Beloved, By Toni Morrison

The maternal mortality rate for Black women in America is three times higher than it is for white women. This is just one example of the healthcare crisis that Black women face today, which is deep rooted in the historical devaluation of enslaved women. Beloved depicts this devaluation of Black motherhood through Sethe’s experience, as she struggles with the exploitation of her body and how that impacts her perception of herself as a woman and mother. Morrison illustrates the relationships between Sethe and her mother and Sethe and her children, placing a strong emphasis on the lack of a maternal bond. Through Morrison’s multigenerational portrayal of these relationships within the historical context, she demonstrates how each affects the next.

This is shown through one of Sethe’s strongest memories of her relationship with her mother, in which she was deprived of this physical connection. Sethe shares, “The little whitebabies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own. I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left” (Morrison 236). Sethe was deprived of her mother’s breast milk, which directly impacted how she perceived her own role as a mother. The lack of this connection made Sethe value her ability to breastfeed her children as a measure of her ability to care for them: “All I knew was I had to get my milk to my baby girl. Nobody was going to nurse her like me. Nobody was going to get it to her fast enough, or take it away when she had enough and didn’t know it… Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me” (Morrison 19). To Sethe, breastfeeding meant nurturing her children and providing them with the maternal connection that she never got to

When Sethe is raped by the schoolteacher’s nephews at Sweet Home they steal her breast milk, “one sucking on [her] breast the other holding [her] down” (Morrison 83). This is the most explicit way of showing how Sethe is robbed of her ability to be a mother, both physically and psychologically. Throughout Beloved, Sethe is continually reduced to an object and violated. She has to sell her body to get an inscription on Beloved’s tombstone after killing her to protect her from slavery. “She thought it would be enough, rutting among the headstones with the engraver, his young son looking on, the anger in his face so old; the appetite in it quite new” (Morrison 5). Even when trying to fulfill her role as Beloved’s mother, Sethe is subjected to the commodification of her body. Morrison’s use of “rutting” and “appetite” emphasize how Sethe is dehumanized and that this is animalistic behavior. Every act of motherhood Sethe tries to display is perverted by the institution of