Second Hand Trauma In Beloved

Besides the issues that the family as a whole face at 124, Sethe has her own struggles from early on in her life. Michele A.L Barzey touches on one of these struggles Sethe faces with motherhood in her article on “Thick Love: Motherhood in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Julian of Norwich’s Revelations of Divine Love”. Sethe never knew her mother and she was the only surviving child her mother, Ma’am had since she was raped so many times by white men. However, Sethe also had two other mother figures bringing her up into

Sethe says she believes she won't even have to explain her motives for killing her (a love so great she can't let her be taken into a life of slavery). "I don't have to remember nothing," Sethe tells herself on page 183. "I don't even have to explain. She understands it all." Sethe believes the one true way she will find restitution and understanding with Beloved, is by knowing the mark she has left on her daughter. "I only need to know one thing. How bad is the scar?" Sethe feels that by knowing the scar, by touching the "memory of a smile under her chin," she can feel her daughter's pain and connect with her.

Sethe divulged to Paul D the catastrophic events that caused her to run away from Sweet Home, and then she surrendered her sons and daughter to a woman in a wagon because she was worried about the family’s future under the Schoolteacher’s reign. Her description of the assault was straight forward. She told Paul D and very succinctly the roughness and cruelty of those white people especially the two white boys who beat her while she was pregnant with Denver injuring her so badly that her back skin had been dead for years. She refers to the situation as

In this chapter, we learn that Sethe was already pregnant with Denver when she ran away from Sweet Home. By the time when Sethe collapsed her feet in the woods, a white girl Amy Denver had found Sethe. Due to Sethe’s fear about Sweet Home, she told Amy Denver a false name- “Lu”, because if she were caught, she would be returned to Sweet Home, and she would continue experiencing her previous painful daily life again. Amy Denver helps Sethe by massaged her feet and release her pain. Later, Sethe gave birth to her baby successfully with Amy’s help and Sethe also naming the child after Amy Denver.

So often, the old adage, "History always repeats itself," rings true due to a failure to truly confront the past, especially when the memory of a period of time sparks profoundly negative emotions ranging from anguish to anger. However, danger lies in failing to recognize history or in the inability to reconcile the mistakes of the past. In her novel, Beloved, Toni Morrison explores the relationship between the past, present and future. Because the horrors of slavery cause so much pain for slaves who endured physical abuse as well as psychological and emotional hardships, former slaves may try to block out the pain, failing to reconcile with their past. However, when Sethe, one of the novel's central characters fails to confront

Beloved, by Toni Morrison, is a novel which tells the story of a family of former slaves dealing with the historical and intergenerational traumas in their household. In Beloved, Sethe, the main character, murders her child in order to keep her from slavery; now her dead child, Beloved, haunts the house and psychologically influences her and the other members of the household. Sethe killed her child in efforts to keep her children free from

Sethe lives in the shadow of her act of infanticide throughout the entire length of the book. This is because its legacy pervades itself throughout the entire novel, showing events leading up, and ways the future has been affected. The novel begins as such: “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom. (Page 1)” This baby refers to Beloved, who became a ghostly presence in Sethe’s house and continuously terrorizes the house

“Just as we can live as we wish, we ought to be able to die as we wish, too.” (Mill) and for Beloved she did not wish to die as she did. Sethe had no right to take a life of an innocent baby by slicing her throat. How can a mother even think about murdering her own flesh and blood? But then again what do I know about being a slave and a mother?

Beloved is a novel by Toni Morrison based on slavery after the Civil War in the year 1873, and the hardships that come with being a slave. This story involves a runaway captive named Sethe, who commits a heinous crime to protect her child from the horrors of slavery. Through her traumas, Sethe runs from the past and tries to live a normal life. The theme of Toni Morrison’s story Beloved is how people cannot escape the past. Every character relates their hard comings to the past through setting, character development, and conflict.

Sethe is finally free from the burden of her past and because of Beloved’s acceptance she can reclaim her motherhood. Once Beloved reappears in Sethe’s life, Sethe yearns for forgiveness for the actions which she has been scrutinized for her whole maternal life. Sethe constantly has to justify herself in the eyes of the public and through Beloved’s reappearance in her life, Sethe gains the strength to defend her actions: “It ain’t my job to know what’s worse. It’s my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that” (195).

After all that happened with her involving her baby Beloved, Like Caruth’s expresses, Sethe couldn’t get past her trauma because she didn’t have access to it. No one spoke to Sethe about what she did and that resulted in her never coming to terms with what she did which could’ve abled her to move on and put it behind her. That is, until Paul D arrives which results in Sethe regaining all the memories of the past and what she did to Beloved. As her love for him grows, so does the love and memory of her daughter. From Caruth’s theory, Paul D’s presence bringing back such memories shows exactly the lack of consciousness that Sethe had with that memory.

Later in Seth’s life, a fully grown woman named Beloved showed up at 124 which is Seth’s home. Sethe believed that Beloved was her daughter that come back from the afterlife. Sethe felt like she could tell Beloved, what happened and all would be well in Beloved’s heart. In the novel Sethe said, “ When I explain it she’ll understand”(Morrison 210). If Sethe had made the decision not to kill her baby, she would not have to worry about explaining her actions.

Raped by Schoolteacher’s students, she also bears the traumatizing experience of her violated relationship between herself and her daughter as they "stole [her] milk" (17). After this damaging event, Sethe resolves to prevent her children from ever having to go through the same horrors; this becomes her motivation for killing her infant daughter. She couldn't "let her or any of them live under schoolteacher. That was out" (163). Familial bonds became the most precious thing to Sethe, and she strives to thwart anything that threatens it.

Sethe overly loved her children because they were one of the few things that were free in her life. Her love was also a conduit to pay off the guilt that she felt from killing Beloved and attempting to kill the rest of her young. She harbors the most guilt from Beloved’s death, so once she reappears Sethe directs most of herself to that daughter. The feelings of remorse make her dependent on Beloved, corrupting the previously strong woman essentially a slave waiting on all of Beloved’s whims. Sethe is unable to leave the relationship because of the guilt, but she cannot come clean of it until she comes to terms with herself, leaving her in an unending cycle of emotional deterioration until the women of the community drive Beloved, the source of her issues,

 Sethe learned the value of motherhood from an early age.  Not wanting the children of the white men that raped her, Sethe?s mother, Ma?am (as she is called in the book), threw all the unwanted children away.  But, Sethe?s father was a black man whom Ma?am loved, and so she kept Sethe.  Recalling the story, Sethe thinks back on what Nan (the woman who knew Sethe?s mother and raised Sethe, herself) said, ?She threw them all away but you.  The one from the crew she threw away on the island.  The others from more whites she also threw away.  Without names, she threw them.  You she gave the name of the black man? (Morrison, 62).  Thus having an identity because of her mother, ?Sethe learns Ma?am?s history and grounds her personality in motherly-love? (Kubitcheck 123).  Kubitcheck also says, ?mother-love offers the strongest defense against slavery.  When Nan tells Sethe that her Ma?am chose to conceive and bear her, Sethe acquires the base on which to build feelings of self-worth? (135).  She could also identify with her mother by the mark branded below Ma?am?s