Critical Lens Experts

In the figurations of rape and the supernatural by Barnett, she explains how men are portrayed as victims and the women are viewed to be blamed for everything. The article explains how in the book Sethe and other women that were in slavery had to be sexually violated in order to get money and pay for things that they couldn't afford to pay. Men would see woman only as sex objects and not humans. Beloved symbolizes the history of rape and slavery throughout time, and when she comes back she brings it back with her. In Beloved the African women are inferior to the white women. And the African American men are inferior to White men. As Barnett states “ Beloved serves as a powerful reminder that rape was and often still is a racial issue..Susan Brownmiller has asserted “a process of intimidation by which all men keep all woman in a state of fear” (15). While male and female do not formulaically describe rapist and victim in the novel, white and black almost always do” (425). Barnett is explaining the absence in rape culture from the times of slavery. She describes how Morrison is constructing the discourse of the rapes of African American men and women who have been raped during slavery. She is using her novel to show the various powers that structure rape and trauma.