Sethe's Pride In Beloved

To love and to be loved, to, is one of life's greatest gift and most ugly curse. Sethe, the main character in the novel Beloved, fearlessly loves her children and is boldly prideful. These same qualities may seem to be her downfall, but it is also an attempt to reclaim her humanity and establish her freedom, to others and to herself. Her pride is displayed in her confidence and assertiveness in her decisions, something that which slaves cannot do. Her devotional, and sometimes suffocating love for her children, also serves as a constant reminder to herself that she is a free human, with the inherent ability to love and feel, despite being branded as an animal and property on the plantation. When Baby Suggs is in Cincinnati she preaches about

Kinship is snatched from them at a young age and obedience towards white people, adult and children alike, is given instead. It is practical for slaves to carry feelings of a fear and hate in their hearts. Sethe resents not having a chance at daughterhood. She said that one woman nursed her along with the other children and sometimes she did not get enough milk. She said, “The little white babies got it first and I got what was left. Or none. There was no nursing milk to call my own”(236). This was common on a plantation to have a slave woman nurse many of the children (black and white). So when Sethe is finally given the chance to be a mother, she whole-heartedly surrenders herself and gives her life to her children. When the reader is taken through all the things she wants to say to Beloved it says, “So I sent you all to the wagon with the woman who waited in the corn...what I had to get through later I got through because of you”(233). It becomes apparent that the free life that she desperately runs to, is all in the name of motherhood, so her children will not have to live the humiliating lives of slaves. Love is something that she can’t do while at Sweet Home, she says to Paul D, “I couldn’t love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to love”(190), so when she arrives in Cincinnati, it is the first thing she does. She continues her narration saying, “But when I got here, when I jumped down off

It is said that symptoms of sexual assault are a loss of control and PTSD and that victims may turn to substances to help cope. The assault on the plantation results in a not only a loss of pride, but a loss of ownership of control over her own body. She repeats over and over to Paul D” they took my milk” (20). This shows that she thinks of her body as simply a tool to feed her children and nothing more, after experiencing such a traumatizing violation of her body and in turn she reduces her self worth even more. While Sethe may not have turned to substances to help cope with the assault it can be said that she turns to motherhood. She describes her children as, “all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful”(192), placing the ownership of herself in her children's hands. After crying into Paul D she proceeds to have sex with him in her bedroom. Although there isn’t much said from her perspective of this experience, it shows her re-establishing ownership of her body as a sexual being and not just a mother, who births and nurses children. This also shows her exploring other facets of womanhood other than being a mother, which she has baptized herself in and uses as another form of