Gaze and Oppositional Gaze: On Sethe's Subjectivity Construction in Beloved

Beloved is generally considered as one of the most accomplished and renowned works by Toni Morrison.In Beloved,Sethe is constantly under the gaze of whites and is reduced to the Other situated at the bottom of the power structure of society.Under the school teacher’s disdainful gaze,she becomes the Other between animal and human and loses her subjectivity.Under Amy’s sympathetic gaze,Sethes feels ashamed of her status as a black woman and falls into identity crisis.However,Sethe struggles to resist whites’ oppression and reconstruct her subjectivity through the oppositional gaze.The reversal of the subject and object of the gaze exposes the cruelty and inhumanity of slavery and deconstructs the binary opposition between blacks and whites.