Toni Morrison’s Beloved traces Sethe’s life, highlighting her experiences as a mother and as a former slave. In the novel, the titular character conveniently appears and takes the form of the person the inhabitants of 124 need the most. Sethe desperately needs a child, as her two sons have run away, she killed one of her daughters, and her other daughter lives with her, but isolates herself from everyone. Sethe takes in Beloved and spoils her, even before learning that Beloved is the daughter she killed, serving as a reflection of her desire to have a healthy relationship with at least one of her children; ironically, this creates a situation in which Sethe is enslaved once again, but to a different master: Beloved.
Every woman who was a mother
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Despite that, her chance at motherhood is stripped away from her in a more painful manner than most. Rather than suffering from separation from her children to different owners, Sethe is condemned to a much worse fate: she must live with the fact that her children think her to be a monster that will kill them at any given moment, making Beloved’s entrance into Sethe’s life incredibly convenient.
In Slavery and Motherhood in Toni Morrison's "Beloved", Terry Caesar argues that “a daughter defines - far more powerfully than a father or a community - what a mother hasn't been” (Caesar 115). After taking in Beloved, Sethe sees herself as someone who wasn’t “good enough, alert enough, strong enough, [or] that caring” (Morrison 155). Beloved represents a chance for Sethe to start over and care for her child in a way she never personally experienced. As a child, Sethe never had a nurturing mother-like figure to care for her and the only memory of her mother that she has is when her mother shows her the branded symbol on her breast. The fact that Sethe hardly remembers having someone care for her on top of the accumulation of guilt through the years of rejection from her children further convinces Sethe that she needs to take care of Beloved through any means