Portrayal of The Protagonist in Lawrence Hill's 'Someone Knows My Name' and Toni Morrison's 'Beloved'.
ABSTRACT
Dalam skripsi ini, saya membahas mengenai tokoh utama dari dua novel yang
berjudul Someone Knows My Name dan Beloved. Kedua novel tersebut mempunyai
topik yang sama yaitu mengenai bagaimana perbudakan di Amerika mempengaruhi
dan merubah kehidupan seseorang. Kedua novel ini juga mempunyai persamaan dan
perbedaan.
Persamaan yang saya dapatkan adalah bahwa kedua novel ini menggambarkan
perjuangan dua orang budak wanita untuk lepas dari perbudakan tersebut. Namun
demikian, terdapat pengaruh yang berbeda dari perbudakan tersebut bagi masingmasing karakter. Selain itu mereka juga memiliki motivasi yang berbeda untuk lepas
dari perbudakan.
Dalam skripsi ini, saya membandingkan dua tokoh utama yang ada dalam
kedua novel tersebut. Walaupun keduanya adalah budak, mereka mempunyai
perbedaan yang sangat kontras. Dalam skripsi ini dijelaskan bahwa tokoh Aminata
Diallo
mempunyai watak yang kuat, pintar, berkeinginan kuat, taat beragama,
bertanggungjawab dan berani. Tokoh Aminata Diallo sangat membantu dirinya untuk
bertahan dengan baik dalam situasi buruk yang dihadapinya. Aminata berjuang sangat
keras untuk terbebas dari belenggu perbudakan dan mencapai mimpinya, yaitu pulang
kembali ke kampung halamannya di Afrika dan hidup sebagai seorang wanita yang
bebas.
Tokoh yang kedua, Sethe mempunyai karakteristik yang berlawanan dengan
Aminata. Dia mempunyai watak pesimistis terhadap kehidupan dan juga memiliki
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mental yang labil akibat perbudakan dan tekanan yang dialaminya. Hal ini membuat
kehidupan Sethe tidak bertambah baik setelah terlepas dari belenggu perbudakan.
Secara keseluruhan, kedua novel ini menunjukkan bagaimana perbudakan telah
merenggut kebebasan seseorang serta merubah kehidupan seseorang.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..........................................................................................i
TABLE OF CONTENTS.............................................................................................ii
ABSTRACT.................................................................................................................iii
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
Background of the Study....................................................................................1
Statement of the Problem....................................................................................3
Purpose of the Study...........................................................................................3
Method of Research............................................................................................3
Organization of the Thesis..................................................................................3
CHAPTER TWO: PORTRAYAL OF THE PROTAGONIST IN LAWRENCE
HILLS’ SOMEONE KWOWS MY NAME...................................................5
CHAPTER THREE: PORTRAYAL OF THE PROTAGONIST IN
TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED................................................................16
CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION.........................................................................25
BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................29
APPENDICES:
Synopsis of Someone Knows My Name……….............................................30
Synopsis of Beloved….....................................................................................31
Biography of Lawrence Hill…………...….…………………………………..32
Biography of Toni Morrison……….…….…………………………………...33
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APPENDICES
SYNOPSIS OF SOMEONE KNOWS MY NAME
Aminata Diallo is kidnapped when she is a child from her home in an
African village and sold into slavery. She passes a journey of great sufferings. She
faces hard life in the trip, limited supply of food, unfriendly weather, and wild
animals. Then she is taken to the United States of America, passing the wild
oceans.
Her ability to catch babies makes her get the doctor’s attention. She is
taken to the doctor’s room and can have proper food to eat, unlike other slaves.
Finally, she arrives in the United States of America. There, she is sold to an indigo
plantation as a slave. She is called Meena since no one – not even a black
American – can pronounce her African name. She finally finds one friend from
the journey in Africa called Chekura.
Meena gets pregnant. After she bears her child, her master sells her child.
She is desperate for some time, but she realizes she has to survive. Later, she is
taught to read and write by her mentor in the plantation. She learns it in a short
time. One day, she is sold to a Jew and taken to New York. There she meets
Chekura and has a baby. However, they get separated since Chekura is still a
slave.
34
Having lots of obstacles in her life, Aminata never gives up. She struggles
hard to face the problems she gets and tries to reach her dream. Finally, she can
reach her dream to come to her hometown as a free woman.
SYNOPSIS OF BELOVED
Sethe, a 13-year-old girl of unnamed slave parents, arrives at Sweet Home,
a plantation in Kentucky operated by Garner. Within a year, Sethe selects Halle
Suggs to be her mate and, by the time she is 18, she bears him three children.
After Garner dies, his wife turns over the control of the plantation to her brotherin-law, the schoolteacher, who is a very cruel man.
Fearing that her children will experience bad treatments from the
schoolteacher, Sethe sends them to her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. The
schoolteacher finds it out and asks his nephew to suck the milk from Sethe’s
breasts. Not able to stand this treatment, she finally escapes from the plantation
even though she is pregnant.
Sethe flees through the woods and, with the help of Amy Denver, a
runaway white indentured servant, gives birth to her fourth child. Then, with the
help of a black ferryman, she crosses the Ohio River and gets freedom.
In Cincinnati she reunites with Baby Suggs and her babies. One day when
she works in the yard, she sees the schoolteacher, the sheriff, a slave catcher, and
one of the schoolteacher's nephews arrives to capture Sethe and her children. To
spare her children a return to bondage, Sethe slices the throat of the eldest girl,
Beloved, and tries to kill her two boys. Then she is sent to jail by the sheriff.
35
Three months later, the pressure given by the Quaker abolitionists and the Colored
Ladies of Delaware makes Sethe set free.
In Baby Suggs’ house, Sethe finds Beloved’s ghost. Left only with
Denver, her daughter, Sethe lives in an uneasy condition. Several years later, her
husband’s friend in the plantation, Paul D arrives. Since then, the ghost
disappears. Sethe and Paul D decide to live together.
Sethe and Paul D’s relationship is interrupted by the appearance of a
mysterious young woman who calls herself Beloved. Beloved quickly becomes a
dominant force in Sethe’s house. She drives Paul D out of Sethe’s bed and
seduces him. One day, Paul D asks Sethe to have a baby. At first she agrees, but
after she comes home and talks to Beloved and Denver, she disapproves of Paul’s
desire to have a baby. Then Sethe realizes that Beloved might be the reincarnation
of her daughter. After this, Beloved disappears.
BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE HILL
Lawrence Hill is a Canadian writer, whose memoir Black Berry, Sweet
Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, was a Canadian bestseller in 2001.
He was born in Toronto in 1957. He is the son of a black man and a white woman,
civil rights activists Daniel and Donna Hill. Growing up in the predominantly
white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario in the sixties, Hill was greatly influenced by
his parents' work in the human rights movement. Much of Hill's writing touches
on issues of identity and belonging.
36
In 2006 he won the National Magazine Award for the best essay
published in Canada in 2005 for "Is Africa's Pain Black America's Burden?”. He
also wrote the screenplay for "Seeking Salvation," a documentary about the Black
Church in Canada. "Seeking Salvation" won the American Wilbur Award for best
national television documentary in 2005.
Lawrence Hill's third novel was published in 2007 as The Book of
Negroes in Canada (HarperCollins) and as Someone Knows My Name in the USA
(W.W Norton & Co.). It won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Canada and
the Caribbean region) and the 2007 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. A #1
Canadian Bestseller, it was named one of the top 100 books of 2007 by The Globe
and Mail. In the United States, Amazon.com listed Someone Knows My Name as
one of the top 100 books of the year. Right now, Lawrence Hill lives in
Burlington with his wife and five children.
(Source: http://www.lawrencehill.com/bio.html)
BIOGRAPHY OF TONI MORRISON
Toni Morrison (Chloe Anthony Wofford) was born in 1931 in Lorain
(Ohio), the second of four children in a black working-class family. She displayed
an early interest in literature. She studied humanities at Howard and Cornell
Universities, followed by an academic career at Texas Southern University,
Howard University, Yale, and since 1989, a chair at Princeton University.
In 1958 she married Harold Morrison. They had two children, Harold and
Slade, and were divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to Syracuse, New
York, where she worked as a textbook editor. Eighteen months later she went to
37
work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House. She was
also a critic and gave numerous public lectures, specializing in African-American
literature.
The Bluest Eye was her debut as a novelist in 1970, and it soon gained the
attention of both critics and a wider audience for her epic power, unerring ear for
dialogue, and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of Black
America. In 1973 her novel Sula was nominated for the National Book Award.
Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national attention. The
book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a
black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. It won
the National Book Critics Circle Award.
A member since 1981 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she
has been awarded a number of literary distinctions, among them was the Pulitzer
Prize in 1988 for Beloved. In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature, the first black woman to win it. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison,
"who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an
essential aspect of American reality."
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison)
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background of the Study
In 1619 slavery was practiced in the United States of America. The first
African slaves arrived in Virginia. When the white discovered Africa, they took
not only its natural resources but also its people. White people tried to kidnap
native Africans to enslave them. They did not treat kidnapped people as humans.
On the contrary, they treated them as their property. They could sell or buy them,
ask them to work very hard without any payment, get them improper life, and
abuse them.
Two authors who deal with the issue of slavery in their novels are Toni
Morrison and Lawrence Hill. Toni Morrison is the first female black American
who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She also won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1988 for one of her novels, Beloved. Lawrence Hill is the son of a black man
and a white Canadian woman. He won a lot of awards, such as The American
Wilbur Award in 2005, National Magazine Award in 2006, Rogers Writers' Trust
Fiction Prize in 2007, and Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2008.
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I have chosen Beloved by Tony Morrison and Someone Knows My Name
by Lawrence Hill because in these novels the authors describe the impact of
slavery very vividly. Beloved was written in the early 20th century. Morrison
presents the protagonist as a woman slave in America. She describes the
protagonist as a surviving slave who has escaped from slavery and run away from
her master to get her freedom. In Someone Knows My Name, which was written
in early 21st century, Hill presents the protagonist as a strong woman who
struggles against slavery and tries to get her true freedom and goes back home to
Africa.
As both authors make use of their protagonists to convey their ideas, I
would like to discuss the portrayal of the protagonist of each novel. I think the
protagonists in both stories are interesting to analyze. The protagonists in both
novels are slaves. And, both of them are women. In Beloved, the protagonist is
Sethe. She is a woman slave who tries to escape from the slavery that she
experiences. Sethe is facing a trauma from her late daughter’s ghost, Beloved,
who always tries to ruin her life. In Someone Knows My Name, the protagonist is
Aminata Diallo or Meena. She is an African woman who has been kidnapped and
enslaved. She tries to get her freedom back and get her way home to Africa. She
gets a lot of obstacles to reach her dream but she never gives up.
Both novels have the same issue, which is slavery, that each protagonist
experiences. So, in analyzing these novels, I think the most suitable approach to
use is formalism approach. The protagonists in these two novels are different in
how they think and how they deal with the problems they face. It is interesting to
analyze how a native African woman who has been captured and a black
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American who was born as a slave behave when both of them face their problem
in the United States. The problems they face are different. So, we can see how
they struggle from slavery in different ways.
Statement of the Problem
The problems are stated as follows:
1. How do the authors portray the protagonists?
2. What is the authors’ purpose in creating such protagonists?
Purpose of the Study
Based on the statement of the problems above, this study is done:
1. To show how the authors portray the protagonists.
2. To reveal the authors’ purpose of creating such protagonists.
Method of Research
In writing this thesis, I start the research by library research, by first
reading Beloved and Someone Knows My Name as the primary texts. I also read
and compile some texts that are taken from books and the Internet. Then I analyze
the novels and draw some conclusions.
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Organization of the Thesis
This thesis consists of four chapters preceded by Abstract, Table of
Content, and Acknowledgement. Chapter One is the Introduction, which consists
of the Background of the Study, the Statement of the Problem, the Purpose of the
Study, the Method of Research, and the Organization of the Thesis. Chapter Two
is the portrayal of the protagonist in Someone Knows My Name. Chapter Three is
the portrayal of the protagonist in Beloved. Chapter Four is the Conclusion,
followed by the Bibliography and the Appendices, which consist of the synopses
of the two novels and the biographies of the authors.
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CHAPTER FOUR
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I am going to draw some conclusions based on the analysis
that I have done in the previous two chapters. In Someone Knows My Name, the
author portrays Aminata Diallo as a round and static character. In Beloved, the
author portrays Sethe as a round and dynamic character. I find that both novels
discuss the same issue, namely the effect of slavery in one’s life. Through the
portrayal of the protagonists of both the novels, I can see that the novels have
similarities and differences.
From the analysis, I can see that both female major characters are black
woman slaves. They experience the hardness of life they get in slavery. They also
struggle very hard to escape from slavery. They also have children that effected
their life as a single mother. Those are the similarities that I find through the
portrayal of these protagonists.
Besides the similarities, I also find some differences. The first difference
that I find through the portrayal of the protagonists is that both of the characters
have different characteristics. Besides, they also have different backgrounds why
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they get into slavery. In Someone Knows My Name, the protagonist is Aminata
Diallo. She is portrayed as a free Moslem woman who is captured by Americans
to be a slave. She is also portrayed as a strong woman who survives from slavery.
She struggles hard to get her freedom back. Her strong will makes her able to
reach her dream to be a freeborn Moslem woman and comes back to her
hometown. In Beloved, the protagonist is Sethe. She is portrayed as a strong
woman who has a traumatic life she experiences from the slavery. She tries very
hard to escape from it because she cannot stand it anymore.
From the analysis I can see that Aminata Diallo is a strong willed person
who tries so hard to reach her dreams. No matter what obstacles she has in front of
her, it can never stop her from reaching her dreams. Born as a free Moslem
woman makes her miss her freedom so much. I think it is a normal thing that
someone who has once been a freeborn woman never feels settled to be a slave.
They will never forget how being a free man feels. Moreover, the treatment they
get in the slavery is really terrible. Physical abuse and sexual abuse are
inseparable things in slavery.
Meanwhile in Beloved, Sethe is portrayed as a strong woman slave with a
traumatic life. She cannot forget the hard treatment and abuse she gets from the
schoolteacher. It makes her have no principle in her life and pessimistic in life.
This makes it difficult for her when she once kills her daughter, Beloved, in order
to save her from experiencing the hard life of slavery. It does not only make her
lose her daughter, but also loses her two sons owing to her fear that they may be
killed.
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I think having a trauma is a common thing that all humans ever
experience. Yet, to heal the trauma is what one needs to do when one has
traumatic moments in life. The trauma which has not been healed can destroy
one’s life unpredictably. It can influence the way of one’s thinking. It is what
happens to Sethe. Her traumatic life makes her wrongly see what life is. Her love
to her daughter is not expressed properly. She also cannot think clearly so that she
makes a lot of mistakes or is inconsistent in taking decision. Between both of the
female protagonists, in my opinion, Aminata Diallo is better than Sethe in healing
her trauma. In addition, she also can fulfill her dream by struggling so hard no
matter how hard she has to struggle. She also can learn some languages fast which
helps her reach her dreams.
Another difference that I find is that Aminata is having a dream in her life
and she keeps struggling to reach it while Sethe has no dream in her life. Having a
purpose in life is what mature people do. It drives one to be a better person.
I also notice that the purposes of the authors of creating such different
characters. Lawrence Hill wants the reader to see that slavery can make
someone’s personality to struggle hard and reach her dream. On the other hand,
Toni Morrison prefers to show the reader that slavery can make someone’s life
become worse because she cannot heal her traumatic experience.
Healing the trauma is one of the points I can get from the novel. I learn
from the novel that everyone will face something bad in their life. However, we
cannot stay in that point for too long. We should struggle and keep our spirit hard
so that we could pass that point. We also should face and heal our trauma because
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we cannot live in the trauma. It makes us unable to keep our life on. We will never
get our dreams come true if we cannot heal our own trauma. One should leave the
past behind and continue one’s life.
Lawrence Hill and Toni Morrison have differences in portraying the
characters. The background and gender of both the authors influence the way they
portray the characters. Lawrence Hill, a son of a black man and a white woman,
has optimism in his character, Aminata. He portrays her more optimistic than Toni
Morrison does in her novel. As a woman author, she portrays Sethe has a lot of
tension in her life and she cannot deal it right. I think how the authors portray the
characters influenced by their gender and their personal background. Toni
Morrison sees slavery as a never ending suffering in life because she is a black
woman. She sees slaves cannot reach something good in their live as long as they
are slaves. While Lawrence Hill sees slavery is something hard that can be passed
by slaves. His being half black makes his point of view of slavery is not too
gloomy. Moreover, he sees that a slave can survive from it.
Having read and analyzed these two novels, I have a new perception about
life. We will face some obstacles in our life, but we cannot surrender. We should
struggle hard and conquer the obstacle. This is what Aminata Diallo does in the
novel. She never surrenders in such a terrible condition in her life. On the
contrary, she keeps moving and reaching her dreams. Most of us seem to
surrender when we get some obstacles and sometimes we cannot heal our trauma.
It forces us to stay in a bad condition, as shown in Sethe’s portrayal. She has no
dreams to reach. She only lives in the shadow of her traumatic life. Therefore, I
learn that we should face the obstacle, conquer it, and heal our trauma. Someone
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also should not blame themselves on something bad happening to others. We are
not a hero that can help everybody out of trouble.
Through the novels, I also find that slavery is a terrible thing ever that
happens in human culture. It should not exist in any form because it is not the
right thing to do.
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BIBILIOGRAPHY
Internet Websites:
“Beloved: About the Novel: A Brief Synopsis”. Cliffnotes.27 April 2008.
“Lawrence Hill – Biography”. Lawrence Hill.com. 2 May 2008.
Wikipedia.org. Toni Morrison. 2 May 2008.
Primary Texts:
Hill, Lawrence. Someone Knows My Name. 2007. New York: W. W. Norton
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 2004. New York: Vintage
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Dalam skripsi ini, saya membahas mengenai tokoh utama dari dua novel yang
berjudul Someone Knows My Name dan Beloved. Kedua novel tersebut mempunyai
topik yang sama yaitu mengenai bagaimana perbudakan di Amerika mempengaruhi
dan merubah kehidupan seseorang. Kedua novel ini juga mempunyai persamaan dan
perbedaan.
Persamaan yang saya dapatkan adalah bahwa kedua novel ini menggambarkan
perjuangan dua orang budak wanita untuk lepas dari perbudakan tersebut. Namun
demikian, terdapat pengaruh yang berbeda dari perbudakan tersebut bagi masingmasing karakter. Selain itu mereka juga memiliki motivasi yang berbeda untuk lepas
dari perbudakan.
Dalam skripsi ini, saya membandingkan dua tokoh utama yang ada dalam
kedua novel tersebut. Walaupun keduanya adalah budak, mereka mempunyai
perbedaan yang sangat kontras. Dalam skripsi ini dijelaskan bahwa tokoh Aminata
Diallo
mempunyai watak yang kuat, pintar, berkeinginan kuat, taat beragama,
bertanggungjawab dan berani. Tokoh Aminata Diallo sangat membantu dirinya untuk
bertahan dengan baik dalam situasi buruk yang dihadapinya. Aminata berjuang sangat
keras untuk terbebas dari belenggu perbudakan dan mencapai mimpinya, yaitu pulang
kembali ke kampung halamannya di Afrika dan hidup sebagai seorang wanita yang
bebas.
Tokoh yang kedua, Sethe mempunyai karakteristik yang berlawanan dengan
Aminata. Dia mempunyai watak pesimistis terhadap kehidupan dan juga memiliki
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mental yang labil akibat perbudakan dan tekanan yang dialaminya. Hal ini membuat
kehidupan Sethe tidak bertambah baik setelah terlepas dari belenggu perbudakan.
Secara keseluruhan, kedua novel ini menunjukkan bagaimana perbudakan telah
merenggut kebebasan seseorang serta merubah kehidupan seseorang.
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TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS..........................................................................................i
TABLE OF CONTENTS.............................................................................................ii
ABSTRACT.................................................................................................................iii
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
Background of the Study....................................................................................1
Statement of the Problem....................................................................................3
Purpose of the Study...........................................................................................3
Method of Research............................................................................................3
Organization of the Thesis..................................................................................3
CHAPTER TWO: PORTRAYAL OF THE PROTAGONIST IN LAWRENCE
HILLS’ SOMEONE KWOWS MY NAME...................................................5
CHAPTER THREE: PORTRAYAL OF THE PROTAGONIST IN
TONI MORRISON’S BELOVED................................................................16
CHAPTER FOUR: CONCLUSION.........................................................................25
BIBLIOGRAPHY.......................................................................................................29
APPENDICES:
Synopsis of Someone Knows My Name……….............................................30
Synopsis of Beloved….....................................................................................31
Biography of Lawrence Hill…………...….…………………………………..32
Biography of Toni Morrison……….…….…………………………………...33
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APPENDICES
SYNOPSIS OF SOMEONE KNOWS MY NAME
Aminata Diallo is kidnapped when she is a child from her home in an
African village and sold into slavery. She passes a journey of great sufferings. She
faces hard life in the trip, limited supply of food, unfriendly weather, and wild
animals. Then she is taken to the United States of America, passing the wild
oceans.
Her ability to catch babies makes her get the doctor’s attention. She is
taken to the doctor’s room and can have proper food to eat, unlike other slaves.
Finally, she arrives in the United States of America. There, she is sold to an indigo
plantation as a slave. She is called Meena since no one – not even a black
American – can pronounce her African name. She finally finds one friend from
the journey in Africa called Chekura.
Meena gets pregnant. After she bears her child, her master sells her child.
She is desperate for some time, but she realizes she has to survive. Later, she is
taught to read and write by her mentor in the plantation. She learns it in a short
time. One day, she is sold to a Jew and taken to New York. There she meets
Chekura and has a baby. However, they get separated since Chekura is still a
slave.
34
Having lots of obstacles in her life, Aminata never gives up. She struggles
hard to face the problems she gets and tries to reach her dream. Finally, she can
reach her dream to come to her hometown as a free woman.
SYNOPSIS OF BELOVED
Sethe, a 13-year-old girl of unnamed slave parents, arrives at Sweet Home,
a plantation in Kentucky operated by Garner. Within a year, Sethe selects Halle
Suggs to be her mate and, by the time she is 18, she bears him three children.
After Garner dies, his wife turns over the control of the plantation to her brotherin-law, the schoolteacher, who is a very cruel man.
Fearing that her children will experience bad treatments from the
schoolteacher, Sethe sends them to her mother-in-law, Baby Suggs. The
schoolteacher finds it out and asks his nephew to suck the milk from Sethe’s
breasts. Not able to stand this treatment, she finally escapes from the plantation
even though she is pregnant.
Sethe flees through the woods and, with the help of Amy Denver, a
runaway white indentured servant, gives birth to her fourth child. Then, with the
help of a black ferryman, she crosses the Ohio River and gets freedom.
In Cincinnati she reunites with Baby Suggs and her babies. One day when
she works in the yard, she sees the schoolteacher, the sheriff, a slave catcher, and
one of the schoolteacher's nephews arrives to capture Sethe and her children. To
spare her children a return to bondage, Sethe slices the throat of the eldest girl,
Beloved, and tries to kill her two boys. Then she is sent to jail by the sheriff.
35
Three months later, the pressure given by the Quaker abolitionists and the Colored
Ladies of Delaware makes Sethe set free.
In Baby Suggs’ house, Sethe finds Beloved’s ghost. Left only with
Denver, her daughter, Sethe lives in an uneasy condition. Several years later, her
husband’s friend in the plantation, Paul D arrives. Since then, the ghost
disappears. Sethe and Paul D decide to live together.
Sethe and Paul D’s relationship is interrupted by the appearance of a
mysterious young woman who calls herself Beloved. Beloved quickly becomes a
dominant force in Sethe’s house. She drives Paul D out of Sethe’s bed and
seduces him. One day, Paul D asks Sethe to have a baby. At first she agrees, but
after she comes home and talks to Beloved and Denver, she disapproves of Paul’s
desire to have a baby. Then Sethe realizes that Beloved might be the reincarnation
of her daughter. After this, Beloved disappears.
BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE HILL
Lawrence Hill is a Canadian writer, whose memoir Black Berry, Sweet
Juice: On Being Black and White in Canada, was a Canadian bestseller in 2001.
He was born in Toronto in 1957. He is the son of a black man and a white woman,
civil rights activists Daniel and Donna Hill. Growing up in the predominantly
white suburb of Don Mills, Ontario in the sixties, Hill was greatly influenced by
his parents' work in the human rights movement. Much of Hill's writing touches
on issues of identity and belonging.
36
In 2006 he won the National Magazine Award for the best essay
published in Canada in 2005 for "Is Africa's Pain Black America's Burden?”. He
also wrote the screenplay for "Seeking Salvation," a documentary about the Black
Church in Canada. "Seeking Salvation" won the American Wilbur Award for best
national television documentary in 2005.
Lawrence Hill's third novel was published in 2007 as The Book of
Negroes in Canada (HarperCollins) and as Someone Knows My Name in the USA
(W.W Norton & Co.). It won the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize (Canada and
the Caribbean region) and the 2007 Rogers Writers' Trust Fiction Prize. A #1
Canadian Bestseller, it was named one of the top 100 books of 2007 by The Globe
and Mail. In the United States, Amazon.com listed Someone Knows My Name as
one of the top 100 books of the year. Right now, Lawrence Hill lives in
Burlington with his wife and five children.
(Source: http://www.lawrencehill.com/bio.html)
BIOGRAPHY OF TONI MORRISON
Toni Morrison (Chloe Anthony Wofford) was born in 1931 in Lorain
(Ohio), the second of four children in a black working-class family. She displayed
an early interest in literature. She studied humanities at Howard and Cornell
Universities, followed by an academic career at Texas Southern University,
Howard University, Yale, and since 1989, a chair at Princeton University.
In 1958 she married Harold Morrison. They had two children, Harold and
Slade, and were divorced in 1964. After the divorce she moved to Syracuse, New
York, where she worked as a textbook editor. Eighteen months later she went to
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work as an editor at the New York City headquarters of Random House. She was
also a critic and gave numerous public lectures, specializing in African-American
literature.
The Bluest Eye was her debut as a novelist in 1970, and it soon gained the
attention of both critics and a wider audience for her epic power, unerring ear for
dialogue, and her poetically-charged and richly-expressive depictions of Black
America. In 1973 her novel Sula was nominated for the National Book Award.
Her third novel, Song of Solomon (1977), brought her national attention. The
book was a main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the first novel by a
black writer to be so chosen since Richard Wright's Native Son in 1940. It won
the National Book Critics Circle Award.
A member since 1981 of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, she
has been awarded a number of literary distinctions, among them was the Pulitzer
Prize in 1988 for Beloved. In 1993 Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize in
Literature, the first black woman to win it. Her citation reads: Toni Morrison,
"who in novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import, gives life to an
essential aspect of American reality."
(Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toni_Morrison)
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CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
Background of the Study
In 1619 slavery was practiced in the United States of America. The first
African slaves arrived in Virginia. When the white discovered Africa, they took
not only its natural resources but also its people. White people tried to kidnap
native Africans to enslave them. They did not treat kidnapped people as humans.
On the contrary, they treated them as their property. They could sell or buy them,
ask them to work very hard without any payment, get them improper life, and
abuse them.
Two authors who deal with the issue of slavery in their novels are Toni
Morrison and Lawrence Hill. Toni Morrison is the first female black American
who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. She also won the Pulitzer Prize
in 1988 for one of her novels, Beloved. Lawrence Hill is the son of a black man
and a white Canadian woman. He won a lot of awards, such as The American
Wilbur Award in 2005, National Magazine Award in 2006, Rogers Writers' Trust
Fiction Prize in 2007, and Commonwealth Writers' Prize in 2008.
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I have chosen Beloved by Tony Morrison and Someone Knows My Name
by Lawrence Hill because in these novels the authors describe the impact of
slavery very vividly. Beloved was written in the early 20th century. Morrison
presents the protagonist as a woman slave in America. She describes the
protagonist as a surviving slave who has escaped from slavery and run away from
her master to get her freedom. In Someone Knows My Name, which was written
in early 21st century, Hill presents the protagonist as a strong woman who
struggles against slavery and tries to get her true freedom and goes back home to
Africa.
As both authors make use of their protagonists to convey their ideas, I
would like to discuss the portrayal of the protagonist of each novel. I think the
protagonists in both stories are interesting to analyze. The protagonists in both
novels are slaves. And, both of them are women. In Beloved, the protagonist is
Sethe. She is a woman slave who tries to escape from the slavery that she
experiences. Sethe is facing a trauma from her late daughter’s ghost, Beloved,
who always tries to ruin her life. In Someone Knows My Name, the protagonist is
Aminata Diallo or Meena. She is an African woman who has been kidnapped and
enslaved. She tries to get her freedom back and get her way home to Africa. She
gets a lot of obstacles to reach her dream but she never gives up.
Both novels have the same issue, which is slavery, that each protagonist
experiences. So, in analyzing these novels, I think the most suitable approach to
use is formalism approach. The protagonists in these two novels are different in
how they think and how they deal with the problems they face. It is interesting to
analyze how a native African woman who has been captured and a black
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American who was born as a slave behave when both of them face their problem
in the United States. The problems they face are different. So, we can see how
they struggle from slavery in different ways.
Statement of the Problem
The problems are stated as follows:
1. How do the authors portray the protagonists?
2. What is the authors’ purpose in creating such protagonists?
Purpose of the Study
Based on the statement of the problems above, this study is done:
1. To show how the authors portray the protagonists.
2. To reveal the authors’ purpose of creating such protagonists.
Method of Research
In writing this thesis, I start the research by library research, by first
reading Beloved and Someone Knows My Name as the primary texts. I also read
and compile some texts that are taken from books and the Internet. Then I analyze
the novels and draw some conclusions.
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Organization of the Thesis
This thesis consists of four chapters preceded by Abstract, Table of
Content, and Acknowledgement. Chapter One is the Introduction, which consists
of the Background of the Study, the Statement of the Problem, the Purpose of the
Study, the Method of Research, and the Organization of the Thesis. Chapter Two
is the portrayal of the protagonist in Someone Knows My Name. Chapter Three is
the portrayal of the protagonist in Beloved. Chapter Four is the Conclusion,
followed by the Bibliography and the Appendices, which consist of the synopses
of the two novels and the biographies of the authors.
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CHAPTER FOUR
CONCLUSION
In this chapter, I am going to draw some conclusions based on the analysis
that I have done in the previous two chapters. In Someone Knows My Name, the
author portrays Aminata Diallo as a round and static character. In Beloved, the
author portrays Sethe as a round and dynamic character. I find that both novels
discuss the same issue, namely the effect of slavery in one’s life. Through the
portrayal of the protagonists of both the novels, I can see that the novels have
similarities and differences.
From the analysis, I can see that both female major characters are black
woman slaves. They experience the hardness of life they get in slavery. They also
struggle very hard to escape from slavery. They also have children that effected
their life as a single mother. Those are the similarities that I find through the
portrayal of these protagonists.
Besides the similarities, I also find some differences. The first difference
that I find through the portrayal of the protagonists is that both of the characters
have different characteristics. Besides, they also have different backgrounds why
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they get into slavery. In Someone Knows My Name, the protagonist is Aminata
Diallo. She is portrayed as a free Moslem woman who is captured by Americans
to be a slave. She is also portrayed as a strong woman who survives from slavery.
She struggles hard to get her freedom back. Her strong will makes her able to
reach her dream to be a freeborn Moslem woman and comes back to her
hometown. In Beloved, the protagonist is Sethe. She is portrayed as a strong
woman who has a traumatic life she experiences from the slavery. She tries very
hard to escape from it because she cannot stand it anymore.
From the analysis I can see that Aminata Diallo is a strong willed person
who tries so hard to reach her dreams. No matter what obstacles she has in front of
her, it can never stop her from reaching her dreams. Born as a free Moslem
woman makes her miss her freedom so much. I think it is a normal thing that
someone who has once been a freeborn woman never feels settled to be a slave.
They will never forget how being a free man feels. Moreover, the treatment they
get in the slavery is really terrible. Physical abuse and sexual abuse are
inseparable things in slavery.
Meanwhile in Beloved, Sethe is portrayed as a strong woman slave with a
traumatic life. She cannot forget the hard treatment and abuse she gets from the
schoolteacher. It makes her have no principle in her life and pessimistic in life.
This makes it difficult for her when she once kills her daughter, Beloved, in order
to save her from experiencing the hard life of slavery. It does not only make her
lose her daughter, but also loses her two sons owing to her fear that they may be
killed.
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I think having a trauma is a common thing that all humans ever
experience. Yet, to heal the trauma is what one needs to do when one has
traumatic moments in life. The trauma which has not been healed can destroy
one’s life unpredictably. It can influence the way of one’s thinking. It is what
happens to Sethe. Her traumatic life makes her wrongly see what life is. Her love
to her daughter is not expressed properly. She also cannot think clearly so that she
makes a lot of mistakes or is inconsistent in taking decision. Between both of the
female protagonists, in my opinion, Aminata Diallo is better than Sethe in healing
her trauma. In addition, she also can fulfill her dream by struggling so hard no
matter how hard she has to struggle. She also can learn some languages fast which
helps her reach her dreams.
Another difference that I find is that Aminata is having a dream in her life
and she keeps struggling to reach it while Sethe has no dream in her life. Having a
purpose in life is what mature people do. It drives one to be a better person.
I also notice that the purposes of the authors of creating such different
characters. Lawrence Hill wants the reader to see that slavery can make
someone’s personality to struggle hard and reach her dream. On the other hand,
Toni Morrison prefers to show the reader that slavery can make someone’s life
become worse because she cannot heal her traumatic experience.
Healing the trauma is one of the points I can get from the novel. I learn
from the novel that everyone will face something bad in their life. However, we
cannot stay in that point for too long. We should struggle and keep our spirit hard
so that we could pass that point. We also should face and heal our trauma because
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we cannot live in the trauma. It makes us unable to keep our life on. We will never
get our dreams come true if we cannot heal our own trauma. One should leave the
past behind and continue one’s life.
Lawrence Hill and Toni Morrison have differences in portraying the
characters. The background and gender of both the authors influence the way they
portray the characters. Lawrence Hill, a son of a black man and a white woman,
has optimism in his character, Aminata. He portrays her more optimistic than Toni
Morrison does in her novel. As a woman author, she portrays Sethe has a lot of
tension in her life and she cannot deal it right. I think how the authors portray the
characters influenced by their gender and their personal background. Toni
Morrison sees slavery as a never ending suffering in life because she is a black
woman. She sees slaves cannot reach something good in their live as long as they
are slaves. While Lawrence Hill sees slavery is something hard that can be passed
by slaves. His being half black makes his point of view of slavery is not too
gloomy. Moreover, he sees that a slave can survive from it.
Having read and analyzed these two novels, I have a new perception about
life. We will face some obstacles in our life, but we cannot surrender. We should
struggle hard and conquer the obstacle. This is what Aminata Diallo does in the
novel. She never surrenders in such a terrible condition in her life. On the
contrary, she keeps moving and reaching her dreams. Most of us seem to
surrender when we get some obstacles and sometimes we cannot heal our trauma.
It forces us to stay in a bad condition, as shown in Sethe’s portrayal. She has no
dreams to reach. She only lives in the shadow of her traumatic life. Therefore, I
learn that we should face the obstacle, conquer it, and heal our trauma. Someone
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also should not blame themselves on something bad happening to others. We are
not a hero that can help everybody out of trouble.
Through the novels, I also find that slavery is a terrible thing ever that
happens in human culture. It should not exist in any form because it is not the
right thing to do.
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BIBILIOGRAPHY
Internet Websites:
“Beloved: About the Novel: A Brief Synopsis”. Cliffnotes.27 April 2008.
“Lawrence Hill – Biography”. Lawrence Hill.com. 2 May 2008.
Wikipedia.org. Toni Morrison. 2 May 2008.
Primary Texts:
Hill, Lawrence. Someone Knows My Name. 2007. New York: W. W. Norton
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. 2004. New York: Vintage
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