The person-as-symbol element in fiction can be a very powerful one, and few uses of this device are more prominent or more powerful than Toni Morrison's in Beloved. This also comes with certain elements of fantasy -- misconceptions and/or misunderstandings based on a simplified view of the character Beloved. Sethe comes to treat Beloved as the sole purpose in her life, a being who deserves everything and is essentially above judgment due to the suffering caused her. This is just as incorrect a view of Beloved, it turns out, as the view of the narrator in Baldwin's short story by the Americans is. Whatever Beloved is, she is not simple, and not being granted the full life of responsibility ad freedom, she stagnates, and causes Sethe to stagnate along with her. The fantasies held in these works are not productive, but instead hold...
The commonality of the fantasies' relationship to race, either directly or through the indirect effects of the racial injustice of slavery -- is also highly significant.
This same idea of the fantasies created by racial prejudice appears in an earlier work, though somewhat less explicitly. The Souls of Black Folk by W.E.B. DuBois contains many references to the metaphor of the Veil, which is used to symbolize the altered perception that racial prejudice places over society. At one point, DuBois speaks of the "Black World beyond the Veil" as an almost unattainable dream, revealing the juxtaposition of the Veil's symbolism (Ch. V, par. 10). It is both a fantasy placed upon the world that distorts, and yet a more positive fantasy exists in the possibility to thrust it off.
