Bibliography

[the_lady_lily]

Beloved – Toni Morrison

Read this after touching on it over a year ago in my Womens Studies class (over a year ago? Scary). I've always been a bit sceptical about the way the American school system seems to insist everyone read this book, but having read it, I understand. I have to say I'm at somewhat of a loss to understand why students are apparently made to read it so young, before having a chance at possessing the critical thinking skills necessary to appreciate all its depth, but that's by the by.

This is the story of Sethe, an run-away slave, her history and her family. It's essentially about her struggle, how her life and that of those around her is affected by the way she is treated by the people who own her and from whom she eventually escapes. However, they come after her, and the only way that she can think to save her four children from the awfulness she knows that these owners will inflict upon them is to send them 'somewhere safe' and follow after. That is, she tries to kill all of them. She only succeeds in killing one daughter; the other three children survive. The novel tells, in disjointed fashion, the story that led up to this terrible event and the story that followed it. There's a ghost, in case you were interested.

Obviously it's a complete Medea-topos dilemma (how can a mother kill her children?), and a lot of the book is spent working that out. Morrison holds off the actual horror for as long as she can, skirting around it and hinting at it, rather like one supposes the horror of slavery was (how can one human being own another?). Having a pair of ethical dilemmas to unpick actually balances the book quite well - with just one of the two, it would have been somewhat unwieldly, but two such contraversial and difficult subjects bounce off each other very well.

I shan't spoil the final conclusion of the plot (of course, part of the joy of the conclusion is that it isn't really a conclusions at all), but I did really enjoy reading this. It's tough in places, it's graphic, and some spots aren't at all pleasant. But putting together the pieces of the jigsaw and puzzling out the chronology, as well as the fascinating representations of character, make it worth a read.

Lost Christianities - Bart D. Ehrman

Picked this up following a recommendation from lizw, as a way to fill out some of my basic early Christian knowledge holes, of which there are many. If you don't know your Ebionites from your elbow, and really think you should, this is the book for you. Ehrman does a good job of debunking the theory that Christianity has always been in exactly the form we now know it in, and bringing other forms of Christianity that didn't win through out, blinking, into the light. This gives one space to think what was lost, both for good and bad, when these versions of Christian theology didn't supercede what Ehrman called the proto-orthodox view.

He also does a neat job of retelling some of the non-canonical material, particularly the Infancy Gospel of James and the supremely silly Acts of Thomas. I have to say that some of this stuff sounds much more like the Greek novels we were reading last semester than scripture, but it's still All Good Fun. Full of miracles.

I thoroughly recommend this as a good, basic but sensible fill-in-the-gaps book. Ehrman's style is readable and engaging, and he makes some rather doctrinally tricky points as clear as can possibly be expected in an introductory work. Apparently some of his less populist stuff gets a bit Derridean, but there's none of that Continental Theory business here - just good solid exposition and context. And a bit of scholastic bitching about the Secret Gospel of Thomas, but I think the general opinion on that is that Morton Smith was a bit of a fruitcake with an agenda. Hieros gamos, much?

Comments

[metonymy.livejournal.com]

I didn't read Beloved in high school, though I think some classes in the school might have. Instead I read it as part of a Classics seminar called "Murdering Mothers," which started with Medea and used both fictional and real-life texts (the Susan Smith case) to examine the idea. (I took it concurrently with a Greek seminar on the Euripides Medea. It was a great semester intellectually but a bit depressing.)

It's a hard book, and definitely unpleasant, but you're right - it is good and worth reading. I need to reread it, I think.