Selfish Desire For Sethe In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Sethe’s Selfish Desire For Death

Beloved by Toni Morrison narrates the story of a dysfunctional family, haunted by the ghost and reincarnation of Beloved. Throughout the novel, Sethe, Denver, and Paul D reveal to the reader suppressed memories of their struggles and the effects from the suppression and resurgence of the past. One major event described in the novel is when Sethe murders Beloved in the shed in order to prevent her children from becoming slaves under the Schoolteacher. According to Sigmund Freud's theory, the reasoning behind the Sethe’s actions are the death drive and repetition compulsion. Sethe has this sense of death in order to deal with the traumatic event from when she was a child, spared by her mother during the

Middle Passage. In order for her to feel relief, she has this drive towards death. Repeating the traumatic event with her baby, Beloved, allows her to act out the death drive and feel as though she is liberated and not haunted by the past. However, although it may seem that Sethe’s action is a form of motherly love, this is simply an act of selfishness.

In middle of the novel, Morrison reveals the reason for Sethe’s death drive.

She informs the readers that Sethe wishes she could have died with her other siblings because the current life she is living is only filled with anguish and agony. Sethe remembers the story of Nan and her mother during the Middle Passage. According to Nan, Sethe’s mother “threw them all away but you,” (74). Sethe’s siblings are all thrown overboard, murdered. All except Sethe. Nan assures Sethe that she is special to her mother because “[she] put her arms around him. The others she did not,” (74). Her mother loves her father and because of that, Sethe is the only child her mother truly loves. Although this story is to make Sethe grateful for life, she only feels “unimpressed” and “angry,” (74). Sethe is the unlucky child from her mother. All her life, she has been enslaved and nothing good has come out from living. She has only experienced traumatic events, mainly from her time as a slave in Sweet Homes. One of the most disturbing memories Sethe has is when Schoolteacher categorizes the slaves’ characteristics. She happens to be passing by the building and hears that the men are putting “her human characteristics on the left; her animal ones on the right,” (228). Sethe is perturbed as to how her animalistic features are sorted out from her human characteristics. She is not seen to be a human being, but an animal. With her life as a slave, Sethe sees that there is not positive outcome from living. She only experiences pain for Halle goes insane, Sixo is burned alive, Paul A is hanged, Paul D is forced to wear a bit in his mouth, and Sethe is almost whipped to death. Her only wishes are that all these events had never happened and blames her mother for not having thrown her into the sea and causing all these memories. According to Freud, everybody has a death drive within themselves. Currently, Sethe’s death drive is causing her to have this desire of death.

Inherently, humans want to go back to the original state they are in before they are born. For Sethe, the “subject pursues its own death,” (Smith). Perhaps, if Sethe lived a better life, she would not have this strong desire.

During the journey of the Middle Passage, Sethe is only a baby. Yet, even though she is not able to comprehend the events going on, she still experiences the deaths of her siblings. Because of Sethe’s traumatic experience, Freud’s theory explains why she murders her child, Beloved. According to Freud, Sethe has this want of repeating events of trauma. With this desire, the reader is exposed to Freud’s concept of repetition compulsion. In the novel, Morrison makes Sethe seem as though she is jealous of her dead sisters and brothers. This trauma is what causes her to murder her baby. Although it was her motherly love that wanted to prevent her baby from experiencing the same experiences she has gone through, the reasoning behind the motherly love was the compulsion to repeat the trauma over so that she may be allowed to receive release. Sethe wants to believe that she is doing the moral action for Beloved. Yet, from the reactions of the community and Paul D, the reader can see that Morrison is portraying Sethe as the mother with love that is “[too] thick,” (194). After Paul D discovers why Sethe is sent to jail, he is horrified to discover the woman of his life so easily acts inhumanely. He tries to remind Sethe and himself that she has “got two feet,” “not four,” (194). However, his words are not enough to assure him that those desires are almost animalistic and in a sense, selfish. Humans are animals that are able to repress certain desires like the death drive and repetition compulsion. Sethe, on the other hand, succumbs to these urges and this is what causes her solitude from the community and close friends. However, not all blame is against Sethe because she never asks for a slave life. With her violent past, Sethe finds that the only “other way” to be liberated from the trauma is to succumb to the repetition compulsion and repeat the past (194).

As the reader can see, the death drive and repetition compulsion are closely related in this slave narrative. Although not all trauma are related to death, in the case for Sethe, her numerous cases of trauma causes her to have this death drive. And the only way to relieve this drive is by repeating the trauma of when she was a baby. During the Middle Passage, Sethe is on her way to working as a slave. For Beloved, her case is very similar for the Schoolteacher is going to take her in as his slave. Sethe comprehends that her child will live a very similar life as herself, so she thinks that she is killing her daughter is for the best. Yet, she does not realize that she is only living vicariously through Beloved. The death drive takes over and ends the Beloved. At the same, repetition compulsion urges her on to murder her daughter so that she can get over the fact that Sethe’s mother did not kill her as a baby. Once Sethe commits the act, she feels much better about her past, yet she doesn’t understand that these “motive forces” took over her mind because she has repressed these traumatic experiences for a very long period of time (Bercovitch)..

Freud believes that these two concepts are one of the ways in which humans are able to accept the past. Reliving the trauma allows Sethe to gain relief. In this case, the death drive for the sake of her daughter and the repetition compulsion for herself, to be free from her past trauma. Because of Sethe’s intentions, her motherly love was not justified. Sethe is allowed to be relieved from the past, yet the murder of her child was more for personal reasons, rather than for the sake of the child.