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Essay about The Association of Maternal Bonds and Identity in "Beloved"

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Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, is a “haunting stray of a mother’s love that frames a series of irrelated love stories by multiple narrators” (Bell 61). The main character Sethe is a mother who fails to realize her children’s needs. She attempts to protect her children from the community amongst many other dangers such as slavery and love, however ultimately isolating them. Sethe’s character as well as actions confirms the “struggle and psychological trauma of slavery” (Napierkowski 35) from which she suffers. Shapes of almonds and depth “like two wells,”(9) Sethe’s eyes are “some sign to warn folks of what that emptiness held” (9). Sethe has yet to confront the absence of her mother, which reflects the idea that “one of the cruelest …show more content…

Once escaping Sweet Home, Sethe births her daughter Denver on a river bank, goes to jail, and more. She finally arrives in Ohio at 124 Bluestone, a home that is later haunted by her deceased daughter. Still devoting all of her efforts to her children, Sethe attempts to save them from the physical, emotional, and spiritual trauma slavery causes by attempting to murder them. All of Sethe’s motives are out of love, however, “for a used-to-be slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous” (45). Her love indirectly pushes her children into the world versus saving them from it. Her sons Buglar and Howard abandon the haunted house in hopes of escaping their past and the ghost. Because Sethe focuses on the past so much, it ruins her, and she doesn’t know who she really is. The return and presence of Beloved “forces Sethe to confront her past and thus reconcile her vision of herself” (Perkins 43). Critics and also Sethe describe Beloved as the “reincarnation” (Perkins 43) of her dead daughter. Symbolically Beloved is the epitome of pain and struggle from Sethe’s past. Ironically the ghost’s name is Beloved the same word engraved on the Sethe’s baby’s tombstone. Beloved is also the age Sethe’s daughter would be if she was alive (Napierkowski). Beloved is clueless as to why she is here or from where she came, however, she manages to ask Sethe questions that originate from her past like,

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