So is killing her children was justified? No doubt it was wrong, but slavery is also wrong. As a mother would we do the same? What would we do to protect our children from the horrors of slavery?
Monday, November 21, 2016
Is Killing Justified
In Beloved, Toni Morrison brings the conflict of what motherhood means in slavery. It highlights some of the extreme conditions that families, and more specifically mothers, have to go through while in slavery. They can be driven to make extremely difficult decisions, that can be viewed as immoral or even insane by somebody who has not gone through the same experiences as them. In this chapter Sethe, is forced to make one of these choices. When she begins to think that there is no hope of escaping the teacher, she decides that she would rather kill her children than to give them to him. She realises that if he catches her kids, they will have just as horrible of life with him as she has had. It was this moment when she decided that the best course of action would be to kill her children so that they would never have to live through the same horrible experiences.
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This brings up really interesting questions, I am unsure what I would do in Sethe's situation
ReplyDeleteThis brings up really interesting questions, I am unsure what I would do in Sethe's situation
ReplyDeleteIt is hard to even imagine putting myself into Sethe's situation, but loved the post!
ReplyDeleteI feel that with questions like these not every perspective is always justified. You bring up a great point of what it´s like to be a mother in this kind of situation. At a first response the idea of killing your own children is immoral however, if you put into perspective everything else Sethe has dealt with and I´m sure she has contemplated possibly what her children may endure, she wanted to protect them from those horrors. Unfortunately, the only way to guarantee that was death itself.
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