African American Lit

 The readers know Beloved is Sethe's lost child pretty much from the beginning - when a girl without a backstory shows up on Sethe's porch with the name written on the child's gravestone. Later Sethe realizes this fact - when Beloved sings a songs only Sethe's children know. When did Denver realize Beloved was her long lost sister? Denver has had a relationship with Beloved even before her physical form appeared at 124. Growing up the baby's ghost was at times her only companionship. Denver has a pretty fragile self-conception for most of the book. She's been isolated away from the outside world for years, and any world that doesn't include her scares and angers her. This is illustrated when Paul D shows up and she feels jealous at his relationship with Sethe, when Beloved shows up and she feels jealous of her relationship with Sethe, as well as even all the events at Sweet Home that she wasn't at but heard about all her life. It's this jealousy at S

We discussed a lot in class about whether or not their Eyes Were Watching God could be considered a feminist novel. I wanted to talk about and continue some of that discussion in this blog post. It's initially hard to believe the book could be a Feminist novel while almost exclusively focusing on Janie's relationships with men. Does this not dull down the primary female character in the book to her interactions with men, therefore disqualifying itself from a category all about women being on equal grounds with men? Does spending so much time on the men in her life instead of everything else mean the book is suggesting this is all there is / the most important thing there is to Janie? There's a few things the book does have going for it however. It's not a love story between Janie and one man - although it is one man that takes up a significant portion of the book - It's about her relationships with three different men and their differences. What's important is t