Thresholds: Beginnings, Ending & Everything in Between

Thresholds, in the literal sense of the word, are strips of wood, metal, or stone forming the bottom of a doorway and crossed in entering a house or room. Threshold can also refer to the magnitude or intensity that must be exceeded for a certain reaction, phenomenon, result, or condition to occur or be manifested. These are all accurate representations of the word threshold, but thinking in a more abstract way, thresholds can be much more valuable in this sense than when seen materially. Thresholds are an invitation to a transformation, whether that be spiritually, emotionally, mentally or even physically.

The idea of being on a threshold of sorts when looking at different beginnings and finales that occur throughout my life as a living, breathing human being is so bizarre and fascinating to me. At this point in my life, I am taking steps forward and leaving things behind as I continue to grow intellectually and emotionally through my college journey. Opening my mind and thinking about entering this course as an equivalent of crossing over a threshold I made a short list of other things that are thresholds for me right now. I am at a threshold with all three of my English courses this semester, it is my last semester of my senior year at Geneseo, I am going to be transitioning from being an undergraduate student at college to being a full-time teacher AND graduate student by the end of this year, and I have just recently finished my journey of student teaching and have successfully made the transition back to being the student in the classroom and not the teacher! There are so many events that could be considered thresholds, and “when one door closes, another one opens!”

There are many ideas that I have been actively thinkING about recently in regard to what I am most excited about for this course. I mentioned before that I have never read works by Morrison or Dante and I am super excited to get to make connections between the two. I like that a lot of this course involves collaboration, and I am hoping that we will be involved in more discussions that lead to “aha moments.” An example of an “aha moment” in a collaborative setting is exactly what happened in class today. We were all discussing the importance of numbers in both Morrison and Dante’s writing. When we were realizing just how repetitive the use of the number three is in both works and everyone in the class was astonished! Being able to share these moments of realization and appreciation for an author’s creation is something that I am really looking forward to doing more. I have already loved so many aspects and perspectives brought about in the literature we have read so far and I cannot wait to continue on this adventure as the semester progresses. Morrison’s craft and care embedded in “Beloved” thus far has really brought me in and made me want to explore more. Morrison’s characters are flawed and fragile and human. These characters have feelings, desires, hopes, fears, pasts, presents and futures that are known just like it is impossible to look ahead fifty years and see exactly where we will be and what we will be doing in that exact moment in time. When Sethe talks about Sweet Home in the very beginning of the novel, she wonders if hell is a pretty place (Morrison 7). This was amusing and shocking to me because Sethe now knows that Sweet Home was not a good place, but it was pretty and first impressions are usually what guides what we do next. Sethe has the same thought process that living, breathing people in her place would have and it allows readers to put themselves in her position while watching her story unfold.

Another quote that I noted in the text was when Sethe met Amy and sobbed when Amy massaged her swollen feet. Amy said “Anything dead coming back to life hurts,” and I remembered this quote when Beloved came through the water and was sick for the next several days. Beloved dealt with pain in her lungs the most (from the water) and even after she felt better she speaks in a raspy voice. I thought back to what Amy said about the dead coming back to life and how much pain can be involved in that journey. Beloved is thought to be Sethe’s deceased child that has come back to Earth to be with them and their family, and the idea of her being once dead and now alive and sick at first directly correlates to what Amy was saying about Sethe’s swollen feet.

Watching all of the characters in this novel develop and cross thresholds of their own made me stop and reflect on what thresholds I have crossed and will cross as I continue to grow as a person. Morrison’s characters have real-life feelings during events that act as starting points and closings throughout their story, and this is something I think a lot of us can connect to, as we are taking on explorations of our own and feeling similar ways. I have come to the realization of how many doorways I have walked through to get where I am today. Anything can be a threshold: beginnings, endings and everything in between.

Color in Beloved: A Threshold

In my reading of Beloved by Toni Morrison so far, I noticed that colors seem to have a lot of importance. From what has shown so far, colors are very important in cluing the reader into mood and linking events across the narrative. The concept of color itself is as important, with color being very infrequently mentioned and only are mentioned in narratively and thematically important moments, for the most part. This is in addition to specific colors. The important colors I’ve seen so far in the narrative are pink, red, blue, and green. I want to make a note that I have not been tracking the colors white, gray, or black throughout the novel because most of the time that white or black is being used, they are referring to people or skin tones, and because these colors, in addition to grey, seem to be indicative of a lack of color through the lens I’m looking through – as in the white and gray exterior of the house at 124. I am also aware that other colors, such as yellow, purple, and orange, are mentioned, but their rarity and irregularity made them very difficult to connect across the narrative. This tracking and analysis is also not accounting for the change in Sethe’s view of color after she realizes that Beloved is her lost daughter, but this essay is working from the outer edge of the threshold that Sethe crosses in the second part of this novel.

The very first mention of pink was when Baby Suggs was dying, and asked for color in the Ohio winter. “Bring a little lavender in, if you got any. Pink, if you don’t” (Morrison, 4). When dying, people often want comfort, which is what color seems to bring Baby Suggs. Another very important mention of the color pink is in the dead baby’s gravestone – “Pink as a fingernail it was, and sprinkled with glittering chips” (Morrison, 5). Pink is used once again in the blossoms, the flowers, that Paul D. follows North to freedom after escaping the prison camp. “When he lost them, and found himself without so much as a petal to guide him, he paused, climbed a tree on a hillock and scanned the horizon for a flash of pink of white in the leaf world that surrounded him” (Morrison, 133). Pink also appeared in the form of ‘rose’ in the fabric that Mrs. Garner gave to Sethe, which she wanted to make into a ‘shift’ for her daughter, the one who she killed, since she decided to do it before she left Sweet Home. She forgot this fabric, and then had to make her daughter clothes from a different fabric, with no color mentioned, once she got to 124. In all the instances of the color pink appearing in the text, it seems to indicate something to do with home, kinship, or comfort.

As for the color red, the most recurring mention of the color red comes when discussing the death of Sethe’s daughter. This happens may times throughout the book, including during the recounting of the actual event. Sethe’s “wet red hands” (Morrison, 178) are mentioned when the sheriff was going to bind them, and again when Baby Suggs tried to get Sethe to clean the blood off of herself before nursing Denver, she “slipped in a red puddle and fell” (Morrison, 179). Another important moment in which the color red is mentioned is when Paul D enters 124 for the first time, into the back room, where he had to walk through a “pool of red and undulating light” (Morrison, 10), which was attributed to the baby’s ghost. So far, it seems that the color red is attached to conflict in the narrative, though I think it goes farther than just physical conflict and includes personal, internal conflicts. One could argue that the attempted murder of her children was an internal conflict, because that can’t be an easy decision to make, but there are more explicit examples of inner conflict coinciding with the color red. One point in which the color red indicates inner conflict is when Paul D talks or thinks about the stories he will never tell, he says or thinks of it as “that tobacco tin in his chest where a red heart used to be” (Morrison, 86). And then, when he was deciding whether or not to have sex with Beloved, and does, “he was saying, ‘Red heart. Red heart. Red heart,’ over and over again.” This conflict within Paul D applies to his thinking about Mister, the rooster, as well. He mentions that Mister had a “comb as big as [his] hand and some kind of red,” and then goes on to contemplate the freedom and autonomy that even the rooster had that he wasn’t allowed to. This shows the common thread that the color red ties together so far in Beloved, which is conflict, both physical and internal. Another interpretation of this I can see well is the fear within love – Sethe’s love for her daughter and vice versa, and Paul D’s love (or something close to it) for Sethe.

The color blue shows up in the text a lot less frequently than pink or red. The first place I noticed blue in the text is in the setting of their house, 124: “on Bluestone road” (Morrison, 4). There’s also a mention of blue in the color of the wallpaper of the second floor of 124. Another place where the color blue is used several times in a short section of text is when Sethe is recounting the birth of Denver, with the ‘whitegirl’ Amy helping. After Denver was born in the boat, the surroundings are described in this sentence: “Spores of bluefern growing in the hollows along the riverbank float toward the water in silver-blue lines” (Morrison, 99), in which the repetition of the word ‘blue’ stands out because of the mostly-colorless descriptions elsewhere in the novel. On the same page, ‘bluefern’ and ‘silvery-blue’ are repeated once more, further reinforcing the linking of the color to this scene. Blue is also mentioned by Baby Suggs, when she’s contemplating color talking with Stamp Paid, and she says “Blue. That don’t hurt nobody” (Morrison, 211). I think this statement really encapsulates the mood that the color blue is supposed to indicate in this novel. Another important place where blue is mentioned is the chapter where Beloved is talking or thinking in broken sentences, and the blue seems to be referring to the ocean, in which the bodies of those who didn’t survive the passage, presumably from Africa to the Americas, were thrown. This seems to be repeating the logic that Sethe uses to justify her actions when the schoolteacher came to take her and her children back to Sweet Home, that it’s better and safer to be dead than to be enslaved. If blue’s line snaking through the novel is one of safety, than it seems like the symbolism is working toward 124 being a place of safety, at least from the kinds of danger that come with enslavement. Even though the characters weren’t physically safe at 124 – the children from their mother and the inhabitants from the ghost of the murdered daughter – they were safe from enslavement, as even though they were found, none of them ended up going back to Sweet Home or enslaved anywhere else. In that same vein, blue could also mean something like freedom, as (even though Amy Denver was speaking to Sethe with harmful, racist words, tones, and phrases) without Amy Denver’s help, the reader is left wondering whether Sethe and Denver would have made it to freedom, to 124, at all.

The last important colors that I saw throughout the novel, though fairly sporadically, was green. One place where the color green seems to have a lot of importance is that it is used to describe Denver’s ‘emerald closet’. Made of bushes that had grown high and together, it was a big, closed-off room where ”bent low, Denver could crawl into this room, and once there she could stand all the way up in emerald light” (Morrison, 34). The novel states that Denver was “veiled and protected by the live green walls” (Morrison, 35). This color seems to evoke at once protection and nature. Another place in the novel in which ‘green’ was mentioned many times was when Sethe, Denver, and Beloved went to the Clearing where Baby Suggs used to ‘call.’ It’s first described as “the green blessed place” (Morrison 105), and then the path they take to get there is referred to as “a bright green corridor of oak and horse chestnut” (Morrison, 105). The clearing was holy to Baby Suggs and everyone who went to hear her speak, and the greenness of it is definitely asserted. As the three are leaving the clearing, the path is referred to as “the green corridor” once again. Interestingly, in both cases of green being used as the major descriptor of the scene, though they both take place in nature, words for manmade structures were used to describe them. It might be alluding to the kind of fortitude one can find in building, or it may be that the importance and protection that is found in these places is manmade by those who inhabit or inhabited it.

Color is a luxury. On Baby Sugg’s deathbed, all she asks for is color. Color is a luxury that Sethe seems to have lost when she lost her daughter, except for in very significant moments. Sethe, standing at the threshold of belief versus skepticism, starts seeing colors again in regularity when she begins to cross that threshold. Before she crossed, the moments color was mentioned are especially important, if only because of their rarity.

Leeman Thresholds Essay ENGL 431

Throughout the past three weeks of class, I’ve become intrigued with a number of themes and interpretations on Toni Morrison’s Beloved. Right now, in accordance with the class structure, I’ve been focusing on Dante Aligeri’s Divine Comedy and seeing how Morrison, in the twentieth century, drew from these texts and used them as inspiration for her characters in the trilogy that begins with Beloved. I suspect these comparisons will become clearer as the semester goes on and we move forward with the rest of the novels, but for now, I find myself lost in the woods, so to speak, with interpreting this story inside this set context. I know that this prompt and course interpretations are meant to be more open ended, but I like to set strict guidelines for myself in writing. I’m a person who requires a plan, and this is, admittedly, throwing me for a bit of a loop. Morrison’s work necessitates careful examination and study, and every day I dig deeper, but I’m still struggling a bit with mapping Dante characters and major themes of the Divine Comedy onto Beloved. There are a few major ones I’ve noticed at this point, but I feel its prudent to remind any reader that this analysis is already necessarily in the preliminary stages. The mapping of Dante and Morrison’s trilogies onto one another has just embarked beyond its threshold.

For this paper, I chose to focus on the idea of exile and the pain that this causes. Dante, in Inferno and beyond, moves through worlds where he does not belong as of yet. At the end of Inferno, he remarks “through a small round opening ahead of us/I saw the lovely things the heavens hold,/and we came out to see once more the stars” (Inferno, Canto 32). This maps, albeit loosely (a caveat that applies to most comparisons here), onto Paul D’s internal thoughts when he hears Sethe talking about love while enslaved versus in freedom. He feels, rather than thinks, “so you protected yourself and loved small. Picked the tiniest stars out of the sky to own” (Morrison 191). All of Morrison’s characters in Beloved are inherently in exile. Forced from their families and their lives, Sethe and Baby Suggs, in an attempt to regain what they have both lost, settle at 124 to build themselves back up once more. Baby Suggs, after her son Halle purchases her freedom, is ‘taken in’ by the Bodwins, white people connected to the Gardeners who claim that they detest slavery. Yet they require her to perform domestic labor for them in exchange for renting 124. She is not truly free, even if she is no longer considered enslaved. She has been taken from one bad situation to another, knowing that they are different but neither good nor truly allowing for her own independence.

Nevertheless, she persists, carving out a life for herself in Cincinnati. She makes a reputation for herself, much like a preacher one might encounter in Paradiso, as a pillar of the community. Things start to feel dangerous, though, after she is given blackberries by Stamp Paid, an arguable candidate for Virgil’s counterpart. Stamp takes responsibility for the entire community, “[extending] this debtlessness to other people by helping them pay out and off whatever they owed in misery” in much the same way that Virgil cares for Dante, focusing on his charges with a single minded love and affection (Morrison 218). They both acknowledge that the journey for the protagonists will not be easy; “‘But you must journey down another road,’/he answered, when he saw me lost in tears,/ ‘if ever you hope to leave this wilderness’” (Inferno, Canto 1). Baby Suggs’ ideals and tentative peace begin to dissolve when Stamp Paid gives baby Denver 2 buckets of blackberries, and she prepares a feast; soon after, she notices the frostiness and even anger of those around her, noting that “her friends and neighbors were angry at her because she had overstepped, given too much, offended them by excess” (Morrison 163). But the last straw for her idyllic freedom comes, of course, when the schoolteacher and his posse come to attack and kidnap Sethe’s family, leading her to take the drastic but understandable act of protection her attempted murder is. Afterwards, “strangers and familiars were stopping by to hear how it went one more time, and suddenly Baby declared peace. She just up and quit” (Morrison 208). Her heart has shattered, and she, like Dante, experiences the words of Dante in Paradiso, “You shall leave everything you love most dearly:/this is the arrow that the bow of exile/shoots first. You are to know the bitter taste/of others’ bread, how salt it is, and know/how hard a path it is for one who goes/descending and ascending others’ stairs” (Paradiso, Canto 17).For instance, when Baby Suggs sees that baby Denver is still alive, grabbed from Sethe’s grip just before her death, she breaks down, making “a low sound in her throat as though she’d made a mistake, left the salt out of the bread” (Morrison 178).

Like Baby Suggs, Sethe originally has high hopes for 124, hopes that are seemingly confirmed when she arrives. Upon recollection, she describes her arrival off the wagon as the time when she finally feels that she can love her children with all her heart, her heart that is no longer taken from her and locked away. She remarks, “maybe I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t mine to love. But when I got here, when I jumped down off that wagon- there wasn’t nobody in the world I couldn’t love if I wanted to” (Morrison 190-191). This optimism, of course, is crushed by the reality of their situation. Forced into a hellish situation, Sethe made an impossible choice, and has spent the time since her child’s death paying the price for it every moment of every day. Ostracized by both her community and her family, Sethe is left to linger in her sorrow for eighteen years; as Dante states, ““I did not die -I was not living either!/Try to imagine, if you can imagine,/me there, deprived of life and death at once” (Inferno, Canto 34, 25-27). How can her remaining children trust her? Her former friends now rebuke her for the killing of her child, and are careful to keep their distance, although they started to inch away before this.

Yet how could anyone condemn her? It is only when Paul D arrives that Sethe is confronted with the reality of someone who shares her past experience in the brutality of enslavement and simultaneously does not yet not know what she has done, what she would have done. Her life seemingly becomes idyllic, with her Beloved daughter returning. Beloved, however, only scares the community more. Denver, initially excited for her sister and only friend to return in a physical form, not merely as a companion in the river, reminding her, “‘don’t you remember we played together by the stream?’” (Morrison 89). But Beloved lives up to her name, particularly with Sethe, who begins neglecting Denver in favor of the baby that she lost and has seemingly been returned. Denver, separated from her self proclaimed purpose of protecting others and herself from Sethe, is lost and without purpose. In her exile, she feels without purpose, just as Dante feels when Virgil discovers him in the woods, fearing the she-wolf “that in her leanness/seemed racked with every kind of greediness” she sees hidden in Beloved (Inferno, Canto 1). Denver is the one character who makes it out of the ordeal relatively unscathed, and yet even she is traumatized by the supernatural horrors and greed that she has seen. Much like Dante, this journey is required for her to grow into the woman she becomes, but this baptism by fire is disheartening for readers of the Divine Comedy and Beloved alike.

My question therefore is, how can we move forward from here? Are we as readers “getting closer to the center/of the universe, where all weights must converge,/and I was shivering in the eternal chill” (Inferno, Canto 32). It is clear that there is more to come, both in the Divine Comedy and Morrison’s trilogy, but I am curious to see if parts of Inferno will come back into play in Morrison’s work, as well as looking back and seeing the parts of Purgatorio and Paradiso that we may have missed by virtue of simply not having the context to understand Morrison’s clever usage of Dantean principles and themes in her work. I am aware that we have not yet finished Inferno, so this may also impact my interpretation of this relationship in the future. Overall, as we stand at the threshold of both the class and the trilogies, I find myself thinking more than analyzing what can come next. The themes of exile and leading/being led through the darkness are already so prominent, but I wonder how much farther they can extend.

Thresholds Essay

The predicament with an essay such as this one is that the prompt is so open ended that it causes the mind to wander in a multitude of different directions. Where should my focus be found? Should it lie in the evidence I found in the text or the ideas burgeoning in my brain, begging to be penned on a piece of paper? In the end, I have decided to go with the train of thought that inspires the most passion in me; a thought that I have been itching to put in writing and explore: the connection between Toni Morrison’s Beloved, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude.

On the surface, this connection I have drawn seems odd or inconsequential since it appears completely unconnected to anything we have been discussing in class. After all, what does a course about Morrison and Dante have to do with Marquez? When interpreting the prompt, I have decided to do so somewhat abstractly, applying the concept of connecting two texts that seem to come from vastly different worlds, and am excited to share the links I have uncovered. Similarly to how there is no way Morrison wrote Beloved without being heavily influenced by Dante, I also believe she has taken note of Marquez’s novel, which was only published 20 years prior to hers. There are too many similarities in some of the characters between the novels for this connection to be denied, and I believe this essay, which serves as a time capsule for my mindset at the start of this class, is the perfect vehicle for it to be explored. 

The most obvious connection, the one that struck me the most, is the similarity of relationships between Denver and Beloved, and Amaranta and Rebeca. To start out, neither of these girls are biological siblings, as Rebeca and Beloved are both orphan characters that are adopted by the matriarchs, Ursula and Sethe respectively.  At this point in Beloved, Denver is a lonely girl desperately trying to hang on to any scrap of love or companionship she can get. When Beloved arrives, a seemingly quiet and complacent companion for the solitary Denver, she jumps at the opportunity to be a part of something; to be a part of someone. Denver, despite nursing Beloved back to full health and serving as a constant ally, can never seem to surmount the pedestal Sethe holds in Beloved’s eyes. Anytime Denver deigns to say something remotely unbecoming or tinged with annoyance about her mother, Beloved’s demeanor darkens. Beloved’s secret, passionate, and protective underbelly is hidden by the weak, quiet, and frankly childish demeanor she tends to portray, content to sit and suck her thumb while the world spins around her. These are direct parallels to the relationship and archetypes of Amaranta and Rebeca. As mentioned previously, Denver is the embodiment of Amaranta, a young girl whose countless disappointments in love only serve to harden her heart for generations to come. Beloved, on the other hand, has clear connections to Rebeca, an orphan who finds her way into the Buendia household as a child who carries a bag of her parents’ bones, has a tendency to eat earth, and is constantly seen sucking her thumb. In Marquez’s novel, these motifs associated with Rebeca boil down to sex, love, and passion. Rebeca never wanted to settle down; she only wanted to maintain a level of carnal, animalistic desire that can never be satisfied on a human plane.

 It is the different ideas of love that tear the relationship between Amaranta and Rebeca apart. Both are infatuated with a man named Pietro Crepsi, however he ends up choosing Rebeca and the two become engaged following a passionate love affair. Rebeca pushes off the engagement for years, before abandoning him and starting a new, even more passionate and savage affair with her adoptive brother. Crespi then decides to woo Amaranta, the sister who was initially burned, but she is still so full of hate from the aftermath of the love triangle, that she rejects him and he kills himself. In my mind, if Denver is the Amaranta figure and Beloved is the Rebeca, that makes Sethe the Crespi. When thinking back to the point in Beloved where I am right now, it seems like Beloved is merely using Denver to get to Sethe, and that when given the chance, Sethe would choose Beloved over Denver. When the strength of Beloved’s affection for Sethe becomes obvious to Denver, it may cause the latter to discover a hurt she had no idea existed, one that surpasses any sliver of pain, love, and loneliness she has ever felt before. Not only would it cause Denver’s downfall, but the possibility of Sethe losing Beloved and the new passion she brings to her life would be detrimental, leading to either a physical or spiritual death akin to that of Crespi. I feel as if something big is going to happen. Whether it be a shattered relationship that cannot be pieced back together or lost love that may never be recovered, all I know is that somebody (maybe everybody) is going to get irreversibly hurt. 

When comparing Beloved to Dante’s Inferno, one large theme that drew me in and has remained prevalent in my mind is the idea of selfless love versus selfish love. Is it selfless for a mother to love her child, to make a choice for them that they do not have the capacity to make? Is it selfish to give into the throes of desire, regardless of consequences? These themes are also examined in One Hundred Years of Solitude, showing that passionate love cannot survive, and that where fire sparks, a storm will come to snuff it out as soon as it has arrived. So far, it seems the same can be said for Beloved. Where there is passion, there is destruction. It is only a matter of time before I see which characters escape from the flames, and who gets consumed by the burn. While the sheer idea of connecting Dante to this text may have inspired me to explore another possible text connection by giving my observations merit and me the confidence to explore a train of thought that I desperately needed to get down on paper, this is a good point, I feel, to remember why the Dante connection is so important in the trajectory of Beloved. Although it is a complex story with many themes, the primary purpose of Marquez’s novel was to show how families and societies get stuck in the same cycles. That purpose does not necessarily align with that of Dante’s Inferno and Morrison’s Beloved

If there is anything I have learned at the threshold of this class, it is that when one reaches the pits of hell, they eventually will reach a point where they cannot do anything but go up. Marquez’s novel does not have this climb, which is the linchpin to Beloved and its relationship with Dante. Regardless of whether my thoughts can be considered correct or incorrect, I am happy I was able to explore this whim, which I had picked up on from the second I began reading Morrison’s novel. The prompt for this essay was purposefully vague, making it simultaneously frustrating and a gift. For all that it is annoying to not have much direction, I am grateful I was given the chance to allow a glimpse into my brain, my thought process, and how I write. I am ready to move on to the next phase of the semester. I am now ready to cross the threshold.

Thresholds of Understanding and of Departments (ENGL 431 Thresholds)

            This semester, we will be diving into three works by Toni Morrison, Beloved, Paradise, and Jazz. I’ve never read any of Morrison’s work, so such a focused look into a completely new author is an exciting chance to learn for me. At the same time, the coming semester presents me with some apprehension from multiple sources. We are connecting many of the themes in Morrison’s work to the writing of Dante, another author which I have never read. While it is exciting to explore new works, that much new material in such a high level class does bring a level of concern that I may not be able to keep up with the reading or with the comprehension of the rest of the class. In addition, I have recently been grappling with a feeling of “otherness” in my English classes this semester stemming from my STEM major and my focus on different studies. While we study the idea of thresholds in the writing of Dante and Morrison, these worries leave me, ironically, at two of my own thresholds to consider as we move into the spring semester.

             The first threshold to consider is that of understanding. Now that we have read some of Morrison and Dante, I have the beginnings of an understanding of why the two might be grouped and studied together. The themes present in Dante’s Inferno are starting to pop up in Morrison’s Beloved, and they interact in increasingly interesting ways. Dante’s idea of Hell in Inferno centers largely around the idea of contrapasso, that sinners’ punishments are fitting for their sins. Since Sethe killed her child, that sin would put her in one of the circles of Hell, most likely Caina, in which sinners are held under frozen water with only their heads sticking out. Despite her sin, after reading most of Beloved I would venture to say that Sethe does not deserve this kind of punishment, since the circumstances of her life before and after the supposed sin show her to be a good person put in a bad situation. Dante would seem to disagree, since the sinners in Hell refuse, or are unable to, answer Dante the Pilgrim when he asks for their stories and are condemned to Hell without concern for the context under which their sins were committed. If my interpretation of Sethe’s life is in line with what Morrison intended, I am interested to see how or if this apparent disagreement between Dante and Morrison over what sinners deserve is resolved. Not knowing anything about either author at the beginning of the semester, I feel like I am moving towards a greater understanding of the two authors and how they overlap, but I acknowledge that I still have a lot to learn and a lot of material to read. This leaves me in a state of both understanding and not understanding at the same time, an idea that struck me as ironically fitting due to our focus on different kinds of thresholds in our readings this semester. I have no doubt that a semester worth of reading and good-faith conversation with my classmates will push me through this threshold and lead me to a greater understanding and appreciation of both authors.

            I am much less certain of overcoming my second threshold. As a biochemistry major, I have felt more noticeably out of place in my English classes this semester than in previous semesters. After thinking on the feeling, it makes perfect sense. I had recently remarked to a friend that my chemistry classes had become much smaller and more competitive as we moved into junior year, since the only students left in chemistry classes this advanced are upper-level chemistry and biochemistry majors that really care about and love the subject. With that in mind, it makes a lot of sense that I feel out of place in my two four hundred level English classes. My classmates are largely English or English education majors who have decided to dedicate their college education to a subject that they really care about. This is not to say that I do not care as much as my classmates do, but I have realized that they have dedicated a much more significant part of their lives to the subjects we are studying than I have, in exactly the same way I have dedicated more time to chemistry than they have. That dedication showed in the first few days of my English classes, in which my peers were much more ready to tackle difficult readings and discussions of interpretations that had not even occurred to me yet. While I was a little discouraged that I was lagging behind my peers in some discussions, knowing that my peers are expected to have developed their reading skills more than I have is a comforting thought that provides me the motivation to catch up with my peers’ comprehension of the texts we are reading. My minor in English leaves me at my second threshold; both in and out of the English program. While I’m currently enrolled in two high-level English classes, I am now aware of the difference between me and my English major peers and how that is starting to manifest in the classroom. This semester, one of my goals for this class, as well as Professor Rutkowski’s Herman Melville class, will be to push myself to the level of my peers and share some of the dedication and the extent of the love that they have for English literature.

            As we move past the threshold and into the class itself, I am challenging myself to take these difficulties as a challenge more than an obstacle. It is true that I feel behind my peers in comprehension and skill, but that gives me a framework to center my improvement around. I have never read the two authors we are focused on this semester, but new authors give me an opportunity to both expand my literature lexicon and catch up with my peers in my reading and analysis. The thresholds I find myself in currently provide a fitting link to the class curriculum and an impetus to grow beyond my previous education and attitudes, a prospect that excites me as much as it does intimidate me.

Abandon All Previous Conceptions Ye Who Reads Morrison’s Books

Before the start of this class, before I looked upon the threshold, before my eyes glazed over any words of Dante, I had attempted to read Toni Morrison. I was a high school student, trying to walk through that doorway of adulthood, and I found that the only way to truly understand what it meant to be an adult was to read the stories and authors that everyone else was reading. The first Toni Morrison book I purchased was God Help The Child, and I read about half of the book then I decided that I wasn’t the right audience to enjoy the content, so when I was recommended to read Beloved I jumped at my chance to finally enjoy a Toni Morrison book. I wanted to read it simply because it was seen as a classic, not the sort of classics that we were taught in those days––not the canon––but a classic in its own right. It was a book to read if you truly wanted to be a reader. A book that would open you up to ideas and content you never bothered to read or think about. I was ready for that––or at least I thought I had been. Looking back, I realize that I never cared to read Morrison’s work because of her genius, rather, I wanted to complete it. I wanted to tell everyone that I had read a Morrison book (and Beloved nonetheless). 

I also thought that seeing what the works of a successful Black author were like would help me become the writer that I wanted to be. But I couldn’t make it through the book. I found myself at the threshold, a few pages into Beloved, excited to continue reading, but still not having the mindset or the energy to pick it up and continue. To learn about Sethe or Denver or Sweet Home. To find out if Beloved was the “crawling-already?” baby. To study Morrison’s writing and enjoy her books. I never made it past the third or maybe the fourth chapter (or maybe it was the fourth page), and the book became buried in the crates and bins with all of my other books. Long forgotten until I fished it out in response to taking this class. I was very thrilled to be reading Toni Morrison again, but I found a creeping feeling there that I would get to that initial point in Beloved where I could no longer continue for the sake of enjoyment and it would become a task simply for this class. I was afraid that I wouldn’t be able to walk through that doorway, that I would be stuck at the threshold. 

However, as we finish up Beloved, I find myself excited to read ahead. I find that first intrigue bubbling back up and encouraging me to read until I have reached the last page. I look back at my initial try and I think it was because I didn’t have peers to contemplate the contents of the book with that stopped me short of enjoying it fully. In the last class, we discussed what circle of betrayers would Sethe, Paul D., Denver, and Beloved fall into. From this discussion, I have been doing a lot of thinking about the main character’s motives and desires. Since Caina is the part of Cocytus dedicated to people who betrayed their relatives, we originally deemed Sethe as a member of this group since she killed her child, and attempted to kill the others––betraying the trust and love of their mother. However, when you take into account her reasoning for performing infanticide––helping her children escape slavery and the life that she had run away from––things become a bit less black and white. With that being said, can one fault her for this? As Toni Morrison said, “[Sethe did] the right thing…but she had no right to do it.” While morally, she had betrayed her children, her husband, and even Baby Suggs, how could she not have had that right when white people during this time period had the right to lynch black people? What is the difference? Where is the law? Taking all of this into consideration, I believe that Sethe may have fallen into this particular place in Cocytus, however, I also believe that Denver could be seen as a betrayer of her relatives––specifically Sethe. Denver has an inkling of who Beloved might be, but she keeps it to herself. She even goes as far as to say that “the choice between Sethe and Beloved was without conflicting,” insinuating that she would choose a stranger over her mother. That she would watch Beloved choke her mother on Baby Suggs’s rock if it meant having company and companionship because Denver refuses to go back to the overwhelming loneliness she felt before the arrival of this stranger. Could Sethe not also find herself in Tolomea––the part of Cocytus dedicated to those who betray their guests? While she doesn’t betray Paul D. or Beloved outright, can’t a withholding of information be indicative of a betrayal? She knew why all of her neighbors and the Black people in the town avoided her and Denver, but she never uttered anything of the unfortunate events surrounding her child’s death to Paul D. She allowed him to remain ignorant in his knowledge of everything and is that not a betrayal? 

Aside from the talks of the Cocytus, I am starting to understand the vast parallels between Beloved and Dante’s Inferno. When we look at the characters who mirror Virgil, acting as a guide for other characters, many people stand out. In Sethe’s life, Amy acted as a Virgil on the night surrounding Denver’s birth, guiding Sethe through the fields toward the house they spent the night in, and even further on toward the boat. Amy protects Sethe from impending death, soothing her swollen feet and beaten back, and making a makeshift sling for Denver. I also thought Amy had characteristics of Charon since she ferried her through the terrain toward the water for freedom, however, looking back now, I think someone who encompasses Charon more would be Stamp Paid. His entire job centers around carrying runaways by boat to Ella and John in hopes of helping them find freedom. He is just as much of a guide (a Virgil), but his job is done when they get across the river, which makes him more akin to the mythological character than to Dante’s companion during his trip through hell and purgatory. I have also come to think of Beloved herself as a guide for Denver. There are things that Denver never bothered to learn about her mother’s time at Sweet Home, but now she finds herself eager to know simply because Beloved wants to know. She also looks to Beloved for everything, including friendship. When Beloved disappears in the shed for a split second, Denver has a fit, not wanting this to be the end of what they have because if Beloved left––truly went back to wherever she walked out of––then Denver would find herself alone yet again and with no one’s company to enjoy. In a sense Beloved is guiding Denver’s loneliness, helping her feel like she belongs not only at 124, but also in others’ company. 

We’ve talked quite a bit about contrapasso’s which, according to Dante, is the idea that the punishment fits the crime equally. In this idea of the contrapasso, Dante the pilgrim believes that those who are in hell deserve to be there due to the makings of their own choices. This idea is brought up in Beloved when Amy is talking to Sethe and she says, “You must of did something,” which is in response to the tree on Sethe’s back. This line alludes to the idea that Sethe’s lashings were a fitting punishment for whatever crime she must have committed to deserve such a thing. This opens one’s eyes to the overall idea of slavery: that enslaved people have committed some crime to have been enslaved, which we know not to be true, but reasons well with Dante’s idea of contrapasso. We can see Dante’s inability to accept other people’s crimes and set them apart from their punishments when he goes through Cocytus. Dante relentlessly asks the suffering souls why they are there––what act they had committed––and then proceeds to pull their hair or threaten them until they tell him. He is neither sympathetic nor caring, not believing that they deserve his pity because whatever life they led is represented by the space they occupy in hell. 

All of this thinking and interpreting brings me to the forefront of this class: how are Dante’s Divine Comedy and Morrison’s Beloved (and Jazz and Paradise) coincide with one another? Is it in the form of the characters themselves? Do Morrison’s characters represent one specific character in Dante’s Divine Comedy or are there just bits and pieces of their characteristics sprinkled throughout Morrison’s trilogy? As we continue to delve into this subject and the course material, I find myself making my connections, not only to the works presented to us but also to the things I have learned in other classes. The scene when Beloved leaves the water reminds me of what happened in Lagoon when the Ayodele walks out of the water for the first time and the two witnesses watch her. While it isn’t the same thing, this can be seen as an alien (Ayodele)––or a spirit(Beloved)––taking root in not only the lives of the characters, but also in the place where everything is happening. As I stand on the threshold of this class, continuing to delve deeper into Morrison’s other works, I hope I can discard my initial thoughts of reading her books just to say I have read her/to say I am a reader of classics. I hope to find further connections between Morrison’s works and Dante’s works, and connect them back to many of the other things I have discussed, interpreted, or come across while here at Geneseo.

Thresholds Essay ENGL 431-01

Standing at the threshold to this class, that is an interesting phrase to me. I have never been in and out of a class at the same time. I am so used to being thrown into the class and having to flounder for a little while before understanding and getting my footing. The black hole of assignments and discussions and books can feel so overwhelming. This class, and the ability to breathe before falling into the dark hole is refreshing. 

The floundering and falling aspect of the first weeks of a new class stands out, why would I feel like this in a class I have only just started? I think it is because I am so used to having professors and teachers that expect I already understand and have begun reading the content for the class. The reassuring words and feelings in this class make me want to engage with the material and the active learning. Hearing other students, and even the professor, thinking out loud to understand the material makes me feel like I can understand. I have no specific time in mind, but the comforting feeling of others around me thinking through the same metaphorical and literal questions and readings. I understand that I will not understand everything, that I can be reading this material for the first time, I have the ability to think and understand for the first time without judgment. I feel comfortable around my peers and my educator because there has been a fostering of understanding and community learning that I rarely get to see in college. I am surprised to say that I have not found myself floundering or falling this semester, I have felt stable and content. Although I am excited to be challenged by materials and class discussions with peers. 

Connecting to some of the material I have engaged with so far, I understand the constant churning and looping that happens here. Much like Sethe in Beloved I also struggle with the past. Sethe explains many times in the book that the past is just too hard to think about, but she still recounts it at the begging of Beloved. “It amazed Sethe (as much as it pleased Beloved) because every mention of her past life hurt. Everything in it was painful or lost” (69). I do not want to think about the past, but the past is what helps me understand the future. Sethe hurts when she remembers the past, but it helps her cope with the present. Sethe needs to confront her past, as I have lately. The past can be a burden, but it also can help us heal and understand. 

In thinking about this class in relation to other classes I have taken, I had to remove past prejudices about 400-level English classes. I had seen this class like my other classes, it was going to be difficult, I had to already know the content and be ready to discuss, and I was not going to like the professor. I had already made up my mind and was determined to let the past predict the future, not understanding that my present, the way I think about a class, could influence my future. I was set on believing the class was terrible and I lived in the past. 

The past is also something that can be changed by how we remember things. I am going to take responsibility for my thinking here by saying that the past 400-level classes I have taken may not have been so demanding, but the struggles I went through make the class seem harder. As I remember the past, as Sethe remembers her past, things can be altered to fit our understanding. 

Standing at the threshold of THIS class, I began to see that my past was not going to help me here. This is an engaging class where everyone, including the professor, understands that prior engagement and understanding is good, but not needed. I feel accepted and understood, even when I am processing and thinking out loud. The constant looping, even this early on, also helps to solidify my understanding of both texts so far. Looping to the past, the present and the future helps me to understand that I do not have to understand. The connections and through lines will come. I will try my best to let past predictions and memories go, and to live in the present with this class and my other classes. 

Looping back to a previous topic, the past (look at the irony there), both Dante and Morrison deal with the past in a way that has the readers standing at the threshold between past and present. Sethe stands between readers and the past, she chooses to block the path to full understanding of what happened to her at Sweet Home. Sethe remembers the past, feels the pain of the past and present, but still blocks us out from the full story. Beloved only gets the satisfaction of hearing about the past by begging and pleading, which the readers do not have access to do. 

Dante does not deal with the past in any sort of direct way, opposite of Morrison. Dante gives us tastes of the past through the tortured souls of Hell. We get to see the torture and torment that souls of sinners must endure, we never are witness to the sins themselves. So the past plays an interesting role. It is still the subject of pain and loss, but it is not in the forefront of the text. What is at the front is the present torture of these sinners and the desecent into more torture. Dante makes it known that the past does not matter to these souls, they are stuck in a forever-lasting churning cycle of the present. The past is only a catalyst to what torture must be endured. The way that Dante thinks about the past and the present is more closely related to how I want to think. The past is important, but it is not completely how you will live your present or your future. 

A place in Dante’s writing where he indirectly deals with the past is in Canto 32, where the characters are walking through the field of men buried neck down in ice. “… and it might serve you well, if you seek fame, for me to put your name down in my notes. … Now I know your name and I’ll bring back the shameful truth about you (pg 365). Dante wants to know why these men ended up in Hell buried in ice, but the men do not want to relive the shame. They are living with the shame already, they do not want to relive the horrible moments of things they did. Similar to how Sethe does not want to relive the past and her pain, but she will do it for Beloved. 

Both authors do not let us as readers fully into the past. We only see the important parts that the characters want each other to understand and know about. Dante and Morrison create a threshold that the readers can not cross. Sethe recounts the past at Sweet Home, keeping the parts that hurt the most to herself, to protect herself. Dante does not care about what these sinners have done in the past, because they are in Hell for the past. The past only is a glimpse through the torture. 

This threshold between past and present in the books we are reading leads me back to the threshold between my own past and present. I feel like I relate more to Sethe’s threshold than Dante’s, Sethe wants to protect her own mind and her own self. Dante does not want to protect anyone, he is just a witness to the present and a listener of the past. Sethe does not like to talk about or even think about the past, she wants to live in the present. Living in the present can cause a loop back to the past though. Sethe sees Beloved and lives with her in the present as a figure and person in the house. Beloved is the catalyst for hurt in Sethe’s story, she begs to hear about the past, to live in the memories of another because Beloved’s memories are too painful. What Beloved does not see, or refuses to see, is the hurt that Sethe tries to bury in the past and forget about. The cycle of hurt in the past and the present, trying to cover up past hurt, past hurt causing current pain, all of these resonate with me. 

As I stand at the threshold of this class, I am constantly reminded of the past, past classes, peers and learnings. I am determined to not let the past control my present and my future, I am determined to use my past to further my understanding of the current texts and information of this class. Dante and Morrison will continue to help me in my academic journey and my self journey as I grow and change. I am excited to finally cross the threshold into this class and all that it has to offer.

In Order to Move Forward, You Have to Look Back

We begin the semester with the intent of taking an English course with Dr. McCoy about expulsion and the 2008 housing crisis. On this first day of class we were asked to write down everything we knew about the housing crisis. Many people were not yet knowledgeable about the subject. For example, I thought the crisis had to do with unemployed families being unable to make payments towards their houses and getting them taken away. However, following a semester-long course about it, I can explain it to you. The 2008 recession was tragic for many people and families across the country. The expulsion of these people from their homes caused by a lot of different factors but one of the main components was the carelessness of the businessmen on Wall Street. As seen in Michael Lewis’s The Big Short, big banks felt they were protected by the government when it came to getting money that people could not pay back from loans, creating a moral hazard. Due to this moral hazard, these big banks took more risks by giving loans to clients who were clearly unable to pay it back. Their clients were acting in good faith because they believed they could trust the banks and companies to have their best interest in mind. These banks and companies exploited their clients’ good faith by loaning them money they could not afford to pay back for personal gain. This caused these people to be unable to buy or sell houses which inevitably led to the biggest recession since the Great Depression. Unfortunately, the effects of this recession are still seen in the present day, many issues caused by it were left unresolved. 

Everyone has their own motivations for taking the class; whether that be to fulfill a requirement, learn about something that interests them, take a self-assessed course, or a combination of reasons. In the grand scheme of things, the explanation as to WHY everyone is here ends up being to be learning and thinkING about the housing crisis. First reading the prompt, it was quite difficult for me to put things into perspective; in order to do this I allowed myself to travel back in time to the first day of class. Key course concepts, moral hazard, foreclosure, good and bad faith, expulsion, trust, the life preserves for this course, what everything we learn ends up circling back to. 

From there, we watched a documentary titled “The Old Man and the Storm”. This was the film that got me hooked on this class. The documentary followed an Old Man, Mr. Gettridge, on his quest to rebuild his house that was demolished by hurricane Katrina and the struggles that came along with it. One may ask themselves, “what does a hurricane have to do with the 2008 housing crisis?”. The short answer is, the expulsion of people from their homes. Mr. Gettridge was one of very few people who stayed to rebuild their homes, the rest fled the city since their homes were completely destroyed. Most people could not afford to fix their destroyed houses just as most people could not afford to pay off the unfair mortgages set by big companies. 

After going through the course with the 2008 housing crisis in mind with everything we read, we began to dissect “Parable of the Sower” by Octavia E. Butler. This is a dystopian novel set in the Los Angeles area in 2024. The story follows a young girl named Lauren who grows up in a city surrounded by walls for protection. Over time, the city gets destroyed by people on drugs and she is forced to run away into the north. She meets many people along her journey who all impact her both as a person and as a leader. Lauren describes her goals to the group when traveling north, she tells them about “Earthseed” which is the idea that a society on Earth is possible and that it will eventually spread to other planets. Octavia writes, “That’s all anybody can do right now. Live. Hold out. Survive. I don’t know whether good times are coming back again. But I know that won’t matter if we don’t survive these times”. This quote demonstrates the connection between expulsion and survival. Lauren being expelled from her home caused her to think about how she was going to keep living. Those expelled from their homes during the 2008 housing crisis experienced this need for survival after being left homeless. Since it was one of the biggest  recessions since the Great Depression, many people were really struggling just to make ends meet.  

Throughout this book there is a clear theme which has been present across the course of the semester in this course which is the idea of expulsion. Lauren had experienced being expelled from her home and forced to travel up north in order to survive. This is very similar to the concept of expulsion from the 2008 housing crisis. Octavia says, “Cities controlled by big companies are old hat in science fiction. My grandmother left a whole bookcase of old science fiction novels. The company-city subgenre always seemed to star a hero who outsmarted, overthrew, or escaped ‘the company.’ I’ve never seen one where the hero fought like hell to get taken in and underpaid by the company. In real life, that’s the way it will be. That’s the way it always is.” This quote continues to show the clear connection between “Parable of the Sower” and the 2008 housing crisis because it allows the reader to relate Lauren’s experience of being mistreated by companies to the poor treatment of clients of big companies and banks. The theme in which people are being forced from their homes is both constant and present. Those who were unable to pay their mortgages were expelled from their homes which made them look for somewhere else to live. After running away from Los Angeles, Lauren ventured north to find a new place to live for her and her new friends. Just like in the 2008 housing crisis, people were moving around because it was necessary for them to build a new foundation elsewhere. The idea that people can be forced out of their homes and made to look for new ones, being lost, searching, and having hope, can connect these two concepts that may not have been thought could be connected before. This course really opens your eyes to thinking about connections in places that one may not have thought about beforehand. The idea that everything can be intertwined and connected is so true and mind blowing. Additionally, this is all still relevant today because the effects of the 2008 housing crisis are still causing issues with people and families across the country. The expulsion caused by these mistakes from big companies and banks have ruined lives just so they could make a profit and exploit those who trusted them. 

I think that by taking this course I have grown a lot as a student, a writer, and a person. I have been able to better my time management, communication, and self drive. Taking courses in regards to GLOBE’s insistence that Geneseo students should gain practice in the ability to “reflect upon changes in learning and outlook over time” is vital for the success of a student. I feel that each student across the country and even the world should use a template such that we look back at history’s mistakes and use those lessons to better ourselves and our futures. The ideas behind this course matter, moral hazard, foreclosure, good and bad faith, expulsion, and trust can be seen in almost everything in one way or another. This provides context and relevance to the world which we so desperately need. I am ever so grateful for this course and what it has taught me. I genuinely feel that I was meant to take this course and I was meant to become a better person because of it. So for that, thank you Professor McCoy for helping me open my eyes and start thinkING.

Nina Avallone-Serra, Engl 111 Final Self-Reflective Essay

In my very first semester of college, using Beth McCoy’s ENGL 111 Expulsion & Housing Crisis course as a guide, I took my first ever dive into one of the defining events of my generation: the housing market crash of 2008. Coming from a family fortunate enough to avoid the fallout of this crisis, I grew up with no knowledge of it at all. In fact, I only found out about it in my mid-teens when I caught a showing of the film adaptation of The Big Short which did little to improve my understanding as I struggled to keep up with the large cast, the fast pace, and the head-spinning financial jargon. 

But at the end of the semester I am marginally older and wiser and can explain with some certainty what The Big Short was trying to communicate. The housing crisis (or the subprime mortgage crisis) was a devastating market crash which resulted from the offering of loans to unqualified applicants by predatory lenders. These loans were high-risk, meaning that those who received them had poor credit and were unlikely to pay back the lended money, but investment in these loans was encouraged and even launched a secondary market for repackaging and selling these bad loans to large Wall Street banks. This caused a “bubble”, with homeownership reaching a “saturation point” in 2006 according to Investopedia. After this point, the value of houses purchased with these bad mortgages plummeted, leaving millions indebted to their lenders, unable to pay back mortgages they should have never been able to afford and unable to sell the homes purchased with these mortgages without losing money. This triggered the worst recession seen since the Great Depression, the effects of which can still be felt over a decade later.

Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, the final text of the course, as a dystopian novel written about the effects of an impending climate crisis on the nation in future decades, may not immediately bring to mind the 2008 housing market crash. What does a science fiction novel written in 1993 about the socioeconomic and climate disasters of the distant 2020s have to do with the subprime mortgage crisis of the early 2000s? The surface similarities don’t seem to go very far, but placing Butler’s novel in the context of the crash, broadens the conversation about the 2008 crisis. 

Some of the most striking similarities between the two include patterns of expulsion, lack of access to housing, and extreme wealth disparities. Both the real life event of the housing crisis and the conditions described in Parable of the Sower forced millions out of homes, leaving many homeless and entirely without basic needs. The events of Parable of the Sower, when used as a lens through which to view the housing crisis, adds another dimension to it. In my own reading, I used Butler’s novel as a peek into a nightmarish world in which the outcome of the market crash was truly dystopian, using the similarities between the novel and the crash as a way of magnifying the fallout experienced by those who lost their homes and livelihoods in 2008. 

In our study of the subprime mortgage crisis, one of the aspects that I found most striking was the isolation of rich and poor from one another and the extreme wealth disparity between the two. I learned from Michael Lewis’s The Big Short and articles like Joe Nocera’s “What the Costumes Reveal” just how insular the world of investment banks and mortgage servicers is. In the firm of Stephen J. Baum (who represents multiple large mortgage lenders), the office culture revolves around the mockery and degradation of those who are faced with the loss of their homes. There is a shocking lack of empathy and so little regulation that businesses like this were allowed to cut corners everywhere, free to terrorize homeowners as they pleased. The main players in The Big Short were similarly contained, enjoying lavish Las Vegas lifestyles and protected from the consequences of their business. Lewis writes about the aftermath of the crisis: “A few wall street CEOs had been fired for their roles in the subprime mortgage catastrophe, but most remained in their jobs, and they, of all people, became important characters operating behind closed doors, trying to figure out what to do next.” (pg 260, The Big Short)

This aspect of the market crash is shared by Parable of the Sower. Large corporations like KSF have a large background presence in the novel, buying up towns like Olivar and controlling the market for water. We see stark contrasts in access to wealth and resources between racial and ethnic groups in particular, the wealthy and prosperous town of Olivar offering residency only to white families. There exists, as in the case of the 2008 crisis, an insular characteristic to the wealthiest class in Parable of the Sower, their status enabling them to ignore the veritable apocalypse unfolding before their eyes. A great example of this is our protagonist Lauren’s fascination with the locals in Los Angeles who were able to enjoy a day at the beach simply for leisure despite the chaos around them. With the funding to acquire transportation, self-defense, food, water, and housing, rich people in Parable of the Sower were able to stave off a crisis and preserve their way of life in a manner reminiscent of the way in which corporate bailouts enabled elites on Wall Street to preserve their own jobs, resources, and wealth. Both the rich in the fictitious world of The Sower and in reality occupied a bubble untouched by the realities of the poor and middle class world.

A theme of expulsion represents another strong tie between Parable of the Sower and the housing crisis. The most significant outcome of the housing market crash (as the name would have one believe) is the massive amount of foreclosures on houses across the country, causing millions to be suddenly cast out of their homes. Houses were left abandoned and demolished in the wake of the mass exodus caused by the 2008 crisis. Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House, another one of our texts, offers great insight into the effects of the crisis on middle and working classes. Flournoy describes the  abandoned homes and vacant lots, plummeting home values, and rising poverty and crime experienced in the months leading up to and in the months following the collapse of the housing market. 

The conditions in Parable of the Sower felt eerily similar to this. As I read further into Butler’s novel, mental images of burnt-out ruins in the world of Parable of the Sower started to mirror the depictions of streets lined with demolished and abandoned homes in Detroit in The Turner House. The characters in both books even responded to challenges in similar ways: the walls of Lauren’s home Robledo reminded me of the makeshift garage constructed by the Turner family to keep out thieves and intruders and the emphasis on building community and family in order to survive. The conditions of both novels demanded their characters adopt a strong sense of survival and resourcefulness in order to support themselves and their loved ones and this echoes an important message about the hardships real-life individuals had to overcome during the crisis of 2008. 

  The Turner House and Parable of the Sower also share similar themes about family, addiction, and faith. The internal familial tensions in both books act as a driving force for the development of the protagonists’ actions and beliefs going forward. In Parable of the Sower, Lauren forms many of the foundational tenets of Earthseed around discrepancies between her own beliefs and those of her father. Many of the practical aspects of Earthseed, however, she adopts from the training she received from her father, emphasizing self-defense, vigilance, community, and leadership. We see a similar dynamic in The Turner House, also with the patriarch of the family. Francis Turner’s own beliefs and fears (particularly in regards to the phenomenon of the haint) played a large part in shaping Cha-Cha’s convictions and his role as the leader of his family. His refusal to acknowledge Cha-Cha’s haint, his alcoholism, and his detachment from his children all became defining points in his children’s lives, either empowering their own beliefs, or wearing them down. These family dynamics, though fictional, reflect the real-life significance of family and community, particularly in times of hardship. The people around us are a huge determining factor in laying the groundwork for the beliefs that will carry us through life and in developing our ability to deal with difficult situations. These facts take on an even greater importance when family and community are threatened, and they certainly were in the housing crisis – with this mass expulsion occurring, families and communities were broken up in large numbers, harming these bonds and causing an even greater social and psychological impact on those affected. 

Diving into themes about addiction in both novels continues to broaden the discussion about the 2008 crisis. Addiction would exist with or without a housing crisis or an apocalyptic disaster, but exploring this particular issue and how it interplays with the poverty and crime resulting from events like these gives us a deeper view into their effect on the broader population. The Pyro drug in Parable of the Sower is the clearest example of this issue. The drug worked as both a form of salvation, either by abusing it for pleasure or by selling it for financial relief, and as an agent of destruction. This dynamic works similarly in The Turner House, addiction linking with poverty, crime, and housing instability. Using these novels as a reflection of the housing crisis, addiction becomes an important part of the context of the crisis and creates a clearer picture of how widely the effects of the crash reached. Using Parable of the Sower as window into the 2008 housing crisis, though it may not seem like the obvious choice out of all the texts in our ENGL 111 course, brings a depth to the matter that one may not get if they interpret it through strictly informative sources like The Big Short or “The Giant Pool of Money”. The effects of an event so devastating and transformative can be explored on a more precise and personal level, accounting for family, faith, addiction, poverty and can hit even harder when using Parable of the Sower as a magnifier. Using Octavia Butler’s work in concert with my own newfound knowledge of the nitty gritty of the housing crisis (CDOs, credit default swaps, big banks, etc.) added an element of humanity to my view and helped me to identify the 2008 housing crisis as something apocalyptic in its own right.

Final Self-Reflective Essay, ‘Parable of The Sower’ and The 2008 Expulsion and Housing Crisis

After engaging with ‘Parable of the Sower’ by Octavia Butler, and with the knowledge of the 2008 global financial crisis in mind whilst reading, I have found that many course concepts connect in different ways to this novel as well as the others we have read in the class. Concepts like trust and expulsion especially stuck out throughout the course. While many believe the 2008 expulsion and housing crisis to be caused by homeowners who “did not read the paperwork”, there are truths that lay beyond this. In Michael Lewis’s novel ‘The Big Short’, wealthy investors are seen playing a sick game with the homes and mortgages of many during this time. Grown men are seen betting against subprime mortgage loans and profiting off the little guys, homeowners. “The subprime mortgage machine roared on. The loans that were being made to actual human beings only grew crappier, but, bizarrely, the price of insuring them the price of buying credit default swaps fell. By April 2006 Lippmann’s superiors at Deutsche Bank were asking him to defend his quixotic gamble.” (page 90 of The Big Short). After encountering ‘The Big Short’, it’s clear to see where trust was broken for homeowners who were eventually expelled from their homes because of the corruption on Wall Street that directly affected the lives of real people. 

While it is not easy to see right away that the contents of ‘Parable of The Sower’ has much to do with the expulsion and housing crisis of 2008, themes and concepts are clear to pick out of this dystopian read. Expulsion is one concept I find not only the main character can relate to, but also those who reside outside of walled communities like the one Lauren has lived in. Early on in the novel, the picture is painted clearly of how life was for individuals who did not have the protection of walls and a tight-knit community with, apart from robberies, a reliable food supply. While out with her brothers, father, and four other kids, Lauren describes what and who she sees outside her walled community. “Crazy to live without a wall to protect you, Even in Robledo, most of the street poor- squatters, winos, junkies, homeless people in general- are dangerous. They’re desperate or crazy or both. That’s enough to make anyone dangerous.” (page 10). It’s clear in Lauren’s world that if you don’t have a safe home (walled community), it is near impossible to survive, much like how it is in our own world. “Then there were the pitiful, unwalled residential areas. A lot of the houses were trashed burned, vandalized, infested with drunks or druggies, or squatted in by homeless families with their filthy, gaunt, half-naked children.” (page 10). The people Lauren encounters outside of her community walls have been expelled from “luxury living” even though Lauren doesn’t consider her way of living a luxury, home is not something that is accessible for those stuck on the outside. During the expulsion and housing crisis of 2008, millions lost their homes, their source of safety and comfort. Much like how it’s difficult to place blame on the characters in ‘Parable of the Sower’ struggling to survive, the homeowners that took what loans they were offered in 2008 were merely trying to hold on to shelter and stability, and trying to keep their families generational homes. Many who were expelled from their family homes had to disperse, and with family living in different states, the feeling of expulsion was present in not being around those who have always been around. Lauren went through a similar expulsion when she had to leave her home behind. “It had occurred to me, though, that I should get back to my garage before someone else settled there. I wasn’t thinking very well It was as though that garage was home now, and all I wanted in the world was to be there.” (page 166).

After reading anything, it’s common to gain a better understanding by relating their own personal experiences to these stories. For me, when I read ‘Parable of the Sower’ it became clear that I could relate to the main character in a religious sense and, in a less severe case, her hyper empathy. After identifying this connection, I was able to see that I could understand, on some level, the expulsion Lauren had to feel and face. In the book, we get to know a lot about our main character, Lauren. We find how she has struggled with a disorder that came from prenatal exposure to a drug her mom used at the time. Lauren finds it difficult to travel outside the walls of her home because of the sickness, pain, and drug epidemic that affects the people outside. This is especially difficult for Lauren because through her hyper empathy she can feel what those who are suffering do just by looking at them. Although I don’t suffer from a prenatal birth defect, I have found that I tend to put others needs over my own, which is something that. A quote from ‘Parable of the Sower’ that stuck with me in this sense was when Lauren found out about her brother’s death, and how he was killed. “​​If hyper empathy syndrome were a more common complaint, people-couldn’t do such things. They could kill if they had to, and bear the pain of it or be destroyed by it. But if everyone could feel everyone else’s pain, who would torture? Who would cause anyone unnecessary pain? I’ve never thought of my problem as something that might do some good before, but the way things are, I think it would help. I wish I could give it to people.” (page 115). I suppose this quote puts into words the philosophy I stand behind when it comes to how I interact with those around me. As for how Lauren feels about religion I feel I can especially relate. Coming from a very religious family I’ve struggled with a lot of things that have to do with my faith, every day I am tested with questions that push me in every direction, just one example is wondering whether I should base my actions on what I think God would want or what I know people would want. It’s funny because in The Bible we (Christians) are told not to be of this world yet here we are. Circling back, I feel Lauren’s father and I share the same God, I also think her father and mine would get along great because of the similarities I see between them wanting to protect and prepare family for troubles to come. Although I can’t say I have experienced the trauma Lauren has, I do know that because of the religion I was brought up in, and the way I have always put others’ feelings before mine, I am influenced in a way that has made me feel expelled to some degree. I have found it difficult to gain my own understanding of having a “relationship with God” because of all that I have been conditioned to understand about Him from the congregation and from my family. This plays a big part in my need to please people, especially my parents, if I don’t stick to the moral obligation my religion demands from me, I’m not who they want me to be. All this makes it hard to feel a sense of security, in a way, I am expelled.

Because I feel somewhat of a personal connection to Lauren and the expulsion she has come to face throughout the novel, I am able to understand the concepts that are presented between the lines of Parable of the Sower’. The common theme of expulsion is one not to take lightly, how we understand the concept of being expelled will prepare us in truly recognizing the reason for the 2008 expulsion and housing crisis.