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Character Analysis: They Ain T At Sweet Home

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Even though Sethe kills her child, she’s still a good mother because she did it out of love, she wants to be a good mother, and she feels guilty for what she did. Sethe thought it was for the best to kill her child, instead of letting them be sold into a life of slavery. Sethe explained that because her child would be born into slavery that the child would not have a good life, instead it would suffer of where she didn’t know the right decision to make. Sethe explained when someone accused her that it was a bad idea she responded ‘It worked,’ ‘How? Your boys gone and you don’t know where. One girl dead, the other won’t leave the yard. How did it work?’ ‘ They ain’t at Sweet Home. Schoolteacher ain’t got em.’ ‘Maybe there’s worse.’ ‘It …show more content…

That’s when I stopped because I heard my name… Schoolteacher was standing over one of them with one hand behind his back… I was about to turn around and keep on my way to where the muslin was, when I heard him say, ‘No, no. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right.’ (228) Sethe remembers the day when Schoolteacher was trying to describe her characteristics for the slave trade. He named her as if she was an animal and not a human, by this he was dehumanising her. This was where she realised that she did not want her child to be born into slavery and this was one of the reasons why she killed her. Now that she has met Beloved and she realises that she is her child, she is happy that Beloved forgives Sethe for what she has done. Sethe says “I can forget it all now because as soon as I got the gravestone in place you made your presence known in the house and worried us all to distraction…” (Morrison 217) Beloved came back to Sethe, which Sethe took as a sign that Beloved forgives her for what she did. Sethe can now look at the gravestone that has Beloveds name on it, and know that her child is not mad at what she did. Sethe realised the guilt she had after killing her

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