Critical Lens Expert - The Bonds of Love and The Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison's "Beloved"

Barbara Schapiros ¨The Bonds of Love and The Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrisons Beloved,¨ covers an incredibly complicated topic involving love and self. She describes how the denial of one's status as a human has "deep repercussions in the individual's internal world" with a fascinating focus on the mother daughter relationship Sethe has (or lacks) with her mother, and daughters.

The slave system is innately detrimental to a mother-child relationship. Because a mother is the child's "first vital other," and is made unavailable by the slave system, the child is deeply and terribly affected, Schapio describes. The child, by lacking this vital connection, never develops his or her "self." Growing up, the system continues to deny the child's being as a human subject. Schapiro describes this as the slave system "choking off" the "vital circulation between the mother and child so crucial to the development of self." This lack of affirmation of self that occurs for the child as a result of being a part of the slave system is detrimental to them as individuals.

This was idea that resonated with me greatly. Without the love of my mother, I truly believe that I would have a hard time knowing and developing my sense of self. I am incredibly thankful to have been in a situation where there were not forces working against this bond as I was growing up, as Sethe experienced with her own children.

Schapiro brings us back to the scene where Sethe was brutally assaulted by the schoolteacher's nephews in order to discuss how when her milk is taken from her in this instance, it is not the first time she has been robbed. We are reminded that as Sethe is growing up, her mother is providing her milk to the white children (200), leaving Sethe with what is left over. This is another instance where Sethe's relation with her own mother has been "choked off" leaving her robbed by the system, and starved emotionally of the nurturing relationship she so badly yearned for. The connection made here by Schapiro was incredibly fascinating to me and drew a huge parallel between the instance and her ideas for me.

The worst atrocity of slave system, according to Schapiro, is the physic death. After living through a life of servitude, a personal is no longer fully alive. After being robbed of the love and validation required to go on living, there is no way for them to be fully alive following their experience in servitude. This is an idea that I agree with profoundly. Throughout Beloved, it is clear that Sethe has been deeply effected by her experiences at Sweet Home and undeniably robbed by the entirety of the system until she only part alive. This affects her so much so, that (as we later find out) she makes the decision to take the lives of her own children in order to prevent her children from being robbed in the same way.

“Freeing yourself was one thing; claiming ownership of that freed self was another." This quote from page 112 of Beloved, relates strongly to the ideas presented by Schapiro in this article. Although Sethe has been freed physically from her life of servitude, her experiences have stayed with her, leaving her essentially half alive. Even in her physical freedom, she has a whole other battle to fight. Her thoughts truly prevent her from claiming ownership of herself and being truly free, leaving her stuck in a place of brokenness.

Motherly Instincts - Close Reading #2 by Gennesis Ayala

“The best thing 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...whether a gang of whites invaded her daughter’s private parts, soiled her daughter’s thighs and threw her daughter out the wagon. She might have to work the slaughterhouse yard, but not her daughter.” -Beloved, page 296

In the quote above, Sethe lets us see what she was thinking when the Schoolteacher came for her and her children. Sethe is telling us that anything can happen to her, but she won’t let anyone take her children. Her children are the only part of her that is “clean,” meaning that her children have not yet experienced what she experienced as a slave and woman. Sethe mostly addresses her daughter and says that as long as the white men let her daughter go after they assaulted her, then she would work at a slaughterhouse yard, but her daughter will not.

Sethe is mostly addressing her daughter, Beloved, in this passage. This is because Sethe knows that as a female, Beloved will have the worst experience of all. Sethe is a woman herself and knows by first hand what it is like to be a slave and a woman at Sweet Home. She knows that if her daughter is taken, Beloved will no longer be “clean” and the “whites might dirty her” like they did to Sethe. This shows that during the time when the Schoolteacher came, Sethe wasn’t scared for herself, she let her motherly instincts take over and was sacred for the lives of her children, but mainly her daughter. Sethe’s main concern was her daughter and this is because female slaves were treated a lot worse than male slaves. Sethe constantly has flashbacks where she describes the terrible conditions and events she has to face everyday while she lived in Sweet Home. She didn’t want her daughter to experience that, so instead Sethe decided that her daughter was better off dead, and so were the rest of her children. Although I disagree with her horrifying decision to kill her daughter, I can see where Sethe was coming from. If she didn’t harm her daughter, someone else was going to harm her in a worse way.

Our Identity, Our Lives - A Responding and Reflecting Blog by Sierra Nelson-Liner

"They killed the flirt with whom folks called life"

-Paul D (Beloved, 128)

It seems natural for me to know who I am. For Sethe and for every other slave it was such an uncharted territory to recognize themselves. Their personalities. Their identities. They were taken away the moment they became owned.  For instance Baby Suggs refers to first moments as a freed woman and her realization that she “never had a map to discover what she was like”(pg 165).  In fact, our personalities and our identities are made from our memories and our experiences in life. Without our memories we would not be able to form opinions based off of previous schemas that we start developing as small children. As slaves were brought up that is all they knew that life was. Paul D refers to white men as people who “killed the flirt with whom folks called life”(128). This is just a small taste of what it really meant not to have a life of your own.

Throughout Beloved I have constantly tried to understand what it really meant to live a life as a slave. Toni Morrison tried her best to portray her writing for what the entity of slavery was. While watching an interview of Toni talking about Beloved I noticed that this was something she struggled with as well. Slavery is such a hard concept to imagine, let alone deeply feel. Something that Toni suggests to her students is to connect the characters directly to people in their lives. She similarly did as she was writing to portray the true feeling, the true language, for what was happening. In the interview she specifically talks about the scene where Sethe decided to murder her children. While writing the scene Toni, with a lot of difficulty, tried to imagine her own child. She revealed;“If I am going to imagine what it takes to kill... your baby... then I have to put in my arms my baby. As a result she was able to portray the scene for what it really was. She explained; “[Once I envisioned myself in Sethe’s position] then the language just pairs down. You don’t get ornamental with that. You get very still, very clean limbed, and very quiet because the event itself is bigger than language.” I thought this was very beautiful and despairing at the same time. That has also been my feeling towards Beloved itself. It is a tough read, but an important one. We will never be able to really understand what it meant to be ripped away from our family, to be sold or bought into slavery, to be without our natural rights and freedoms, but it is incredibly important to try to understand so we don’t repeat history.

Ghosts, Vampires, and Traumatic Events -A Critical Lens Experts Blog by Sierra Nelson-Liner

Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved by Pamela E. Barnett focuses on some of the most unsettling and traumatic aspects of Beloved. Some of the first supernatural acts that occur in the novel are the ghost of the child she has killed, the “re-birthing” of characters, and the destructive relationship between Beloved and Sethe nearing the end of the novel. The ghost of the murdered baby is the reminder for Sethe of what she has done. The ghost itself was a reflection of her struggle to let go of what she had done to her child. Interestingly enough, Paul D was able to scare the ghost away because he caught Sethe off guard and began her process of circling back to the past and understanding why she did what she did. The re-birthing occurs when Sethe relieves herself just as Beloved returns and drinks cup after cup of water. Re-birthing  can also symbolize purity which can allude to Beloveds character to purify or change the characters she interacts with. In other words, she brings the characters to see themselves for who they are. 

 One interesting figuration of the supernatural that Pamela E. Barnett suggests is that Beloved is actually a succubus. This is another word for a demon who sucks the life out of its victims. Beloved does this to Sethe by forcing her into regression, stress or guilt that induces childish behavior, and Beloved herself into a dominant character. She sucks so much out of Sethe that she looks like a child next to Beloved who looks like a pregnant mother. This connection reflects further into the bond between mother and daughter. As Sethe feels unbearably guilty for the murder of her child, she struggles to move forward without being able to explain herself to her child, or Beloved. She is also faced with years and years of disruption of her family. She grew up where Baby Suggs puts it as  a place where African Americans were treated as “checkers” where mothers were separated from daughters, fathers, and sons. Nearing the end of the novel Sethe lets Beloved know that she killed her in order to protect her from slavery. It became an argument through the characters whether this was Sethe’s decision. From a mother’s perspective, how do you let your child be taken away from you to a place that had emotionally and physically traumatized you for life?

Rape is also very apparent in the story. This happens both for male and female characters. While the story progresses the trauma from the experiences are always present within the minds of the characters. It seems as if they completely deny what has happened to themselves which is why they can't discuss it. For instance Paul D and Sethe both repress their memories of rape, and in turn it keeps them farther apart because they can’t face their past. This viewpoint on the exploitation of slaves is suggested to focus on the fact that “rape was and often still is a racial issue.” While the slaves were owned by their masters they were forced to give away every aspect of their lives, including their bodies. For certain characters in Beloved their way to retaliate against this was to not nurse babies born from rape. A character who does this is Ella. She was frequently taken by a father and son which she referenced as ‘the lowest of the low.” In a defence mechanism of displacement she blamed the children born of rape and refused to nurse.

The Act of Forgiveness, Responding and Reflecting Blog by Sierra Nelson-Liner

One theme that keeps recurring as I read through Beloved is the relevance of memory and dealing with the past.  One quote I will remember is from Amy Denver when she says; “More hurt the better it is. Can’t nothing heal without pain, you know”(92). This concept of forgiveness occurring through pain can be a very hard concept to understand in the extremity of different situations. Throughout my AP Psychology class I heard of case studies varying from the forgiveness of perpetrators in war, to the relationship between others who have inflicted serious injury on an innocent bystander.  The first step is awareness. For Sethe this is when she talks about rememory. She explained this in contrast to some memories which go and pass on, while others stay. (43). I saw this as a memory that is reinterpreted into something in the real world that triggers certain thoughts and emotions bringing forth a certain remembrance or connection, that brings them once again into a place that they tried to forget. That even though they tried to forget what has happened some things can't be forgotten completely. This is very apparent in Beloved because all of her life she has been trying to forget what has happened to her due to slavery. As a slave Sethe forced herself to not avoid pain but to get “through it as quickly as possible” (46). She will only be able to move on if she deals with the pain, and over time, finds solace.

Furthermore, whilst facing her memories she has to face all of what she has lost. A big portion of this is time. As Sethe describes the crawling already? baby girl the question mark illuminates the surprise as time has passed so quickly. This amplifies the stress of dealing with the past because she has already lost so much, and by noticing all of the small things she has missed the grief gets stronger. Personally, I believe this is the only way to get over things. If you keep repressing what is going on in your life you aren't being true to yourself. When things get difficult I try to remember that I can be a stronger more experienced person once I have overcome a boundary. It shows great maturity and understanding to forgive. I think Sethe will be able to face her past and eventually let go. She will only be able to do so if she comes to terms for what she did to her baby.

The Love of a Mother - Critical Lens #2 by Gennesis Ayala

Slavery and Motherhood in Toni Morrison's Beloved is an article written by Terry Paul Caesar. In the article, Caesar compares a slave and a mother. According to Caesar, Sethe is like a slave to Beloved. The writer also compares Beloved to another novel by the name Uncle Tom’s Cabin. To compare the two books, Caesar brings up that fact that in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a character by the name Cassy, kills her youngest child to “spare him from slavery.” In Beloved, Sethe killed Beloved, her eldest daughter, in order to spare her from slavery. Caesar continues to compare the two novels by saying that in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Cassy was “enslaved by little Eliza… Similarly, so is Sethe by Beloved.” By using the connections in both Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Beloved, Caesar is proving his point, that mothers can be seen as slaves to their daughters.

Due to the connections he made between both novels, I agree with Caesar. I too believe that mothers can be slaves to their daughters, even without any of them realizing. The relationship between a mother and daughter is one of the strongest relationships of all. Being women, mothers and daughters understand each other and help each other, but in Beloved, I don’t see the mother and daughter relationship in this way. In Beloved, we can see where Caesar sees Beloved enslaving her mother. An example of Beloved enslaving Sethe is when Sethe is becoming very thin while Beloved is becoming thick, this is because Sethe is giving Beloved her food portion. Sethe is barely eating so that her daughter can have more food than she actually needs. Sethe wants to be a good mother but instead is seen as a slave to her daughter. Sethe does what she does because she feels guilty of killing Beloved when she was only a small child. The love of a mother can sometimes go too far that a mother ends up doing things for their child that don’t have to be done and in this case, guilt is blinding Sethe from seeing the reality of her relationship with Beloved.

Trauma & Stress - Critical Lens by Gennesis Ayala

           Figurations of Rape and the Supernatural in Beloved is an article written by Pamela E. Barnett. In the article. Barnett writes about how she believes that Beloved is filled with rape and a ghostly presence. Barnett also believes that house 124 is haunted by memories, not a ghost. Barnett brings up the reason why she believes some of the characters in Beloved are traumatized. The reason she brings up is rape. She believes that rape “robs victims of vitality, both physical and psychological.” She believes that Sethe is the most traumatized character because she has the most disturbing past memories about sexual assault. The author also tells us that rape is something that anybody is capable of doing, not just a man but also a woman. We are all on the same level of being raped or committing rape.

           I agree with Barnett in her article about the reason why she thinks the characters, especially Sethe are traumatized. Sethe was sexually assaulted many times in the past and her memories are constantly being triggered by the smallest things. Because she is a woman and a mother, I believe that Sethe went through a lot more than other characters in the book as well. Being a woman and a salve, Sethe was not able to speak up for herself and defend herself. When sexual assault came her way, she had no choice but to let it happen. Being a woman and a slave during that difficult era is what I also believe believe put Sethe into so much trauma and stress. When she became a mother, Sethe wanted the best for her children and put them before herself. She didn’t want her children to experience what she did and even took the life of one of her daughters proving to the reader that she believes that death is better than being a slave and woman in that era. Due to so much sexual assault in her life Sethe became a person with a lot of trauma which caused her to make many actions that other people wouldn’t do. Although the writer brings up that anyone is capable of rape, I believe that is true, but I also believe that men are especially capable of raping woman, especially during the slave era.