Sethe's love
Beloved is a story about trauma. It's a story brimming excruciatingly full with trauma, yet we cannot forget the love. Love is both a hand in the exacerbation of every painful experience, and the center of the healing process. Each character is different -- Beloved's possessive, toxic love, Denver's dependent love, and of course, Sethe's unconditional motherly love.
We find Sethe initially to be the perfect picture of a heroine; for her children, she overcomes seemingly impossible odds with the superhuman strength of mothers, reminiscent of the stories where buses are lifted to save an infant. And of course the one, unforgettable need that pulls her forward: I have to get my milk to my children. I remember the graphic, heart-wrenching description of Sethe's journey to 124 with Denver; I feel like I would simply have dropped dead and given up if I were Sethe -- milk, baby, and all. Her journey calls for readers' admiration and love.
However, when we finally learn the truth of Sethe's past, it throws askew the image we've built of her as the epitome of motherhood. Her one driving characteristic was love, yet how could love ever motivate killing and harming your own children? Sitting comfortably in our homes reading each chapter of Beloved, it's hard to even begin to comprehend Sethe's motives.
Yet the murder, too, is part of Sethe's love. Certainly -- her love may be unhealthy, terrifying, even, as Paul D sees it, but it is still love. Through Schoolteacher's point of view and rememories of Sweet Home, the true horror of Sethe's experiences start to be revealed. The rape, the violence, the complete dehumanization of the enslavement Sethe and the Sweet Home men went through shows that there are things worse than death. "I couldn’t let all that go back to where it was, and I couldn’t let her nor any of em live under schoolteacher," Sethe's bottom line is (Morrison, 81). Like the slaves who chose a quick death sinking beneath cold waves in the Atlantic over a lifetime of agony, Sethe chooses to take matters into her own hands; she'd give up her children and kill them herself rather than let them experience the nightmare of Sweet Home. She'd never let Schoolteacher lay his hands on her babies, never let him measure them, count their teeth, or let his nephews steal their humanity like they stole her milk. Still, the picture of Beloved bleeding out and Denver nursing on her sister's blood, the two brothers forever holding hands in fear, is no easier to take. But perhaps we can see that for a woman who'd been through it all, death is a kinder alternative to the brutality of slavery.
Great post! I agree with you, Sethe's love for her children is indeed unconditional. I think that almost everything she does regarding her children is with good intent for them. Your use of quotes also is good for supporting your argument, and overall your post is fantastic.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Sethe's love is extraordinarily strong, especially under the context of motherhood. I, personally believe that Sethe's act was not murder, but rather a spiritual alternative. In juxtaposition to Sethe's mother "getting rid of" her babies conceived by rape from the crew-members on the slave ship, Sethe might have had a stronger motive to protect her kin. Nevertheless, protection meant to Sethe anything but a life at Sweet Home. Great job!
ReplyDeleteNice job Tracy! This post perfectly outlines Sethe's mentality when she made the decision to kill her children. In class we discussed how Morrison implemented the concept of rememory to the readers- how like you said, learning the truth of Sethe's past skewed our perception of her. Honestly, however, it only took a bit of time for me to on some level understand where she was coming from, and for that reason I still view her to be an inspirational mother figure.
ReplyDeleteHi Tracy, this is such a good post! I agree that Sethe's love is especially unique, because it comes from a mother. And so while Paul D can't understand this love because he's not a mother, everything Sethe does is motivated through her love. I definitely struggled with this but for her, it's through killing her child that she can give it maximum protection from everything she dreads in life.
ReplyDeleteHi Tracy, you make a really great point here that while Beloved is a story about extreme trauma it is also about love, which is literally in the title of the novel. Sethe's love for her children is much greater than any romantic love that I have ever read in another book. I like how you mentioned the generational traumatic response that Sethe and her mother both experience, sacrificing their children to save them from a life of slavery. Sethe's story is the perfect example of what her children, especially her daughters, could go through if they were chosen to be "spared" from death. In many ways, I agree with your statement that "death is a kinder alternative to the brutality of slavery."
ReplyDeleteOne of the dehumanizing myths that white slave-owners and supporters of slavery insisted upon was the idea that African people lacked the same capacity for love--for family attachments and deep emotional bonds with other people--that European people allegedly possessed. (It's easy to see how such a myth would serve to rationalize the institution and its relentless destruction of familial bonds.) That's one central preoccupation of Morrison's novel: to insist that not only do the people she represents have the capacity for love, they have especially strong and intense feelings of familial bond and (in Sethe's case) maternal responsibility. Sethe doesn't just think of herself as a mother--which in itself would be a radical denunciation of the slave-owner's myth. She is a kind of maternal *superhero*, the most intensely loving character perhaps in all of American literature. Morrison pushes back VERY strongly against this rationalization of slavery by making the title of the book, and the "name" of its most unique and haunting character, be a literal assertion of love. The word is literally central to the title, in its *assertive* form.
ReplyDeleteGreat job, your writing is beautiful! I think you do a really great job of explaining your points, and I definitely agree. I think the way the characters act can definitely be driven by love of different types. I like how you describe each characters form of love and how it is evident in their character, especially about Sethe because her love for her children and role in motherhood is a very common theme throughout the story that heavily influences/creates the plot.
ReplyDeleteI think you've captured this really moving, difficult aspect of Beloved incredibly well! One aspect of Beloved that you discuss that I think is really essential to the story is its structure—because the book is set up so we only learn about the central event in the story in the middle of the novel, by the time we reach that point, we already understand how deep Sethe's maternal love is, and how much she is willing to sacrifice for her children. As you point out, it can be really hard as a reader to reconcile everything we've learned thus far about Sethe with this choice she has made (and we see this same internal struggle play out with Paul D.), but I think Morrison ultimately does a really good job of convincing us that Sethe's love and her murder of Beloved are two sides of the same coin.
ReplyDeleteSethe's love was a concept of Beloved that was very difficult to understand for me yet struck me deeply when I started to understand more. The unconditional motherly love Sethe had for her children that drove her to kill them in order to save them was so deeply rooted in the traumas she faced at her time in Sweet Home and I had a hard time understanding it from my perspective as the comfortable reader. I think you've done an amazing job of showing Sethe's heart here!
ReplyDeleteGreat post! I agree that Sethe's love is completely unconditional, which is proven when she finds herself trapped in choosing between a life of torment for her kids or no life at all. Even when talking with Paul D., she stands firm in the belief that she did the right thing, even though Paul D. accuses her of being cruel.
ReplyDeleteThis was a good read, you captured the reader's experience of this novel really well. The depth and extent of Sethe's love is certainly shocking, but as you said, as we begin to gain more insight into what Sethe's life was actually like we gain more sympathy for her actions. Whether or not she was justified is really not for us to say as we haven't lived a day in her shoes, but at the very least we know that her actions, horrifying as they may be, where done out of love.
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