To me, the most heartbreaking moment of Toni Morrison's brilliant novel Beloved was when Sethe attempted to kill all of her children, succeeding with her toddler aged daughter. It was also the most thought-provoking moment. At face value, Sethe is psychotic: attempted murder of her own children resulting in the death of one of them. Life has value and meaning of which she tried to take from her own children. However, upon deeper reflection, I discovered that maybe Sethe was not trying to take life from her children, but to save them from the life not worth living.
It is hard to comprehend that. What exactly is a life not worth living? To Sethe, that was a life in slavery. When she realized that her children would be taken to the life she had risked everything to escape, she saw no option. She had to kill her children to save them from the 'life' of enslavement. She believed that a life under the ownership of another human, a life of torture, and a life of brutality were not worth living, so she made this decision for her children.
By taking a life, Sethe might have truly saved one.
I pretty much agree with your point here about Sethe saving a life by taking one. It's not really up to me to decide how bad slavery was or was for Sethe, but based on Sethe's multiple descriptions of her life in slavery under schoolteacher and her allusions to things too terrible to even fully describe, I'm not surprised that the thought of her children living that life led to the attempted murder. She can't even think of the details of some of the things she experienced, so although her method seems extreme, I'm not sure what else anyone logically wanted her to do in that situation other than return to the unspeakable horrors of slavery and sentence her children to the same.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you, Eleanor. I think that Sethe's determination to preserve her children's innocence led her to psychotic measures, but for a mother, it was the greatest act of love possible. Sethe further destroyed her own humanity, which she never gained conception of until her escape, and exerted newfound agency to ensure that her children would never become animals.
ReplyDeleteI think (and have always thought) that this is the ultimate example of a mother's love. Sethe loved her children so incredibly much that she was willing to end their own lives to make sure that they would never have to go through what she had to. The most heartbreaking part for me is that mothers try their best to protect their children from the injustices and hardships of the world, but slavery would completely dismiss Sethe as a mother. She saw her own relationship with her mother (it was non existent) because slavery does not care about the relationships and bonds of those enslaved, it obliterates them. Sethe knew this and knew that she would have no control over protecting them, so she did what she thought was the best option for them, and inevitably, the thing that ended up saving all her children besides one.
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