In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe is a morally ambiguous character through her contrasting acts of love and violence, ultimately representing the themes of slavery that are integrated throughout the novel. At the heart of Sethe’s moral ambiguity is her decision to kill her infant daughter, Beloved. As a reader, it is revealed through flashbacks and the thoughts of Sethe and Paul D that a life of slavery is extremely damaging, and results in both characters remaining permanently scarred emotionally and physically. With this in mind, the action of killing her child can be seen as justifiable and morally correct, as Sethe believed killing herself and her children to be a better alternative than allowing them to live through the same pain she …show more content…
The death and subsequent revival of Beloved are akin to that of Jesus Christ in the sense that she died to protect the living. Through the death of Beloved, Sethe and her family were saved from the slave catchers, who did not enslave Sethe due to her apparent madness. However, the difference between Beloved and Christ is the lack of consent given to Beloved. Jesus willingly gave his life as an offering to God in order to absolve humanity of their sin, while Beloved did not receive such a choice. This marks the inherent evil that can be interpreted from Sethe’s actions, as she ultimately took it upon herself to decide the fate of a life that still had much left to live. Additional evidence pointing towards her act being nefarious in nature includes what she has to gain from Beloved’s death. In the novel, Beloved acts as a symbol for Sethe’s traumatizing past, which until Beloved’s death she keeps locked away, similar to Paul D with his tobacco-tin heart. It is only through Beloved’s return that Sethe ends up coping with her past, and therefore Beloved could have been seen as a sacrifice in Sethe’s eyes--a sacrifice for a peaceful soul. In her journey to accept her past, Sethe’s parasitic motherly love blinded her to the horror of her actions, and when presented with the opportunity to kill Beloved while having a reason to do it, she “flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing” (Morrison 79). The depiction of her actions in an animal-like nature points towards the malicious way in which she performed the action, with little remorse or
In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the author often utilizes many different writing techniques to emphasize the story’s main idea that one cannot let past mistakes dictate one’s life and future. Morrison’s application of nonlinear exposition in Beloved helps convey the novel’s main theme by allowing the reader to witness Sethe’s journey to self-acceptance through her personal flashbacks and Paul D.’s point of view. From the beginning, the author incorporates a flashback to illustrate how Sethe is burdened with guilt from killing her baby daughter. Morrison makes it clear to the reader that Beloved is constantly on Sethe’s mind.
While as informed by the author Beloved has no good intentions but only to cause Sethe pain, Seth can’t because she is blinded by her aim to make it up “to her daughter.” Blinded by her love for her daughter, Sethe continually shares information about her past with Beloved which ultimately serves as a catalyst for the materialization of unpleasant memories she had lived to suppress. While Denver, Sethe’s child relates well with Beloved under the impression that she is creating a bond with her, she is oblivious to the fact that beloved is using that opportunity to make her mother suffer and destroy her. Through highlighting the experiences of these characters at this point, Morrison sets out to use the trauma theory to show the implications of trauma and the actions people result to to go through their experiences. In this case, the author shows guilt as an outcome of trauma and how Sethe blinded by her guilt gets exploited and even at some time her pain get intentionally added.
A key feminine quality for women in general around this time period was their capacity for being a mother. Throughout the story, Beloved is one of the many memories that haunts Sethe which she tries to repress in vain because she attempted to murder her own child in order to save them from the same physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that she endured during her time working at Sweet Home. However, Morrison depicts this as an act of kindness. Sethe 's character is given a connection to the audience for her motherly instincts, but also a way for the audience to reflect on the fact that her attempted murders were out of motherly love and protection. Placing Sethe in the scope of many women of the time who had lived without the harshness of slavery are forced to confront the weight of a decision that they never had to make nor most likely ever will.
While people pass from this life into the afterlife their lives reside in the memories of their loved ones. The novel Beloved by Toni Morrison follows Sethe- a mother, Baby Suggs, a depressed grandmother, and a doomed household. The narrative is based on the timeframes of pre and post civil war, following the story of a mother escaping from a life of slavery. During her escape, she murders her own child who is assumed to haunt the 124 house. This scene is opened in a discussion of the cold and bland state of Ohio, where the characters reside.
Stephanie J. Shaw comments on the topic in “Mothering under Slavery in the Antebellum South”: “Even when slave women had abortions, refused to conceive, or committed infanticide in order to protect children from a lifetime of slavery, they often did so in [what was considered] the interest of mothering”(249), which often served as the slave’s mother’s last options. In fact, Morrison presents the issue of infanticide with Sethe’s mother throwing babies overboard and Ella starving her baby. Although their actions save the children from living as slaves, their motivations are tainted by their emotions about the circumstances under which the children are conceived. Sethe completely loves the children she plans to kill. Still, she spends most of
Beloved, the unnamed embodiment of the Sethe’s slain two-year-old daughter, is deliberately depicted not only as illuminating the idea that slavery inevitably resurges to haunt the present but, epitomizing the unnamed masses of black bodies that died and were never remembered during and after the manifestation of slavery. Chapter 1 of the novel opens with “124 WAS SPITEFUL. Full of a baby’s venom. The women in the house knew it and so did the children...the sons, Howard and Buglar, had run away by the time they were thirteen years old—as soon as merely looking in a mirror shattered it (that was the signal for Buglar); as soon as two tiny handprints appeared in the cake (that was it for Howard)... Each one fled at once—the moment the house committed
Beloved places historical trauma at the center of American race relations and reveals two denials of historical trauma through unveiling the violence. The racist institutional power denied the violation of African American lives, and the black society refused to admit the truth of African American familial self-destruction and self-hatred. And so American racial trauma became submerged. Morrison ' s Beloved is a revelation of this trauma portrayed by apocalyptic events, such as infanticide.