Toni Morrison’s Beloved explores the depressing lives that slaves had to go through in American society, and the trauma they face afterwards. The most infamous scene of the book is when Sethe decides to kill her daughter, Beloved, in an attempt to save her from slavery. This is where the question of whether or not killing can be an act of love comes from: Obviously, we usually associate killing with hatred or anger but can it be considered an act of love in the right situation? In this case, Sethe kills Beloved so that she wouldn’t have to experience the suffering and trauma of slavery. While reading through this scene, I drew some parallels to John Steinback’s popular book Of Mice and Men. In that book, one of the main characters is mentally disabled and gets into some trouble that results in people trying to lynch him. The other main character, who is the disabled man’s friend, decides to shoot him in order to save him from a cruel fate. In both books, killing is done as an act of love. While obviously sad, the killing is being done so that a loved one would not have to go through a worse fate. The killing is being done to prevent further suffering. However, is love enough to justify this type of violence? Is it more loving to save somebody from pain if that means ending their life?
I think this also shows how truly oppressive slavery was. We’ve all read books about slavery in the past and we can all easily agree that it was a horrible, nauseating practice that caused suffering for millions of people. Beloved, however, portrays slavery in a way that I’ve personally never experienced before. The very act of killing your child so that they wouldn’t experience slavery already shows just how bad actually living through slavery was, to the point that it drives a mother to take her child’s life so that her child would be spared from the subjugation that she herself went through. This killing then becomes an act of resistance, as Sethe uses the power that she has in order to defy the fugitive act and the broader institution of slavery in general. Morrison explores the psychological toll that slavery took on those who experienced it in a unique way that showcases just how awful slavery really was.
