Discuss in the Light of Your Reading of Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Is Sethe’s Murder of Her Own Child

It is a universal truth that every mother loves her child more than herself. It is shocking to hear that a mother has killed her own child. The question which arises in our mind—is how is this possible? If we go through the story of the novel Toni Morrison's Beloved, then it becomes clear to us why and under what situation Sethe murdered her daughter. Although it is not justified to take anyone’s life, we cannot hold Sethe guilty in this regard. The physical abuse which she got from her owner was responsible for her mental trauma. Slavery took joy from her life and gave only unbearable pain. She tried to escape from her horrible life with her children. When she was caught, she killed her daughter for saving her from being a slave and thus leading a miserable life. She thought that dying was better than being a slave. If we go through her tragic life at Sweet Home, we can say that she was justified to kill her own child.

 

Unwilling to relinquish her children to the physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma she has endured as a slave, she tries to murder them in an act that is, in her mind, one of motherly love and protection. Her memories of this cruel act and of the brutality she herself suffered as a slave infuse her everyday life and lead her to content that past trauma can never reality be eradicated—it continues, somehow, to exist in the present. She thus spends her life attempting to avoid encounters with her past. Perhaps Sethe’s fear of the past is what leads her to ignore the overwhelming evidence that Beloved is the reincarnation of her murdered daughter. As Sethe loved her dead child, she came to her life again, but now in the form of spirit.

Sethe wanted to escape from the horrible Sweet Home. So, she sent her children to Cincinnati. So, schoolteacher’s nephews seized Sethe in the barn and violate her, stealing the milk her body is storing for her infant daughter. When schoolteacher found out that Sethe had reported his and his nephews’ misdeeds to Mrs Garner, he had her whipped severely, despite the fact that she was pregnant. Swollen and scarred, Sethe nevertheless ran away, but along the way she collapsed from exhaustion in a forest. A white girl, Amy Denver, found her and nursed her back to health. Amy later helped Sethe to deliver her baby in a boat. Rather than surrender her children to a life of dehumanizing slavery, she fled with them to the woodshed and tries to kill them. Only the third child, her older daughter, died, her throat having been cut with a handsaw by Sethe. But her motherly love made her to manage the word beloved on a tomb stone by letting the stone cutter have sex with her.