Responding and Reflecting #1 Motherhood in Toni Morrison's, Beloved

      As I read a psychological reading on Beloved by Sandra Mayfield, my initial reactions took a turn with a different point of view that I did not expect. The beginning of this reading starts to introduce the idea that the novel is “about motherhood and mothering.” As a women now in the 20th century, motherhood is an exciting new chapter, that most girls from early on want to experience. While being able to be a free women, without the worry of being a slave, is an idea that is still hard to grasp. From time to time, women seem to have more rights each time. While reading Beloved, and then reading the Psychological Reading, the idea of Sethe having kids and raising them, while being a slave is an interesting point of view that relates to the bigger picture. The overall picture that is trying to be said by the author of this reading, is that the hardships in life can drive us to make decisions, that later come back and haunt us.
       By taking old literary figures and seeing those figures, such as "Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Edgar Allan Poe and Willa Cather, of with all appear in Playing in the Dark," helps to bring light to the argument made by Mayfield. This argument that even though slaves had a hard and series of unfortunate events, in the end they were still able to get out of this dark side of American History, but with the ugliness and memories that don't go away. When years and years go by, a new set of literary figures all come by with similar ideas, in the case of the figures above they all seemed to have a "blindness to an Africanist discourse, [that included]..the mind and spirit of Africans." This is an interesting way of trying to analyze just how much the idea of slaves in motherhood has a significant effect on "the mind and spirit of Africans."
       As Mayfield describes how Toni Morrison portrays and argues the opposite of literary figures through the "character of Sethe," she is also to provide an important side that we often forget. While reading through out Mayfields, "A Psychological Reading," I saw that nobody is really free, many can say that we are nowadays, but the reality is that our memories are what keep us from having closure. The mistakes that we make and the choices that we want to make, but end up letting go of them. This is one of the few readings that I took a lot of time trying to analyze, due to the reason that I did not grasp the authors intention at first.
        By reading and then rereading, I realized that their are a lot of ways that a psychological lens can help to analyze Toni Morrisons, Beloved. Psychology is something that I always look forward to reading more about and in this case I was able to do just that. I was also able to see what other points of view come up from this, it was a journey of memories and realizations that motherhood in the times of slavery was possible, but was something that came back to haunt them.