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.
I personally think that in Sethe's case infanticide was an act of love. She clearly loved Beloved before that event as instead of giving up and dying in the forest she chose to keep going, so Beloved would have milk to drink. Based on her conversations with Paul it seems like she truly believed death was a better fate than life under School Teacher. Although, an objectively horrifying situation, I think it would be difficult to argue that Sethe did not love Beloved.
ReplyDeleteI agree that Sethe's actions were those of love. But unlike the other example from Of Mice and Men, it is not murder to prevent a crueler death. Its murder to prevent a crueler life.
ReplyDeleteThe novel also raises questions around whether an "act of love" is inherently a good thing: as Paul D articulates memorably, Sethe's love might be seen as "too thick," or too strong and too uncompromising. But Sethe's rebuttal--"think love ain't no love at all"--is also hard to refute. We see a paradoxical situation where the institution of slavery, with its relentless efforts to undermine the family structure, has actually shaped Sethe into this heroic kind of uber-mother-figure whose maternal love is a terrifying and devastating force. She believes that she's in a position to know and understand exactly what is at stake if "schoolteacher gets" her children, and (like mothers do all the time, making decisions about vaccines or health care for children too young to understand) she has to go ahead and make the decision "for" Beloved. One way to read the extended "haunting" with Beloved's reappearance is that she is forcing Sethe to explore the unanswerable question, "If she COULD, would the baby have endorsed Sethe's choice?" And of course Beloved the ghost never answers this question directly.
ReplyDelete*thin love
ReplyDeleteGreat question to bring up. In zombie movies, we often see friends having to kill (near-zombified) friends as a way of ending the cruel fate they bring. Infanticide, in Sethe's eyes, was a way of severing the potential traumatic fate of Beloved in Sweet Home. Society has already answered the question, that in some scenarios, loving is killing.
ReplyDeleteIt's so difficult to justify or condemn Sethe's actions from a moral standpoint. As we've mentioned many times in class, it's impossible to even remotely relate to Sethe's situation. Even so, I think that Sethe's actions are quite clearly done out of love, as twisted as that may sound. She's so traumatized beyond all rational reasoning that she's made to resort to such extreme means, and that's what makes her actions so heartbreaking in the end. Nice post.
ReplyDeletePersonally, I have no doubt that Sethe killed Beloved out of love. I think the real question is whether or not Sethe's act of love was the morally right course of action. Sometimes, even in less extreme scenarios, actions can be taken with all the right intentions but still have all the wrong outcomes. In the case of Sethe and Beloved, it is truly impossible to pass definitive judgement on such a convoluted situation.
ReplyDeleteI feel like the question in this specific circumstance can't even be whether or not Sethe killed Beloved out of love or not, but more whether or not the love-driven nature of the action justifies it. There is no question that–no matter how twisted it sounds–Sethe killed Beloved out of love, but as Paul D says, Sethe's love might be "too thick." I think the problem becomes that Sethe's love for Beloved is so strong that it harms her, which is a whole other issue. This was a really interesting blog post!
ReplyDeleteLike many people commenting I too believe it was an act of love. I like how your blog raises the about whether love can justify violence and explores how Sethe’s act becomes both an expression of love and an act of resistance against slavery.
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