Examples Of Motherhood In Beloved

In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, Morrison explores the rich and textured lives of multiple characters as they heal from the lingering effects of trauma. Morrison tells a tale about people and explores the different facets residing in everyone of them, and so therefore this story could be analysed through many lens, and one of those lens happens to be the womanist lens. For an introductory course for those unfamiliar with the term “womanism” it was first coined by another highly acclaimed African American writer, Alice Walker, and she explained womanism as this, “black feminist or feminist of color who loves other women and/or men, sexually and/or nonsexually, appreciates and prefers women's culture, women's emotional flexibility and women's

They both serve as fascinating foils to one another and their reactions to their circumstances are demonstrations of extreme opposites. As a young child Sethe already had a strong association between motherhood and death. She never fully knew her mother, instead being taken care of by the communal mother as a young girl, with her getting rare glimpses of her mother working in the rice fields. It is also imperative to note how her mother also threw the children she conceived from rape into the sea. Thus from a very young age Sethe has had a very distorted view of motherhood. To deal with her early abandonment Sethe maked sure to give her children all the love she can. Her adore for her children pushed her to escape slavery and to give them the best life possible as she explains to Paul

In the end she makes the decision that death is a better fate than slavery, and when corned by Paul D she has no qualms for her actions,"It ain't my job to know what's worse. It's my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that (194)". And in many aspects Sethe does have a point. Many slave children did not survive long either from accidental deaths from their horrid living or due to intentional acts of sadism. As a slave Sethe never had the luxury of being the archetypal soft loving mother, for when your children can be taken right from your hands and sold to the highest bidder, possession and desperation can be the seen as the right response to have. Yet Sethe is not the only character who has experienced trauma and Baby Suggs who was also a slave mother had to cope with losing all of her children to slavery, as demonstrated