Motherhood In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Sethe did not know if she could get rid off from her memory of her past until she confronted it and solved the unfinished business with her daughter. Beloved’s disappearance was the starting point for Sethe to move forward in her life. She found control over her past and began to see the future through Paul D. Paul D helped her to see that there was still life without Beloved. Sethe learned how to accept her past as the past and to be consciously present while making plans for the future. The past had no more control over Sethe. It was Sethe who took control. This does not mean that she had forgotten the past; she still remembered, but she would not allow herself to live in the past any longer. She could go back and forth from the past to the

In addition to that, the black community isolated Sethe because she did something that the community considered wrong. Black feminism will be the approach utilized here to see the oppression of woman of color because it includes sexism, classism and racism. Since the female characters are very dominant in the novel, a black feminist approach should be very effective and it enables one to see how the female characters deal with the past and live with it in the present, what motherhood mean to the female characters, and how much the past influences the female characters who lives in the present. The end of the novel reveals the forgiveness and the acceptance not only of the black community toward Sethe’s choice (killing her daughter) but also of the white people (the Bodwins) who accepted Denver to work for them. This reconciliation shows the courage and the will to get rid off from the past to live side by side peacefully and to move toward the future together. According to Martha Bayles, The main plot of Beloved can be seen as a variant on the same tale: a slave commits a crime, but it’s not only a crime and it is more than it because it has been committed by a slave. The system, and not the slave stands, unjustly condemned for a deed that would possess another meaning if committed in freedom to some extent. A similar moral a similar moral adjustment has to be made in

She was influenced by the ideologies of women’s liberation movements and she speaks as a Black woman in a world that still undervalues the voice of the Black woman. Her novels especially lend themselves to feminist readings because of the ways in which they challenge the cultural norms of gender, slavery, race, and class. In addition to that, Morrison’s novels discuss the experiences of the oppressed black minorities in isolated communities. The dominant white culture disables the development of healthy African-American women with a self image and Morrison pictures the harsh conditions of black women, without separating them from the oppressed situation of the whole minority. In fact, slavery is an ancient and heinous institution which had adverse effects on the sufferers at both the physical as well as psychological levels. Beloved depicts the excruciating life of Sethe, before and aftermath the end of slavery. The depiction of her life represents the lives of various slaves. Thus this novel is taken to meticulously look through the traumatic situation, recognize where the damage has been done and then finally living without denying the scars. This novel is set against the backdrop of slavery in American South in the period immediately prior to and following the civil