Beloved 793demands eventually overwhelm Sethe, who increas-
ingly sacrifices herself to the girl’s bottomless hun-
gers. The novel’s hopeful ending finds Denver,
Sethe’s shy daughter, leaving the home to ask her
larger community for help. This healthful turn
toward communal healing is powerful and effective;
when people arrive at the home to exorcise Beloved,
she disappears. Denver, we learn in the final pages
of the work, will thrive and blossom into adulthood.
Noreen O’Connor
childhood in Beloved
As many readers know, Sethe, the protagonist of
Beloved, is based on Margaret Garner, who in 1856
murdered one of her children and tried to kill the
others to keep them from being taken into slavery.
The fact that in the true story and in the novel it is
mothers who commit these murders is significant;
because maternity is idealized in American culture,
we are especially appalled to learn that a mother
could kill her children. However, this is precisely
Morrison’s point: Slavery is so heinous that it can
drive a mother to sacrifice her own children to
escape it. As Morrison explains in her foreword to
Beloved,
thoughts led me to the different history of
black women in this country—a history in
which marriage was discouraged, impossible,
or illegal; in which birthing children was
required, but “having” them, being respon-
sible for them—being, in other words, their
parent—was as out of the question as free-
dom. Assertions of parenthood under con-
ditions peculiar to the logic of institutional
enslavement were criminal.When Beloved opens, the reader is thrown
into the center of Sethe’s guilt. We don’t know yet
what her crime is, but we do know that Sethe, her
daughter Denver, and her two sons, Howard and
Buglar, are paying for it. Morrison purposefully
delays the revelation of Sethe’s murder of her baby
girl, revealing only bits of Sethe’s memory of the
event and interweaving them with other memories
of Sethe’s own horrific sufferings as a slave, in order
to secure the readers’ sympathy for Sethe. Once
we hear Sethe’s story, we cannot dismiss her as an
unfeeling monster (“You got two feet, Sethe, not
four,” Paul D. tells her), as we may otherwise be
inclined to do.
In fact, prior to the murder of “crawling-already?”
baby, Sethe is foremost a mother. Consistently,
the injustices that she laments the most are those
intended to deny her the right to mother her chil-
dren. For example, when Schoolteacher’s nephews
assault Sethe in the barn, she does not dwell on her
own degradation but rather on the fact that they
have taken her milk for “crawling-already?” baby.
Similarly, when delivering Denver, Sethe is willing
to die to escape her excruciating pain and exhaus-
tion, except to do so would jeopardize the life of her
child. The significance of this extraordinary act of
love and selflessness is reflected in Denver’s return to
it again and again, a memory that reassures Denver
of her mother’s love for her.
Unfortunately, Sethe’s love for her children is
no match against the immorality of slavery. Indeed,
one of the more insidious truths of slavery revealed
in Beloved is that love is not only useless in a slave’s
world, it is also dangerous, a particularly perverse
irony. As Paul D. notes, “For a used-to-be-slave
woman to love anything that much was dangerous,
especially if it was her children she had settled on
to love” (54). Although at this point Paul D. does
not know of Sethe’s murder, his words explain well
how the impotence of love and the rage that Sethe
feels in light of that fact drive her to make her tragic
decision.
Not only does Sethe take her child’s life, the
maternal love that once sustained Sethe now
becomes grotesque. This is shown in Sethe’s deci-
sion to remain at the house referred to only as 124
in order not to abandon “crawling-already? ” baby’s
ghost (the missing “3” in the address). However,
Sethe’s choice exposes her other three children to
constant fear and isolation. Ultimately Sethe’s guilt
is so great that she allows Beloved (and thus her
guilt) nearly to consume her. Sethe, the mother,
has lost her center; being a mother and loving her
children has not been enough. That is the insidious
power of slavery.
In the end, Sethe does survive, as does Paul D.,
but it is Denver, the baby whose miraculous birth