Motherhood Wrought By Slavery In Toni Morrison's Beloved
Motherhood Annihilation Wrought by Slavery: An Elucidation of Toni Morrison’s Beloved
P J GIFTLIN,
Assistant Professor of English,
Nesamony Memorial Christian College,
Marthandam.
Abstract
Toni Morrison is s famous contemporary black female author who admirably succeeds in creating a ‘penetrating view of black motherhood’. There are several relationships that Morrison links together to show the aftereffects of the civil war from the Afro Americans point of view. The novel Beloved deals with the forgotten era of slavery and the sufferings of black slaves. Sethe, the protagonist suffers the most inhumane treatment at the plantation by the white masters. The literature produced after the Civil War concentrate on the lives of African Americans during and after slavery. Beloved deals exclusively with the distorted love of a mother for her child under the oppression of slavery. Due to the horror of slavery Sethe 's murder of Beloved is renovated into what Morrison controversially considers 'the ultimate gesture of a
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Sethe is the female protagonist in Beloved. She lost her mother at a very early age and she too is a slave. She was brought to the Sweet Home Plantation as a slave where she marries Halle Suggs and bears four children from him. She as a slave suffers a lot inhumane treatment at the plantation by the white masters. She is thrashed hardheartedly and milked like a cow. She was not even considered as a woman. The whites, “…sucked her lactating breasts” (109). This incident disturbs Sethe to a great extent and so she decides to run away from the plantation. She congregates all her courage and flees to take refuge in the house of her mother-in-law at 124 Bluestone Road. She is soon traced and was forced to be back as a slave. On finding no hopes for freedom Sethe takes the most horrific step of killing her own daughter to show resistance towards slavery. She is imprisoned for seven years for her crime and later secluded by the community and declared an
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1275 Words | 6 Pagesand I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own”(236). This was common on a plantation to have a slave woman nurse many of the children (black and white). So when Sethe is finally given the chance to be a mother, she whole-heartedly surrenders herself and gives her life to her children.
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2515 Words | 11 PagesIn addition to that, the black community isolated Sethe because she did something that the community considered wrong. Black feminism will be the approach utilized here to see the oppression of woman of color because it includes sexism, classism and racism. Since the female characters are very dominant in the novel, a black feminist approach should be very effective and it enables one to see how the female characters deal with the past and live with it in the present, what motherhood mean to the female characters, and how much the past influences the female characters who lives in the present. The end of the novel reveals the forgiveness and the acceptance not only of the black community toward Sethe’s choice (killing her daughter) but also of the white people (the Bodwins) who accepted Denver to work for them. This reconciliation shows that the courage and the will to get rid off from the past to live side by side peacefully and to move toward the future together.
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