Excessive Force: Paul D's Exorcism.

Ella Tait Fay, Arin A. The Bluest Eye. Digital image. The Ambassadors Magazine. N.p., Jan. 2009. Web. 25 Apr. 2014. <http://ambassadors.net/archives/issue25/profile3.htm>.

This artifact is an artist rendition of what I believe to be Paul D, and Beloved's ghost. While i am excited to get to why i chose this specific painting, I want to discuss why I think the woman could be interpreted as Beloved. It is in the way that she is drawn into the background. The brown can be seen as the color of the walls in the house, Beloved seems plastered on to the wall. It is almost as if her spirit, her figure, is part of the house itself. She is in a translucent state of being. The holes on the wall, or the circle lenses, can be seen as her eyes. Since she is a spirit without a physical form when Paul D enters the house - it can be said that she possesses almost omnipotent abilities. She can see/hear anything and everything within the house. Which is why these lenses seem fixed upon Paul D. This is what we in the literature community call the Panoptic gaze off of Foucault’s Panopticon Theory. This theory is simple. It can be defined as the realization that one is being watched, but never knows exactly when they are being watched. "Good God." He backed out the door onto the porch. "What kind of evil you got in here?" (Morrison 14). What we get from this quote is something that can easily be related to the painting. Paul D is being monitored by Beloved’s ghost from the moment he set foot into the house. This goes with my deconstruction of this artifact because the way the lenses seem to focus on Paul D. The reason for this can be because just as Paul D senses Beloved, and what she is capable of, Beloved can sense Paul D and what he is capable of. This can be supported by the attack that takes place while Sethe is cooking for him. However, the most striking thing about the painting is the depiction of Paul D.

Paul D is depicted as a child because he has never grown up. This is his obsession with trying to physically control everything. Including physically trying to exorcise the ghost of Beloved. "God damn it! Hush up!" Paul D was shouting, falling, reaching for anchor. "Leave the place alone! Get the hell out!" A table rushed toward him and he grabbed its leg. Somehow he managed to stand at an angle and, holding the table by two legs, he bashed it about, wrecking everything, screaming back at the screaming house. "You want to fight, come on! God damn it! She got enough without you. She got enough!" (Morrison 36). Everything that Paul D has gone through from his time at Sweet Home have emasculated him. This is why he constantly seeks out ways to prove himself as a man, yet in the end he only seems childish because of this. “Secondly, Paul D feels that a man must in some capacity act as the proverbial knight on a white horse riding in to save the day for the women. This cannot be illustrated more clearly than when he expels the baby’s spirit from the house. Upon entering the house, he sensed something wrong with it; he was deeply disturbed while crossing the threshold with “a wave of grief soak[ing] through him so thoroughly he wanted to cry… [but] he made it – dry-eyed and lucky” (Morrison 11). The very house has become an affront to his masculinity by threatening to make him weep. He feels he must retaliate by using a very masculine kind of exorcism, beating the walls and yelling in order to drive the baby girl out” (Dueker).

This is what my visual artifact represents. It depicts the scene of Paul D’s first encounter with Beloved in a very concrete way. The painting shows what Paul D is trying to hide through his masculine front, and that is the fact that he is still a child - that is just as scared as everyone else.