About a week ago, I presented the first 98 pages of the
Toni Morrison’s novel, “Beloved”. A part of my group presentation, we had the
class divide into four groups. These four groups discussed their thoughts and
ideas that they applied to the novel. The group I worked with started comparing
“Beloved” to various films such as “A Bug’s Life” and “The Black Swan”. While I
found both comparisons to be intriguing, I was really interested in finding the
common factors between “Beloved” and the 2010 film, “The Black Swan”.
When reading “Beloved”, many people find the
reincarnation or the ghost of Beloved to be the most frightening component of
the novel. But the more I looked into the relationship between Sethe and Denver,
I came to realize that there is something more disturbing and unsettling about
their relationship. Denver was raised by
a women who has no knowledge of how society works. Sethe has been a slave for almost
all of her life and has been trying to survive. When Denver is born, it is the
first time she is released from her past in a sense. Sethe is not a mother, she
has no sense of what is normal or how to raise a child. She has stated that she
didn’t know what to do while raising her daughter. Denver has been trapped with
her emotionally broken mother her whole life and has been encased by trauma of
her dead sister’s ghost that terrorizes the house. Denver has a tendency to act
as though she is deprived of attention and affection from anyone in her family.
Everyone in her family has left, it is only her and her sister, and the way she
acts towards Paul D and Beloved (the grown up version) is very possessive and
territorial.
Darren Aronofsky’s film, “The Black Swan” mirrors the theme of
dysfunctional relationships between mother and daughter. Nina, the young dancer
has been living with her mother, Erica, who is a former dancer, her whole life.
Nina and Erica seem oddly close with one another, in a not so healthy way. They
really only seem to have each other, no other relationships or family members
are shown in the film. The way the mother treats her daughter (who is certainly
in her 20’s) as a child and gives off vibes that she and the daughter have a
sexual relationship. There is a scene with Nina
in the tub and she is started when she goes under water and sees blood, and
then opens her eyes to see her mom on top of her. But then she gets out of the
water and nobody is there. While all this was hallucination, I think it’s very
symbolic in the fact that Nina never feels fully closed away from her mom.
The women in these fictional pieces
are very interesting in the way they interact with one another. Is it possible
trauma that distorts the norms of a mother/daughter relationship? I believe the
past trauma in “The Black Swan” lies within the truth that Nina’s mother has
been molesting her since she was a child. Sethe has been a slave for half of
her life and was raped, beaten and tortured. Erica and Sethe have so many
mental instabilities to them and they inflict that on their daughters. Should
they even have had children of their own, and is it a vicious cycle, if Denver
and Nina had children, would they impose the trauma from their mothers on their
children?
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