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Beloved (Click to select text)
By: darryl Synopsis Both the movie and the book should be approached as a mystery that unfolds. It is written realistically but has a great deal of mystical overtones throughout the story. Both the movie and the novel begin in the middle of the story which in the beginning may be slightly confusing to either the movie go’er or the reader. Once the story has gone full circle it comes together in and attempts to question some primal beliefs as freedom, love, self worth, and the “natural” instinct for a mother to protect her child. Here is a brief summary of what has happened prior to the novel and movie’s opening. Mr. Garner purchases a 13-year old black slave girl named Sethe in order to assist his wife by doing the routine jobs around the house. Sethe is the only female slave owned by Mr. Garner who has five other male slaves – three Pauls, Halle, and Sixo. Sethe marries Halle and gives birth to four children. While she is pregnant with her fourth child, the six adult slaves decide to escape the household. Her three children make it to safety due to the aid of a runaway slave woman but Sethe waited for Halle, which caused her to get caught. She is then brutally raped and severely beaten by the slave owners but Sethe does eventually manage to escape without Halle. Sethe makes it out of Kentucky and gave birth to “Denver” the night before she crosses the river to Ohio. For 28 days Sethe and her children happily live with Halle’s mother, Baby Suggs, but she is soon found by the slave-owner who had come to retrieve them. To avoid a return to slavery, Sethe decides to kill her children and herself. She is only able to kill her toddler, later known as “Beloved”. At the novel and films opening, which takes place after slavery has been abolished, the entire family is tortured by the ghost of the baby girl haunting the house, and the Black Community has turned their back on Sethe for her seemingly horrendous actions. Observations The character Sethe is presented as a former slave woman who chooses to kill her baby girl rather than allowing the child to be exposed to the physically, emotionally, and spiritually oppressive horrors of a life spent in the confines of slavery. Sethe’s actions are easy to define: She has murdered her child. Her motivations are not as easily encapsulated. She rationalized that by killing “Beloved” she was ironically saving her but was this a case of true love or selfish pride? By examining the complex nature of the character Sethe it can be said that, this is a woman who chooses to love her children but not herself. She kills the baby because, in her mind, her children are the only part of her that has not been ”dirtied” by slavery. The selfishness of Sethe's act lies in her refusal to accept personal responsibility for the death of her baby. Her motivations seem conflicting because as she displays her love by mercifully sparing her daughter from a life of slavery, she refuses to acknowledge that by showing this mercy she is committing murder which she does not admit to. Throughout Beloved, Sethe's character constantly displays the duplistic nature of her actions. Shortly after her reunion with Paul D. she describes her reaction to School Teachers arrival “Oh, no. I was not going back there. I went to jail instead.” (Morrison 42) Sethe’s words suggest that she was making a moral stand by refusing to allow herself and her children to be dragged back into the evil of slavery. Clearly Sethe believes that her actions were justified from the beginning. The strange thing about her statement lies in what she does not say. She omits the terrible fact that her moral stand was based upon the murder of her child. This presents clarity to the aspect that Sethe has totally detached herself from her actions. Even when Paul D. learns of what Sethe has done and confronts her with it, Sethe still avoids the reality of her own selfishness. Sethe describes her reasoning to Paul D., “…So when I got here, even before they let me out of bed, I stitched her a little something from a piece of cloth Baby Suggs had. Well, all I’m saying is that’s a selfish pleasure I never had before. I couldn’t let all that go back to where it was, and I couldn’t let her or any of ‘em live under School Teacher. That was out” (Morisson 163) It is apparent that Sethe truly loves her children, yet still shifts the burden of responsibility away from herself in the respect of her child’s death. She acknowledges that it was “selfish pleasure” to make something for her daughter. Yet refuses to admit any selfishness in the act of killing her. Sethe soon becomes frustrated and indignant with Paul D. confronting her. I believe that Sethe's frustration is due to her contradictory reasoning. On the one hand she views her children as the only part of her that is pure, good and in need of protection, at any costs. But on the other hand it is this very concept of love and protection which drives her to kill her baby and attempting to kill the rest. Sethe sees no fault in this line of reasoning. Placing her children outside the horror of slavery, even if it meant taking their lives, was in her mind justified. Ironically, it is Paul D. who reveals the contradictions that Sethe refuses to see in her logic: “This here Sethe talked about love like any other woman; talked about baby clothes like any other woman, but what she meant could cleave the bone. This here Sethe talked about safety with a handsaw. This here Sethe did not know where the world stopped and she began. Suddenly he saw what Stamp Paid wanted him to see: more important than what Sethe had done was what she had claimed. It scared him” (Morrison 164). Paul D’s character suggests that although the act of killing might have been committed out of an irrational, hysterical, loving mother’s need to “protect” her children, Sethe’s “claim” that she was and is justified in those actions can not be accepted. Paul D. recognizes what Sethe can not; her act of supreme love is also an act of incredible selfishness. When Paul D. calls her thinking into question, she still refuses to acknowledge her roll in what had happened. The concept that Sethe equates her life and self worth with her connection to her children is most graphically illustrated in her ravings with the reincarnation of “Beloved”. Sethe defends the killing of her baby to the woman who she thinks is the reincarnation of her murdered daughter. Within this defense she explains that the absolute worst thing in life was to be “....dirtied so bad you for got who you were and could not think it up.” She furthered her explanation by saying, “The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean. (Morrison 251) To try to understand why a woman would kill her own baby, even in the most noble of circumstances, is an enigma at best. Sethe’s motivations do not fit into a simple schematic. She is presented as a woman who truly loves her children. A woman who loves them so much that she would rather see them dead rather then see them enslaved. So, it would stand to reason that Sethe’s main motivation would be love. This sounds noble at first glance but indeed the murder of the child could be argued to be as evil as the child being enslaved. The death of the child deprives the child of all the good in life as well as protects it from all the evil. Sethe also seems to take no responsibility for her actions. She averts all blame to the institution that has spawned her. In other words “society made me do it”. Ultimately though it is Sethe who is responsible for her child’s death not slavery. Lastly, It is a sad irony that within her lifetime slavery was indeed abolished. It reminds me of the soccer team that went down in the arctic. Could have they eaten the flesh of their teammates too soon? When the survivors of the plane crash were rescued some of the survivors did not eat the flesh of their teammates and did live. They might have suffered from hunger because of their situation and their decision but in the end they had their lives back without the guilt of cannibalism. Ultimately, I believe that Sethe’s actions are as selfish as the cannibalistic soccer players in that she killed her baby to save what she held as pure and the soccer players ate human flesh to save their lives. Word Count: 1501
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