Does a Man Need a Woman or does a Woman Need a Man?

"What? A grown man fixed by a girl?... A lowdown something that looked like a sweet young girl and f***ing her or not was not the point, it was not being able to stay or go where he wished in 124, and the danger was in losing Sethe because he was not man enough to break out, so he needed her, Sethe, to help him, to know about it, and it shamed him to have to ask the woman he wanted to protect to help him do it..." (149) 


   In this quote, Paul D is having hateful feelings towards Beloved because he is so attracted to her, but does not want to be. He goes to Sethe to try and tell her that they have had sex; he thinks that she will protect him from these awful feelings, but he is too afraid to tell her the truth that he asks her to have a baby with him instead.

    While deciding what he wants to say to Sethe, he goes through many realizations about how he is feeling and how he is no longer the person in charge. Paul D believes since he is the man in the relationship, he should have all of the control over the woman, but here Beloved is holding this attraction over him that he questions "A grown man fixed by a girl?" He tries to keep control over Beloved by thinking of her using fowl language to indicate that their relationship and the attraction means nothing, while if he said "sex" that gives more respect to the woman who was involved. Also, he refers to her as a "girl" while he is a grown man to make her seems lower than he is, giving him the control. The use of the fowl language and calling her a girl causes the reader to think that he may have all the power, much like the stereotype of most relationships where the man has all of the influence on the woman

   Although he does want control in the relationship with Beloved, it seems that he would give up everything to be with Sethe. "He needed her" is something that shows who is the strong one in the relationship. Unlike Beloved, Paul D believes that Sethe and he are equals and that they will both protect each other, love each other, and fight for each other no matter what. Morrison creates this imagine to give the modernized image of Feminism vs. the Pre-Historic version of Feminism. The idea of she can protect him vs. she's just a body and he controls it. This quote is extremely interesting the way that it may be interpreted, one may be able to see from this the ideas of how the Feminist movement can start and grow.