The Beard, The Lens, The Legend

Karl Marx went down in the history books for his enlightened ideas, world changing revolutionary political structure, and his facial hair.

We all have different experiences when we pick up a book, for some it’s relaxing, to others it’s just an assignment. We all find different aspects of a book's plot to be the most interesting, and we all have different takeaways or lessons we learned from the reading. The reason behind these phenomenons is simple, we all read through different critical lenses. A critical lens is the theme that you focus on while reading, using that perspective we get a deeper picture of what the book is telling us about that theme. Using critical lens we can figure out what a book is telling us about feminism, ethnicity roles, society at the time of the book. But the critical lens I’ve chosen to read through is my personal favorite, the Marxist lens. Through this lens I’ll be able to take a deeper look into the politics and the social classes inside the book.
I eventually decided to choose the Marxist lens because I’m fascinated by history and the political landscape of the world, both past and present. I’ve been studying Communism and Capitalism for years with help from my History classes at school, and the documentaries that I watch at home. I’ve also had previous experience thanks to my readings in books other than “Beloved” in which I used the same critical lens. Some examples of these are books like “No Easy Day” “The Rise of the German Third Reich” and “The Cold War: A New History”. However, for these books I mainly looked through the Marxist lens in the political sense, in “Beloved” I feel excited because I believe that the Marxist lens will mainly be about the social class of the characters. Also, I haven’t read many civil war or slavery books through the Marxist lens so it’ll be an interesting experience for me.
However, the Marxist lens isn’t the only thing that will form my understanding of the book, my personal beliefs will also play a role in that process. My personal beliefs for the Marxist lens has to do with my personal beliefs for social class in our society. I believe that the gap in social class is very apparent in our society today, however I also believe that the social class in the times after the civil war was even worse. When slaves were freed they quickly became the lowest class and in many cases their life was even worse then when they were slaves.
Even though I chose the Marxist lens, I came close to choosing a different type of lens. My second choice would of been the Biographical historical lens because I believe that the history behind the book is just as important as the history in the book. This is because what’s going on in the world around the author as they write can influence their point of views on very important issues that are in the book. I ended up choosing between these two because I’m very interested in history and I think that the civil war era would provide a very interesting aspect to literature.
However, I know that the Marxist lens was the right choice, and I can’t wait to get started. By the end of this project I hope to understand more about the political structure of America after the civil war. And how freed African Americans were integrated into the social classes. I hope to grow as a reader and as a history through this project.

If you want to learn more about Marxism watch this video: Marxism introduction
If you want to learn more about the Marxist lens read this article: Marxist lens