In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, Sethe is a morally ambiguous character through her contrasting acts of love and violence, ultimately representing the themes of slavery that are integrated throughout the novel. At the heart of Sethe’s moral ambiguity is her decision to kill her infant daughter, Beloved. As a reader, it is revealed through flashbacks and the thoughts of Sethe and Paul D that a life of slavery is extremely damaging, and results in both characters remaining permanently scarred emotionally and physically. With this in mind, the action of killing her child can be seen as justifiable and morally correct, as Sethe believed killing herself and her children to be a better alternative than allowing them to live through the same pain she …show more content…
The death and subsequent revival of Beloved are akin to that of Jesus Christ in the sense that she died to protect the living. Through the death of Beloved, Sethe and her family were saved from the slave catchers, who did not enslave Sethe due to her apparent madness. However, the difference between Beloved and Christ is the lack of consent given to Beloved. Jesus willingly gave his life as an offering to God in order to absolve humanity of their sin, while Beloved did not receive such a choice. This marks the inherent evil that can be interpreted from Sethe’s actions, as she ultimately took it upon herself to decide the fate of a life that still had much left to live. Additional evidence pointing towards her act being nefarious in nature includes what she has to gain from Beloved’s death. In the novel, Beloved acts as a symbol for Sethe’s traumatizing past, which until Beloved’s death she keeps locked away, similar to Paul D with his tobacco-tin heart. It is only through Beloved’s return that Sethe ends up coping with her past, and therefore Beloved could have been seen as a sacrifice in Sethe’s eyes--a sacrifice for a peaceful soul. In her journey to accept her past, Sethe’s parasitic motherly love blinded her to the horror of her actions, and when presented with the opportunity to kill Beloved while having a reason to do it, she “flew, snatching up her children like a hawk on the wing” (Morrison 79). The depiction of her actions in an animal-like nature points towards the malicious way in which she performed the action, with little remorse or