Professor Autumn Womack

And there is something really, I think, really, really evocative about that move from hate, that revision from hate to joy, and it's so small, and you can...

You can overlook it.

And, you know, if you're reading through the archives, only hundreds of pages, it's easy to miss.

But it is one of those things that you might just land upon and say, OK, why would she change this from hate to joy?

Right.

And then it raises questions about what's the what's the intimate relationship between hate and joy in this novel?

Right.

Why does she need it to be joy and not hate?

What is it about these characters who are teasing Piccolo?

What is it about their relationship to her, their relationships to their own sense of self, to the world, right?

That has to be described with this word joy and not hate.

And so those kind of questions, right, like moves from a level of this is just interesting to then this actually reveals something about Piccolo.

the life of the book and the logic of the book and the questions that it's wrestling with, which I mean, it's such a complicated, all of her works are these complicated moral tangles, right?

So what's the relationship between hate and joy here?

How's that a thread that we might follow?

Exactly.

Yeah.

But then there's the other things that I think are just kind of obviously interesting.

So we find outlines for the original version of Beloved.

And as she originally imagined it, it was a three part novel in one and Beloved was just part one.