As shown through many forms of media, a mother is supposed to give their child unconditional love. However, there may be a limit to how far this love should be expressed. In the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sethe, one of the main characters, expresses her love to her children by killing or attempting to kill them in order to protect them from being brought back to the horrors of slavery.
Sethe clearly wanted her children's lives to be better than hers, especially considering that she had to endure being a slave. When Sethe saw her former master, the schoolteacher, approaching her with a slave catcher, she ultimately decided to kill her children as means of protection. She "couldn't let all that go back to where it was, and [she] couldn't let her nor any of them live under schoolteacher" (192).
While Sethe's believed that it was better for her children to be dead instead of slaves, her actions negatively affected other characters that she was close to. Her daughter Denver, who Sethe had attempted to kill, was harassed at school by her peers due to her mother being a "murderer". Additionally, her former lover Paul D was shocked when he discovered that Sethe had murdered her children. When one of the townspeople Stamp Paid shows Paul D the newspaper article about what Sethe had did, Paul D initially refuses to believe that Sethe would ever do that. Ultimately, Sethe's actions cause Paul D to leave 124, as he refused to live with Sethe after learning about her past.
Love, in Sethe's mind, is not restricted to morals. While I disagree with her definition of love and do not think that her actions were justified, I can understand that she wanted to protect her children. Sethe's "love" is not love, however; her actions were driven by past trauma that she wanted no one else to experience.
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