Handed in my final essay for my summer school course. While the essay was easy to write, this class possibly has the most complicated material i have learned yet. Not that many people will care about Marxism versus Humanism in a novel, but here is my last paragraph.
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In Anne Patchett’s Bel Canto, the text moves from a Marxist ideology which looks at the failure of late capitalism, into a universalized humanistic ideal that love can effectively bring together opposing groups. There is a convincing shift from what we believe will be a novel filled with violence, into a novel that places the reader within a middle class fantasy that we are all familiar with—the belief that love will conquer all. By placing the novel within specific ideologies, it is undoubtedly a reduction of what it is to be human. Bel Canto seems to be asking whether humans are fated to be in a perpetual state of conflict, or if we are naturally “pure-hearted” and desire loving relationships with each other. The danger with each perspective is that they seem to be oversimplifying, universalizing, and reducing the history of the ways in which we interact. Although a novel is a representational narrative, in reality, perhaps there is more to human interaction than simply loving or fighting.
