Beloved And Don Quixote: Similarities In Themes And Characters
Beloved and Don Quixote: Similarities in Themes and Characters
On reading Beloved by Toni Morrison and Don Quixote by Kathy Acker,
there seem to be quite a few similarities in themes and characters contained in
these texts, the most prevalent of which seems to be of love and language as a
path to freedom. We see in Acker's Don Quixote the abortion she must have
before she embarks on a quest for true freedom, which is to love. Similarly, in
Morrison's Beloved, there is a kind abortion, the killing of Beloved by Sethe,
which results in and from the freedom that real love provides. And in both
texts, the characters are looking for answers and solutions in these "word-
shapes" called language.
In Acker's Don Quixote, the abortion with which the novel opens is a
precondition for surrendering the "constructed self." For Acker, the woman in
position on the abortion table over whom a team of doctors and nurses work
represents, in an ultimate sense, woman as a constructed object. The only hope
is somehow to take control, to subvert the constructed identity on order to name
oneself: "She had to name herself. When a doctor sticks a steel catheter into
you while you're lying on your back and you to; finally, blessedly, you let go
of your mind. Letting go of your mind is dying. She needed a new life. She
had to be named" (Don Quixote 9-10). And she must name herself for a man
become a man before the nobility and the dangers of her ordeals will be
esteemed. She is to be a knight on a noble quest to love "someone other than
herself" and thus to right all wrongs and to be truly free. In another of
Acker's works she writes: "Having an abortion was obviously just like getting
fucked. If we closed our eyes and spread our legs, we'd be taken care of. They
stripped us of our clothes. Gave us white sheets to...
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