Sethe

Sethe in a Contemporary Context

In the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison, Sethe had brutally murdered her daughter named Beloved and attempted to kill her other three children in a shed as slave catchers, or the four horsemen as the other characters of the novel refer to them, were about to capture her and her children. The justifications for the killing of one’s children by the mothers Mary Stastch, Andrea Yates, Amber Pasztor, Mamareen, and Megan Huntsman lead to the justification of Sethe’s action of killing her daughter, Beloved. According to Sethe, had she not killed Beloved, “[Beloved] would have died and that is something [Sethe] could not bear to happen to her” (236). Sethe really believed that killing her baby herself was a better option for her child than to have her child be taken by slavery, or “die” both physically through abuse and in spirit with the hopelessness of the slave life. In the quote, Sethe implies that slavery is the equivalent of “dying,” and she states that her baby “would have died” had the slave hunters in the shed taken her. In Sethe’s situation in the shed, the only options she had were to give her children to slavery or to kill her children. Because, in Sethe’s mind, she thought that slavery was worse than death by her own hands, she had decided to kill her daughter instead of letting her daughter enter slavery.

Just like the situations of Mary Statsch and Mamareen, Sethe believed she was completely out of options and was in a state of hopelessness that justified her actions to kill her daughter. Mary Statsch and Mamareen were mothers that both believed that if they had not killed or let go of their child, the fate of the child would be worse than death by their mothers. Sethe had the same kind of mindset as these two more modern mothers, and so her murder of her daughter seems to be justified as the actions of Mary and Mamareen also seem to be justified with good reason. Through Sethe’s justification for killing her baby, Toni Morrison argues to the reader that if there exists a high enough level of hopelessness for the mother to properly take care of her children, there may be justification in the mother letting go of their children so that their children may have better fates or futures.

In the cases of Amber Pasztor and Megan Huntsman, substance abuse and mental illness played a large role in promoting the actions that led these women to murder their children. While Sethe was not abusing substances, it is noted in the novel that the abuse she experienced at Sweet Home caused her to go insane and lose track of reality, or as Schoolteacher said, “But now she’d gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run” (Morrison 176). Because of her physical and emotional abuse, Sethe had impaired judgement that caused her to act in a way that no contemporary mother would. Like Pasztor and Huntsman, it can be argued that Sethe was suffering from a mental illness that caused her to kill her children.

Sethe very closely relates to Andrea Yates, the mother who murdered her children to ensure eternal salvation. Yates also suffered from a series of mental illnesses but was truly convinced that she was doing what was best for her children. Like Yates, Sethe worried that she would not be able to protect her children from suffering. Sethe believed that as a mother her main responsibility was to make choices to benefit her children. Sethe states this in the book, saying, “‘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’” (Morrison 194). Having experienced slavery herself, Sethe knew the horrors her children would have to face if they were taken by the four horsemen. Similarly to how Yates murdered her children to save them from damnation due to her poor mothering, Sethe was forced to make the choice to kill her own children to save them from a fate which she believed to be worse than death: slavery.

Maxine Greene’s “Art and Imagination: Reclaiming the Sense of Possibility”

Maxine Greene encapsulates the importance of making such contemporary connections in “Art and Imagination: Reclaiming the Sense of Possibility.” Greene states that “if we know enough to make those paintings the objects of our experience, to encounter them against the background of our lives, we are likely to strain toward conceptions of a better order of things, in which there will be no more wars that make women weep like that, no more bombs to murder innocent children. We are likely, in rebelling against such horror, to summon up images of smiling mothers and lovely children, metaphors for what ought to be” (379). When Greene says “to encounter them against the background of our lives,” she means to apply the pieces of art, such as literature, to our lives. Through this blog, we have related the work of literature, Beloved, through the use of current event infanticide cases. Greene also states the phrase “we are likely to strain toward conceptions of a better order of things” after her statement that we should apply the literature to our current lives so that we will learn how to better the world from applying that “art” to our lives, or the piece of literature to our lives. In our case, we learn through the blog the extent to which mothers will feel hopeless that they would kill their children in hopes that the well-beings of their children will increase.

We read literature like Beloved and we reflected on the answer to the question of whether Sethe’s murder of her daughter was justified so that we are “in rebelling against such horror” and “summon up images of smiling mother and lovely children.” Finding out that the loss of options to take care of one’s children for a mother is a big reason why infanticide is committed helps inform the public that society has to help mothers have other possible options to increase the well-being of their children without having to kill them. The fact that slavery was a big factor that caused Sethe to kill her child also warns readers that actions resembling slavery and the like should not be repeated in the future. As the blog helps readers have a deeper understanding of the book Beloved and Sethe’s actions through contemporary context, we are leading readers to a “better order of things,” as stated by Maxine Greene. We hope to have readers of the blog have more awareness of the struggles and complexities of the options of motherhood, and thus, bring more people to help support struggling mothers with few options to care for their children.