Summary:
Sethe's tough decision to kill her daughter rather than have her become a slave at the plantation is at once the most stunning and most important event Morrison's Beloved. In addition to the chronological, psychological, and thematic consequences of Sethe's verdict, her choice is also significant for it presents her malice and spite. However, as a result of the harsh dilemma Sethe had to face, She escapes the otherwise cruel judgment from the reader. Instead, her sufferings, both mental and physical, stimulate compassion, sympathy, and pardon from the reader.
"Now, too late. The heart that pumped out love, the mouth that spoke the word, didn't count. They came in her yard anyway and she could not approve or condemn Sethe's rough choice" (180). Sethe's tough decision to kill her daughter rather than have her become a slave at the plantation is at once the most stunning and most important event Morrison's Beloved. In addition to the chronological, psychological, and thematic consequences of Sethe's verdict, her choice is also significant for it presents her malice and spite. However, as a result of the harsh dilemma Sethe had to face, She escapes the otherwise cruel judgment from the reader. Instead, her sufferings, both mental and physical, stimulate compassion, sympathy, and pardon from the reader.
Sethe Suggs, the protagonist of Beloved, spends her freed life chained by the debt slavery has placed on her. She is a victim of a domineering cultural and social system where she is refrained from being cared for or taking care of others. Sethe's physical reminders of the brutality she suffered as a slave suffuse her and lead her to maintain that past trauma can never really be eradicated and continues to somehow exist in the present.
Just as the schoolteacher "made a tree" on her back and "it grows there still," Sethe cannot erase the cruelty of her enslaved past and the pain continues to expand and disturb her (p. 21). She understands the horrors of the institution and the scars on her back are physical representations of the site of trauma and brutality. The full presentation of the pain, misery and agony she endured shields her from critics proclaim her malevolence and cruelty.
In addition to the sympathy Sethe acquired from her physical scars, the emotional distress she suffered in the prejudiced society also justifies her complicated thoughts as an adult and as a mother. As an infant, Sethe's mother's inability to care for her in the slave environment instilled pitifully bits and pieces of memory that she carried with her through life. Although as an adult, Sethe eventually comprehends her mother's powerlessness was constrained by slavery, the feelings of desertion and neglect she felt still haunt her as she became a mother herself. In order to compensate for the lack of love she felt as a child, Sethe desires to be a reliable and nurturing mother herself. Unfortunately, slavery would not allow her to succeed; she could not raise her children as infants and could only watch her loved ones be taken away from her. Ultimately, unwilling to surrender her children to the torment she endured as a slave at Sweet Home, she tries to murder them in an act of motherly love and protection. Although Sethe realizes the misunderstanding and intolerance she will receive from her action, she asserts the strong, unrequited love she holds for her children by ridding them of the potential sufferings she bore as a slave.
In her novel Beloved, Morrison stops short of taking any clear ethical stand on Sethe's rough choice of infanticide, but instead presents it as something that she can neither support nor censure. Her full presentation of Sethe moves the readers toward such comprehension: while we struggle with the ethical dilemma introduced by Sethe's choice, we must also imaginatively engage with her instinctive decision that, when faced with the prospect of slavery, loving her children means murdering them. Such approach transforms slavery from an abstract evil to a conspicuous one and constructs Morrison's underlying purpose of her novel to challenge her audience to contend with the continuing effects of slavery in the United States.
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