Conflicts of Family and Friendship Ties vs Self-Interest in Social Confinement
In the novel Beloved, Toni Morrison follows the life experience of several freed slaves before and after the Civil War, as they struggle with the harshness of present economic realities and continued discrimination against blacks, while they seek out family and friends from the days as slaves. The novel transcends different time periods and voices of different characters, creating a highly diverse portrait of how individual African-Americans and the black society as a whole cope with constant and permanent coming and going of people due to slave sales and botched/successful attempts at escapes from southern plantations.
Perhaps the very central theme of the novel concerns how the social fabric is defined in times of interpersonal turbulence. As families are constantly split up, few people can track down their parents, siblings, and cousins, sometimes not even knowing where they are and whether they are alive. For some, they may even not know who their family members are, instead spending their whole lives finding where they are supposed to belong, in a world that often assigns little significance to their social well-being, not just because of discrimination but more often simply because it is unrealistic.
Generations of black Americans growing in an environment of not having proper families and social circles from an early age create a psyche where creating a sense of belonging in a strange and new place becomes overtly important, both for the individual and the community that seeks to accommodate the individual. On the positive side, such accommodation is translated into mutual support networks, where money, food, and shelter are offered to anyone who first arrived and have no way of obtaining any immediately. Those who struggle economically are made sure, by the community, to be kept alive.
On the negative side, however, the community also seeks to filter out those that do not conform to such behavioral norms. Any sign of not being able to take care of others, much less to harm others, would lead to a person being ostracized by the community, a danger considering the fears of running out of money and being hunted as runaway slaves are never far away. Yet, for some, the need to piece together their own broken lives match outweighs the need to accommodate the community's sensitivities. the resulting conflict constantly shapes the communities in question.
While the African-American communities in the days before and after the end of slavery and Civil War is an extreme case, the same underlying principles of broken social fabric and struggles to create some levels of social conformity within a community is still very much relevant today. Every person, while being part of a community, is also in conflict with that community in one way or the other. The ideals the community upholds to assure some level of integration and mutual cooperation among the members will inevitably touch the nerves of some that refuse to abide by those rules.
Often those rules are not followed because following them entails abandoning matters of principle, based on self-interests in ways that infringe upon the interest of the community as a whole to maintain family and friendship ties. In the novel Beloved, for instance, one of the main protagonist sought to protect herself from slave-catchers by attempting to kill her own infant children. The attempted murder, while successful in keeping slave-catchers away, draws the ire of community members, who stopped any and all communication with her for the next 18 years.
Yet, in the ensuing social isolation, the protagonist did not stop thinking about her past friendships and family moments. The ideals of big, happy family surrounded by friends clashed with the harsh reality of escaping death at the gallows for runaway slaves, forcing the protagonist to behave in shocking ways. The lack of social interactions with others, whether family or friends, did not stop the protagonist from abandoning them. Instead, involuntary social confinement increased her desires for them, ultimately resulting in deviated expressions of the desires with talks of ghosts and recurring memories.
The example illustrates the power of social relationships, even in instances where there is no apparent social interactions. Humans, being social animals, naturally desire connections with others, and to build better connections with family and friends. Those ties will inevitably clash with selfish interests of the individual at some point. How the individual behave to mitigate the conflict would dictate how the person interacts with the community and his/her standing within it. Beloved has shown the power of such conflicts to define an individual's life experiences, to the exaggerated point of the supernatural.
Perhaps the very central theme of the novel concerns how the social fabric is defined in times of interpersonal turbulence. As families are constantly split up, few people can track down their parents, siblings, and cousins, sometimes not even knowing where they are and whether they are alive. For some, they may even not know who their family members are, instead spending their whole lives finding where they are supposed to belong, in a world that often assigns little significance to their social well-being, not just because of discrimination but more often simply because it is unrealistic.
Generations of black Americans growing in an environment of not having proper families and social circles from an early age create a psyche where creating a sense of belonging in a strange and new place becomes overtly important, both for the individual and the community that seeks to accommodate the individual. On the positive side, such accommodation is translated into mutual support networks, where money, food, and shelter are offered to anyone who first arrived and have no way of obtaining any immediately. Those who struggle economically are made sure, by the community, to be kept alive.
On the negative side, however, the community also seeks to filter out those that do not conform to such behavioral norms. Any sign of not being able to take care of others, much less to harm others, would lead to a person being ostracized by the community, a danger considering the fears of running out of money and being hunted as runaway slaves are never far away. Yet, for some, the need to piece together their own broken lives match outweighs the need to accommodate the community's sensitivities. the resulting conflict constantly shapes the communities in question.
While the African-American communities in the days before and after the end of slavery and Civil War is an extreme case, the same underlying principles of broken social fabric and struggles to create some levels of social conformity within a community is still very much relevant today. Every person, while being part of a community, is also in conflict with that community in one way or the other. The ideals the community upholds to assure some level of integration and mutual cooperation among the members will inevitably touch the nerves of some that refuse to abide by those rules.
Often those rules are not followed because following them entails abandoning matters of principle, based on self-interests in ways that infringe upon the interest of the community as a whole to maintain family and friendship ties. In the novel Beloved, for instance, one of the main protagonist sought to protect herself from slave-catchers by attempting to kill her own infant children. The attempted murder, while successful in keeping slave-catchers away, draws the ire of community members, who stopped any and all communication with her for the next 18 years.
Yet, in the ensuing social isolation, the protagonist did not stop thinking about her past friendships and family moments. The ideals of big, happy family surrounded by friends clashed with the harsh reality of escaping death at the gallows for runaway slaves, forcing the protagonist to behave in shocking ways. The lack of social interactions with others, whether family or friends, did not stop the protagonist from abandoning them. Instead, involuntary social confinement increased her desires for them, ultimately resulting in deviated expressions of the desires with talks of ghosts and recurring memories.
The example illustrates the power of social relationships, even in instances where there is no apparent social interactions. Humans, being social animals, naturally desire connections with others, and to build better connections with family and friends. Those ties will inevitably clash with selfish interests of the individual at some point. How the individual behave to mitigate the conflict would dictate how the person interacts with the community and his/her standing within it. Beloved has shown the power of such conflicts to define an individual's life experiences, to the exaggerated point of the supernatural.
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