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Sethe's Justification In Beloved

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Be Loved and Be Beloved: Sethe’s Justification for Her Actions in Beloved In Tony Morrison’s prestigious novel Beloved, the harsh reality of slavery in southern states is apparent. Sethe endures many hardships and experiences things beyond imagine. Sethe is forced to take matters into her own hands to prevent her children falling into the same trap that she did. She can’t let the white men take her kids and break them down by dehumanizing them. Sethe has experienced this and will not allow this happen to people she loves. Tony Morrison states, “Sethe did the right thing, but she didn’t have the right to do it” when discussing the murder of Beloved. Although Sethe was trying to protect Beloved, she took away her life and that cannot be undone. …show more content…

She cannot bear to hand her children over to him after what she endured. Schoolteacher doesn’t think that he broke Sethe down mentally and physically. He had no previous knowledge that his nephew was mistreating his slaves as bad as he was. Upon entering the shed and witnessing Beloved’s death, Schoolteacher becomes irritated with his nephew’s wrongdoings towards Sethe. When describing the scene of the crime, Tony Morrison provides explicate and crystal clear images. She writes, “He knew she’d gone wild, due to the nephew who overbeat her” (p 176). Schoolteacher knew that something like this was possible if the slaves were pushed beyond their limits and were severely dehumanized. He asks his nephew “What would your horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education?” (p 176) and he tells him if he beat his dogs they wouldn’t hunt for him and would eventually inflict harm on him. This scene is one of the most powerful messages in Beloved and shows that even the strongest of women can eventually be broken down by slavery. Sethe lost the battle against the whites by killing her own kin in an attempt to protect her. In the advent of this catastrophe, a large crowd of former slaves show up around the barn and watch in awe. The sheriff is frozen and cannot control his body as he watches in astonishment. It is obvious that Sethe has broken down and lost a piece of her soul when she walks out of the barn. Tony Morrison describes Sethe’s appearance and the effect of her crime on her when she says, “ The whites in her eyes had disappeared and since they were as black as her skin, she looked blind” (p 177). At this point in the book it seems that all of the life has been sucked out of Sethe and nobody knows how to react to what has just happened. All of the black faces that crowded around the scene were in shock. The way Sethe carried Denver out of the barn rubbed everyone in a weird way as she seemed

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James Good Mr. Young English 11 17 March 2023 Sacrifice and Personal Growth in Beloved When the reader first meets Denver, she is trying to communicate with the ghost of the baby that her mother killed, while Sethe reminisces about her children and notes that Denver is the only one left. Later, after Beloved has returned, Sethe begins to distance herself from Denver, becoming obsessive in her care of and attendance to Beloved. Without enough to eat, Denver actively allows her family to have her portions, which causes her well-being to decline rapidly. Thesis: Denver’s inherent fear of Sethe leads to her developing self-sacrificial tendencies and a mature sense of responsibility in order to protect her family at the expense of her life and

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Sethe was not raised with love or help from her own mother however, Sethe had no choice, but learn how to be the loving maternal figure for her own children. Becoming a nurturing mother and protecting her children from her own childhood experience was Sethe’s priority. As Sethe mentioned in the novel, “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” (Morrison 165).

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Sethe’s resilience has allowed her to do something that her own mother could not do for Sethe. Sickels maintains that “Sethe’s escape from Sweet Home and the infant she has given birth to reveal her resistance to slavery’s attempt to control black motherhood” (Sickels 38). Sethe is a courageous figure that has given her family freedom without the help of her husband. Sethe explains, “Up till then it was the only thing I ever did on my own” (Morrison 93).

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In Beloved by Toni Morrison, the author often utilizes many different writing techniques to emphasize the story’s main idea that one cannot let past mistakes dictate one’s life and future. Morrison’s application of nonlinear exposition in Beloved helps convey the novel’s main theme by allowing the reader to witness Sethe’s journey to self-acceptance through her personal flashbacks and Paul D.’s point of view. From the beginning, the author incorporates a flashback to illustrate how Sethe is burdened with guilt from killing her baby daughter. Morrison makes it clear to the reader that Beloved is constantly on Sethe’s mind.

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(Morrison 17) This suppression of her identity is a result of the trauma she experienced as a slave, where she was not allowed to have any sense of self or individuality. Through the appearance of Beloved, Sethe is forced to confront her past and accept that she was the reason for Beloved’s death. “The appearance of beloved in the story, manifests the idea that Beloved was killed by Sethe when she was an infant and is returning as a haunting spirit”(Heller 110) Beloved represents Sethe's past, and as she learns to confront and accept her past, Sethe can begin healing and moving

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A key feminine quality for women in general around this time period was their capacity for being a mother. Throughout the story, Beloved is one of the many memories that haunts Sethe which she tries to repress in vain because she attempted to murder her own child in order to save them from the same physical, emotional, and sexual abuse that she endured during her time working at Sweet Home. However, Morrison depicts this as an act of kindness. Sethe 's character is given a connection to the audience for her motherly instincts, but also a way for the audience to reflect on the fact that her attempted murders were out of motherly love and protection. Placing Sethe in the scope of many women of the time who had lived without the harshness of slavery are forced to confront the weight of a decision that they never had to make nor most likely ever will.

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The reason that Sethe did what she did to Beloved all goes back to her childhood. “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 is terrible. I did that” (Morrison, 194).

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She loved and valued her children so much that she could not bear to even think about letting them go back to being a slave. “The best things she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean…Sethe had refused—and refused still” (Morrison 296). Her refusal was the stepping stone to her extreme actions, as she picked up the weapon that would end their lives she would also be liberating them forever. “It ain’t my job to know what’s worse.

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All the while, Beloved is distracted by her need for revenge on her mother, taking advantage of the attention Sethe gives her. Instead of realizing that this attention is all she really desires, Beloved takes a turn for the worse, slowly wearing her loving mother

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Have you ever read a book that was so hard to read due to its massive extensive vocabulary, it’s peculiar writing style? Well one book novel that you’ll find hard to comprehend is called Beloved by Toni Morrison. The book novel Beloved takes place when the Fugitive Slave Act was written, the main character, Sethe, was a former slave women who escaped to the north with her children. They stayed there until she was found by her current slave owner, through desperation she attempted to murder her kids for she believed it would be better for them to be dead then experience the horrors of slavery. She succeeded in killing one child but it only made matters worse.

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Sethe’s actions are all molded by her struggles that are created from her enslaved past and her supernatural presence. “A wounded, enraged baby is the central figure of the book, both literally, in the character of Beloved, and symbolically, as it struggles beneath the surface of the other major characters” (Schapiro 195). Morrison is able to convey the psychological effects of slavery upon a whole family. Offspring, who were not enslaved, are still damaged from the scars of their mother. Morrison’s novel does not only expose a fictional novel presenting the story of a certain slave, but it also analyzes the true mental and emotional effects of captivity.

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Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved explores the ways that trauma, especially that which emanates from situations of powerlessness, like being enslaved, contributes to a shift of one’s perceptions of motherhood, love, and how love is shown. Sethe, who was formerly enslaved, commits a heinous act as a way to protect her child who she loved dearly from being taken away and forced into a life of slavery. Even though Sethe did this act for reasons that were perfectly logical to her, Beloved and Paul D struggle to come to accept what happened, because her reasons seem so foreign to their own ideas of motherhood and love. Due to her past traumatic experiences when she was enslaved, Sethe’s understanding of how she, as a mother, should express her love

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Sethe’s passion for her children shines through this passage, she identifies her children as “the part of her that were precious and fine and beautiful;” for Sethe, to allow her owner to take her children, would be to allow him to destroy everything that is beautiful in herself, to destroy all the “life” she had made. To this understanding, Sethe’s murder of her daughter seems a less morally reprehensible crime because it becomes more of an act of self-defense. Morrison withholds judgment on the action, instead throughout the book, Toni focuses her criticisms on the forces of slavery that led Sethe to kill her daughter. In this passage, Morrison condemns slavery as an institution so cruel that it could mutate a mother’s love into murder. 12.

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Beloved Repulsion In Tori Morrison’s novel, Beloved, the author explores the idea of the massive devastation that slavery has. The negative impact of no knowledge of self-worth and self-alienation, being very dangerous, is one that haunts slaves so far that it continues to reach those who are able to reach freedom. Morrison presents the haunting, taunting temperament of the novel through a child, a spirit of a slave’s daughter murdered by her own mother to avoid slavery but has a different kind of slavery; an eternal captivity. The child is the thought spirit of Sethe’s dead daughter but is the age she would have been if she was still alive.

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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 that 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.

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