for your kids meant.

    The daughter that was supposedly killed, Beloved comes back, alive and well and ruins Sethe's life. She demanded expensive things, constant love and she laid on plenty of guilt trips. Sethe felt guilty for killing her daughter, and to make it up to her, she tried to do everything to gain her love back. This type of love was something completely different, and although Beloved thought it was justified it made Sethe depressed and sick and to most, love is not making someone miserable, no matter what they've done to you.

Because of what her mother had done, Denver never left her house, and always was fearing her mom was going to kill her. When they get to a point of starvation in the book, Denver took action. This conflict was one that she had within herself because she was always afraid of what others thought of her and her mother.“I spent all of my outside self loving Ma’am so she wouldn't kill me.” Although she was deeply afraid of leaving the house, she did so to help save her mom when Beloved was ruining her life. Denver goes out and talks to other people around the neighborhood and gets food, and more importantly tells people what’s going on in her home with her mother and sister who had “risen from the dead.” This was a major development in the book because she was growing up enough to get a job and take care of the family when they just didn't care about her. And eventually the people of her town banded together to save her mother despite what she had done to Beloved. Even though everyone thought Sethe was crazy and a bad parent, they all came together in an almost loving way to save her and scare Beloved away.

    Through all of these different kinds of cultural collisions in the book, the characters were greatly effected and it put them in the positions they were in. From more events she hated white people and that prompted her to kill her daughter, out of what she considered love. And in the end, her other daughter Denver really showed pure love by taking care of both Sethe and Beloved when they didn't care about her anymore and the town came together to save someone they had shunned for 18 years, they had always loved her a little bit all along. All of these collisions didn't just effect the person directly involved, and they all had a major impact on the story. What you do, and what conflicts you get in will always have an effect on the people around you, whether you think about it or not. Love is not just one term with one definition, they are many different kinds of love and reading thing book, I learned that there are many different ways to show them. Love is ever changing, and how you show it is too.