On Reading Beloved By Toni Morrison And Don Quixote By Kathy Acker, There Seem T

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Term Paper Title	On Reading Beloved By Toni Morrison And Don Quixote By Kathy Acker, There Seem T
# of Words	1668
# of Pages (250 words per page double spaced)	6.67

     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 cover our nakedness.  Let us back to the pale green room.  I love it when men take care of me (Blood and Guts in High School 33).  In Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe has two "abortions."  The first and most obvious is the act of infanticide in killing Beloved.  The second "abortion" is Sethe "getting fucked" by the grave-digger.  This abortion, like Acker’s protagonist, creates a name.  The name is Beloved – a "word-shape" representing true love, or freedom.
     For Sethe, to love also becomes a testament of freedom.  For having been owned by others (like Acker’s patriarchy) meant that her claim to love was not her own.  She could not love her children, "love ‘em proper in Kentucky because they wasn’t [hers] to love" (Belov...

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