Beloved Literary Analysis

The theme I chose in Uncle Tom's Cabin was religion because it was so predominant, but when reading Beloved the theme of religion was almost nonexistent. I think the reason for religion not having such a large role in Beloved was because Morrison doesn't have a motive behind her book. She wants to tell the raw, real truths of slavery and the lasting impact it made on so many African Americans. The few connections that can be made to religion within Beloved is Baby Suggs. She would preach to the community at her in the woods "'Listen here, girl,' he told her, 'you can't quit the Word. It's given to you to speak. You can't quit the word, I don't what all happen to you.' (Morrison 105)" which makes her seem like Uncle Tom for a little bit. She has that God-like stature when she is mentioned in the novel, whereas Uncle Tom was straight out depicted in words as "“a sort of patriarch in religious matters (Stowe 27)."
It's pretty obvious that religion isn't a very big theme within Beloved, but why? I think that it has something to do with what Jeanna Fuston-White was talking about within her article. "Beloved represents a working out of subjectivity through the representation of history," rather than what Uncle Tom's Cabin stands for. Morrison indirectly shows that almost no amount of religion can force you to overcome what has happened to a person. Hypothetically, if Sethe were a very religious person, I believe that the story or plot line would play out almost the same. Sethe is essentially scarred and wasn't like Uncle Tom who grew up with fairly decent slave owners who taught him unshakable faith. Sethe had a terrible upbringing with no education at all, let alone a religious education. "Morrison's narrative work poses a strong theoretical challenge to the Modernist tradition of knowledge, reason, language, history, and identity.(Fuston-White 461)." Although Beloved has an inconceivable, almost crazy scenario it does a great job of telling the truths and realities of African American slaves.
Although Uncle Tom's Cabin was recognizably one of the great novels, a lot of reviewers will argue that it embraces white-washing the true stories that did happen to slaves at that time " It is not only a white intellectual tradition that has required the black experience of slavery to be viewed through a white lens (Fuston-White 461)". Beloved doesn't do that, and if it included as much religion as Uncle Tom's Cabin it would. In Uncle Tom's Cabin all the slaves on the Shelby plantation knew about and were so passionate about religion because it was taught to them by white people. If it weren't for the white people within the book the slaves probably wouldn't even believe in a religion. Even within Uncle Tom's Cabin the solution for the white slave owner to deal with misbehaving slaves is to teach them religion, "Miss Ophelia busied herself very earnestly on Sundays, teaching Topsy the catechism (Stowe 213), forcing their religion on them. I also think that the absence of religion within Beloved was a literary move by Morrison. "Morrison found that American slave museums represented slavery through works of handicraft made by slaves, rather than with chains or restraining devices (Fuston-White 463)" Overall I think Morrison was really passionate about telling the real, sometimes even rare, stories that were a result of slavery and that's what drove her to peal away any white influence, namely religion, within Beloved.

Fuston, Jeanna. "From the Seen to the Told": The Construction of Subjectivity in Toni Morrison's "Beloved." African American Review, vol. 36, no. 3, Fall2002, pp. 461-473. EBSCOhost

Stowe, Harriet Beecher. Uncle Tom's Cabin. Mineola, NY: Dover Pubublications, Inc., 2011. Print

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Paris: C. Bourgois éditeur, 2008. Print.