As an enslaved newborn, Sethe was never fully nourished with milk which causes a break in the maternal bond between Sethe and her mother. When Sethe delivers her own children, she tries to provide a maternal bond with her own children in a way that her mother could not. Once Sethe’s children no longer need her breast milk, Sethe starts to tire of the responsibility that her breasts carried throughout the years. In her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison’s motif of milk develops the theme of Sethe’s broken maternal bonds that causes Sethe emotional and psychological trauma. In this novel, the motif of milk serves to emphasize the Sethe's deep psychological need to protect and nourish her children. Nursing a child for Sethe is the essential tool …show more content…
Sethe depicts the true horror of having her milk stolen as the worst event that has happened to her because of slavery, including being whipped: “They used cowhide on you? And they took my milk. They beat you and you were pregnant? And they took my milk!” (PG ####). By forcefully milking Sethe, the schoolteacher’s nephews dehumanizes Sethe by treating her as animal, like a cow being milked. Being treated as an animal by the events of slavery, like being milked, scars Sethe into succumbing to the stereotype of being an animal. Sethe even murders her daughter so that at least her children “ain’t at Sweet Home . Schoolteacher ain’t got ‘em” (194) and to protect them from the horrors of slavery she herself has endured. Sethe also feels the theft of her milk was worse than any physical pain of her being whipped or the pain from escaping Sweet Home. They stole her milk with their mossy teeth: They stole the only possession of hers that allowed her to provide for her children. As Michelle Mock denotes, their violation objectifies Sethe as commodifiable property because the milk is valued as it produces a life-sustaining product. However, Sethe feels a deep sense of betrayal from her own body for when the mossy teeth men try to nurse Sethe her swollen breasts comply to the forced action even though Sethe’s mind does not want to give her milk to the white men. …show more content…
Sethe murders her unnamed daughter to protect her from “undreamable dreams" in which "whites invaded her daughter's private parts, soiled her daughter's thighs and threw her daughter out of the wagon" (251), which exemplifies how thick her love is for her children and to what extent Sethe will go to protect them. When Beloved later reincarnates to be known reincarnates herself into the body of a young black woman named Beloved, which is the name Sethe engraved on her daughter’s tombstone. Once Beloved moves in, Beloved forces Sethe to confront her memories by embodying Sethe’s guilt and repressed memory of slavery. By resurfacing Sethe’s painful memories about Sweet Home, Sethe undergoes unwanted traumu of reliving Sweet Home through her memories. To cope with memories from the past, Sethe goes to the Clearing to seek comfort through late Baby Suggs, the closest mother-figure Sethe had. As Sethe feels the comfort of Baby Suggs hands massaging her neck, the motions become violent and began to strangle Sethe. Beloved reacts by kissing the bruises on Sethe’s neck and Sethe notes that her breath smelled of milk when Beloved tries to nurse onto Sethe like a child. Denver and Sethe soon realize that not only Beloved had strangled Sethe, but Sethe realizes Beloved is her daughter. When Denver accuses Beloved of strangling Sethe, she learns the capacity of love needed
In Beloved, this incident is the moment that Sethe slits Beloved’s throat when Schoolteacher arrives to take her, and her children, back to Sweet Home. This event triggers most of the novel’s plot, making it both illuminating and inciting. However, there are three important aspects that surround this event. First,
During the short space of time (which is 28 days) Sethe embraces the dominant values of idealised maternity. Sethe’s fantasy is intended to end upon recover, however, it doesn’t, on that ground she declines to give her family a chance to be taken from her. Rather she endeavours to murder each of her four kids, prevailing the young girl whom she named Beloved. Sethe’s passion opposes the slave proprietor’s- and the western plot line's endeavours at allocations, for better or in negative ways.
As the plot progresses, Sethe is confronted with elements of her haunting past: traumatic experiences from her life as a slave, her daunting escape, and the measures she took to keep her family safe from her hellish owner plague Sethe into the present and force her to come to terms with the past. A definitive theme observed in the novel is slavery’s dehumanization of both master and servant. Slave owners beat their slaves regularly to subjugate them and instill the idea that they were only livestock. After losing most of the Sweet Home men, the Schoolteacher sets his sights on Sethe and her children in order to make Sweet Home “worth the trouble it was causing him” (Morrison 227).
Each of these flashbacks become background stories to why and how Sethe loses her mind. Each flashback represents a time in Sethe’s life where she went through a major change that affected her whole family. The flashback that sticks out the most is when Sethe and Paul D were back on the plantation in Sweet Home after their failed attempt to runaway up north. A this point in the film when the men are attacking Sethe and taking her milk, this can be considered her lowest point in the movie because all control she had on being able to nourish her children was taken away from her and she had no one to help her in her desperate time of
As much as society does not want to admit, violence serves as a form of entertainment. In media today, violence typically has no meaning. Literature, movies, and music, saturated with violence, enter the homes of millions everyday. On the other hand, in Beloved, a novel by Toni Morrison, violence contributes greatly to the overall work. The story takes place during the age of the enslavement of African-Americans for rural labor in plantations. Sethe, the proud and noble protagonist, has suffered a great deal at the hand of schoolteacher. The unfortunate and seemingly inevitable events that occur in her life, fraught with violence and heartache, tug at the reader’s heart-strings. The wrongdoings Sethe endures are significant to the meaning of the novel.
...from slavery as well as the misery slavery itself causes her. Ultimately, Sethe makes a choice to let go of the past as she releases Beloved's hand and thus moves on to the future. In the very last segment of the novel, the narrator notes that finally "they forgot [Beloved]. Like an unpleasant dream during a troubling sleep" (290). Sethe no longer represses history but actually lets it go. As a result, Beloved becomes nothing more than "an unpleasant dream," suggesting that she does not exist as a real person, but rather has no substance as a mere fantasy or hallucination which has no value to the community or to Sethe, Denver, or Paul D. Sethe moves on with her life as she has already faced the past, tried to make amends for her mistakes, and finally realizes her own value in life.
From the beginning, Beloved focuses on the import of memory and history. Sethe struggles daily with the haunting legacy of slavery, in the form of her threatening memories and also in the form of her daughter’s aggressive ghost. For Sethe, the present is mostly a struggle to beat back the past, because the memories of her daughter’s death and the experiences at Sweet Home are too painful for her to recall consciously. But Sethe’s repression is problematic, because the absence of history and memory inhibits the construction of a stable identity. Even Sethe’s hard-won freedom is threatened by her inability to confront her prior life. Paul D’s arrival gives Sethe the opportunity and the impetus to finally come to terms with her painful life history.
In her novel Beloved, Toni Morrison explores the paradoxical nature of love both as a dangerous presence that promises suffering and a life-giving force that gives the strength to proceed; through the experiences of the run-away slave Sethe. The dangerous aspect of love is revealed through the comments of Paul D and Ella regarding the motherly love of Sethe towards her children. Sethe's deep attachment to her children is deemed dangerous due to their social environment which evidently promises that the loved one of a slave will be hurt. On the other hand, love is portrayed as a sustaining force that allows Sethe to move on with her life. All the devastating experiences Sethe endures do not matter due to the fact that she must live for her children. Although dangerous, Sethe's love finally emerges as the prevalent force that allows her to leave the past behind and move on with her life.
Milk is what makes up the mother-child cycle of unity, although, in Beloved, Sethe is unable to be apart of such unity due to her being a slave. Slavery corrupts her ability to own such things as a child, her freedom, and even her milk. Milk represents one’s ability to provide for their child, which assists with the idea that milk is what harbors the bond between a mother and her child. Milk in Beloved is portrayed as far more than just a resource for the baby, but is a symbol of love and communion. The importance of milk to its retainer is shown when Sethe reflects on the sense of violation and horror that she endured when her milk was taken from her by the school teacher’s nephews (Morrison 83).
Mock, Michelle. “Spitting out the Seed: Ownership if Mother, Child, Breasts, Milk, and Voice in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” College Literature, Vol. 23, No.3 (Oct, 1996): 117-126. JSTOR. Web. 27. Oct. 2015.
Morrison characterizes the first trimester of Beloved as a time of unrest in order to create an unpleasant tone associated with any memories being stirred. Sethe struggles daily to block out her past. The first thing that she does when she gets to work is to knead bread: "Working dough. Working, working dough. Nothing better than that to the day's serious work of beating back the past" (Morrison 73). The internal and external scars which slavery has left on Sethe's soul are irreparable. Each time she relives a memory, she ...
Throughout Beloved Sethes duplistic character is displayed in the nature of her actions. Shortly after her re-union with Paul D, she describes her reaction to schoolteachers arrival as 'Oh no, I wasn't going back there. I went to jail instead' (P42) These words could be seen that Sethe was. portraying a moral stand by refusing to allow herself and her children to be dragged back into the evil world of slavery....
In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the bonds between individuals, whether in a church, community, or town, greatly affect the people who thrive within them. Milk is used to symbolize familial bonds and is used throughout the novel to demonstrate slavery’s negative effects on these bonds. Sethe’s family unit uses the corruption of milk to describe how slavery damages these bonds; meanwhile, the more stereotypical slave stories use the absence of milk to show the prior destruction of the relationships. The corruption of milk appears at pivotal points in Sethe's family unit to highlight slavery’s destruction of a loving bond.
The tables have turned for the slaveholders, in anticipation of successfully returning the fugitives to their burdensome slavery life, leaving them empty-handed with nothing but shock and despair. Sethe had lost her mind, her two boys were traumatized, her daughter had her neck slit open, and her last living daughter, an infant, with no value in keeping, as to no one would take care of her. It was explicitly clear to the slaveholders, there was nothing to claim in this petrifying scene. Based on these two horrifying backgrounds of Margaret Garner and Sethe, you could already comprehend how Margaret Garner was the base for the novel Beloved.
The relationships Sethe had with her children is crazy at first glance, and still then some after. Sethe being a slave did not want to see her children who she loved go through what she herself had to do. Sethe did not want her children to have their “animal characteristics,” put up on the bored for ...