ipl-logo

Beloved: Distorted Love And Broken Motherhood

993 Words4 Pages

Vera Friedman
Toni Morrison
Spring 2018 / Ms. Augustine
Paper #1: Beloved
03/19/18

Beloved: Distorted Love and Broken Motherhood The novel, Beloved, demonstrates Toni Morrison 's ability to penetrate the unconstrained, unapologetic psyches of various characters who bear the awful weight of slavery 's concealed sins. Slavery repudiated black mothers the right to feel maternal love and made them ambivalent toward their family, especially those sired by slave ship crews, masters, and overseers. Slavery culture separated mothers and children not only physically, but emotionally as well. In Morrison’s words, "[These women] were not mothers but breeders." Slavery restricted both Baby Suggs’ and Sethe’s ability to mother their children. In depicting …show more content…

Accordingly, while they are enslaved neither Baby Suggs nor Sethe really owned their children. In slavery culture, both the mothers and the children are considered property of their white proprietors. As property, their rights as mothers are made void and they have no say in regards to the lives of their children. To the masters, a slave woman’s essential esteem is in her conceptive capacity. The female slave is viewed as bringing forth property, and in this manner, capital as new slaves. The proprietor can utilize and discard this new property as they wish. Hence, kids could be sold with no respects for their sentiments or the sentiments of their mom. In the novel, Baby Suggs states she has birthed eight babies, but she only gets to keep one that she sees develop into adulthood. Morrison investigates the psychology of motherhood when Sethe and her children encounter freedom. No longer a "breeder," Sethe is free to love her children absolutely and, therefore, becomes capable of making controversial sacrifices to protect them. Morrison highlights the extreme parenting steps that Sethe takes to save her children from a life she once lived. Throughout her childhood and into her adulthood, Sethe felt abandoned by her mother when she escaped slavery without taking Sethe with her. Sethe did not want her daughter, Beloved, to feel this …show more content…

Sethe finally finds peace within herself when Paul D re-enters her life, but her consciousness is triggered when a girl named Beloved arrives at her doorstep. She believes that this girl is a reincarnation of her late daughter. In a warped sense, Sethe sacrificed her sanity by killing her daughter, which speaks volumes about how much love she had for her children. The reincarnation of her daughter seduces Sethe’s only refuge, Paul D. This serves to be an allegory for the paranoia that haunts Sethe and the fact that she cannot flee from her past. Sethe is spooked not just by the apparition of her dead daughter, but by the recollections of her life as a slave as well. This passage, albeit written in the third person, records Sethe 's thoughts and displays the deep love Sethe has for her daughter via obsessive

Show More
Related

  • Jzebel And Mammy Essay

    545 Words  | 3 Pages

    She did not cause a treat or competition for the slave owner’s wife. Mammy was another figure used to soothe the slave owner’s conscience or rationalize the treatment of slave woman. The reading material was thought provoking because it made me think of the idea of woman as property with no rights. Then, I thought of the idea of property seducing or having the power to seduce their owners. These ideas are the polar opposite and unimaginable.

    Read More

  • Harriet Ann Jacobs Incidents Of The Life Of A Slave Girl

    1345 Words  | 6 Pages

    In regards to trauma young girls and women who were black suffered through the fact that their first sexual encounter would be an act of rape or sexual abuse. One of the many struggles for several of the women characters with in the text is being a women and a slave at the same time. Their wants and desires has no place under the domination of slavery within the confinement over

    Read More

  • Harriet Tubman's Struggles

    157 Words  | 1 Pages

    The Negro Mother said the her dreams would come true through her children. This means that her family has stuck with her even though her family 's been split up. Slaves had to work through hard working conditions. In the Negro Mother it states” I am the one who labored as a slave, beaten and mistreated for the work that I gave.”

    Read More

  • Toni Morrison Beloved Rhetorical Analysis

    470 Words  | 2 Pages

    Throughout the story, Sethe’s regret is seen at many different levels, but towards the end Paul D. examines how Sethe’s guilt and depression have consumed her. Paul D. notices that Sethe has not bathed telling her, “‘you don’t smell right’” and soon realizes that she has stopped trying to survive (Morrison 272). When the story is told from Sethe’s point of view it is quite easy for the reader to understand and empathize with Sethe’s emotions. However, Morrison changes the point of view to show the reader how harboring some emotions for too long can be detrimental to a person’s mental health. Paul D. witnesses how Sethe’s emotions have completely taken control of her life and desperately tries to make Sethe realize her self-worth.

    Read More

  • Sacrifice In Toni Morrison's In Beloved

    1238 Words  | 5 Pages

    Morrison’s authorship elucidates the conditions of motherhood showing how black women’s existence is warped by severing conditions of slavery. In this novel, it becomes apparent how in a patriarchal society a woman can feel guilty when choosing interests, career and self-development before motherhood. The sacrifice that has to be made by a mother is evident and natural, but equality in a relationship means shared responsibility and with that, the sacrifices are less on both part. Although motherhood can be a wonderful experience many women fear it in view of the tamming of the other and the obligation that eventually lies on the mother. Training alludes to how the female is situated in the home and how the nurturing of the child and additional local errands has now turned into her circle and obligation.

    Read More

  • Milk In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    514 Words  | 3 Pages

    Toni Morrison presents her novel Beloved, chronicling a woman 's struggle in a post-slavery America. The novel contains several literary devices in order to properly convey its meaning and themes. Throughout the novel, symbolism is used heavily to imply certain themes and motifs. In Morrison 's Beloved, the symbol of milk is utilized in the novel in order to represent motherhood, shame, and nurturing, revealing the deprivation of identity and the dehumanization of slaves that slavery caused.

    Read More

  • Slavery In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    1350 Words  | 6 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • Greek Tragedy In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    1540 Words  | 7 Pages

    However, Morrison dispels such a notion by framing Beloved as a work of suffering, repression, and tragedy. She uses the framework of Greek tragedies to illustrate the lingering and traumatic effects

    Read More

  • Two Narrative Perspectives In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    843 Words  | 4 Pages

    Toni Morrison’s 1987 novel Beloved is a multiply narrated story of having to come to terms with the past to be able to move forward. Set after the Civil War in 1870s, the novel centers on the experiences of the family of Baby Suggs, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D and on how they try to confront their past with the arrival of Beloved. Two narrative perspectives are main, that of the third-person omniscient and of the third person limited, and there is also a perspective of the first-person. The novel’s narrators shift constantly and most of the times without notifying at all, and these narratives of limited perspectives of different characters help us understand the interiority, the sufferings and memories, of several different characters better and in their diversity.

    Read More

  • Ghost In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    1051 Words  | 5 Pages

    Sethe’s passion for her children shines through this passage, she identifies her children as “the part of her that were precious and fine and beautiful;” for Sethe, to allow her owner to take her children, would be to allow him to destroy everything that is beautiful in herself, to destroy all the “life” she had made. To this understanding, Sethe’s murder of her daughter seems a less morally reprehensible crime because it becomes more of an act of self-defense. Morrison withholds judgment on the action, instead throughout the book, Toni focuses her criticisms on the forces of slavery that led Sethe to kill her daughter. In this passage, Morrison condemns slavery as an institution so cruel that it could mutate a mother’s love into murder. 12.

    Read More

  • Suffering In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    1376 Words  | 6 Pages

    Have you ever felt like your past was holding you from achieving and being successful in the future? Denver, in Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, felt as though her past was affecting her life, which she was very much isolated and keeping to herself. Before Beloved arrived at 124, all was once calm, but now Denver and Beloved formed a relationship in which Denver belives she is somehow Sethe’s child that she murdered in the past. Beloved and Denver relationship is not a healthy one, but since Beloved has this hold over Sethe which is very childlike, Denver is able to grow up herself and find help for her family which helps create her independent identity. Beloved represents pain and suffering much like the effects of the American Civil War and

    Read More

  • The Role Of Feminism In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    2515 Words  | 11 Pages

    She was influenced by the ideologies of women’s liberation movements and she speaks as a Black woman in a world that still undervalues the voice of the Black woman. Her novels especially lend themselves to feminist readings because of the ways in which they challenge the cultural norms of gender, slavery, race, and class. In addition to that, Morrison novels discuss the experiences of the oppressed black minorities in isolated communities. The dominant white culture disables the development of healthy African-American women self image and also she pictures the harsh conditions of black women, without separating them from the oppressed situation of the whole minority. In fact, slavery is an ancient and heinous institution which had adverse effects on the sufferers at both the physical as well as psychological levels.

    Read More

  • How Does Toni Morrison Present Trauma In Beloved

    440 Words  | 2 Pages

    In Chapters 2–5 of Beloved, Toni Morrison uses Beloved’s character to prompt her family’s and African Americans’ collective reminiscence of previous trauma. Part 2 Chapter 2 begins with Sethe analyzing her relationship with Beloved, pondering the justification for her slaughter. As Sethe’s obsessive thoughts with her daughter continue, she thinks to herself: “Beloved. Because you are mine and I have to show you these things, and teach you what a mother should” (237). As if Sethe was not already perseverating on enough trauma from her past, she is now accompanied by the guilt of killing her child.

    Read More

  • Theme Of Alienation In Beloved

    1190 Words  | 5 Pages

    The child had no name so she bears the title on her tombstone; Beloved. Beloved unfolds to the reader as a young, dependent child, but as one takes a longer look at Beloved they begin to realize she becomes more and more malevolent, temperamental, and self-centered. Morrison uses Beloved to represent the inhumanity actions towards slaves from the past that return to haunt the present in a way to presents slavery as something that is not simply left behind or something that just goes away. When Beloved first appears to her mother, Sethe, she have the familiar feelings of her water breaking all over again.

    Read More

  • Trauma In Toni Morrison's Beloved

    927 Words  | 4 Pages

    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.

    Read More

More about Beloved: Distorted Love And Broken Motherhood

Open Document