Though slavery is typically remembered by its physical brutality, its mental scars live on even after the abolishment of slavery with the 13th amendment in 1865. Toni Morrison illustrates the psychological battles that former slaves, Sethe and Paul D, face after emancipation in her novel Beloved. Sethe and Paul D belong to the Sweet Home Plantation. When Schoolteacher, a new slave master, is brought in with his two nephews, he enforces brutal punishment and discipline of slaves. Sethe manages to runaway from Sweet Home while Paul D is sold to a prison camp after attempted escape. During enslavement, both Sethe and Paul D are raped. Rape is an act where one person dominates and controls another and the victims are vulnerable to the power of
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For Sethe, it causes her to commit the infanticide of her third child, Beloved. For Paul D, he locks all of his feelings up in his “tobacco-tin heart.” The physical and emotional scars of rape and assault during enslavement leave Sethe and Paul D questioning their identity and self-worth, which in effect prevents them from recognizing their value. Until accepting and overcoming the abuse, Sethe and Paul D are prevented from progressing towards self-love and the extension of love to others.
One of the strategies of slavery is to break the spirit of slaves so they have no will to fight back. Slave traders purposefully separate families in order to diminish the amount of resilience a slave has, since they have no family members to protect or fight for. It leaves slaves in a …show more content…
Morrison uses rape figuratively and literally to illustrate the horrors and results of slavery even after being freed. Although not explicitly stated in the novel, the two nephews’ violent assault of Sethe did have characteristics of rape when they were stealing her milk as “the two teenaged white boys [held] her down and [sucked] her breast milk” (Field 3). Additionally, as Robin Field notes, “Sethe considers her milk to be greater value than her body itself. Yet this single-minded concentration upon her milk also may be Sethe’s way of repressing another trauma – a rape by the white boys, left unnarrated in the text, but the trace of which emerges during her subsequent flight to Ohio and in her panicked violence against her children when schoolteacher and the boys arrive at Baby Suggs’s house” (3). Sethe’s fixation on her milk could be either her regret for not being able to nurse her children or a coping mechanism for her to slowly deal with the fact that she was raped by the nephews, but both lead Sethe to have the same belief as Baby Suggs that “there is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks” (Morrison 105). Additionally, the manner in which the nephews stole Sethe’s milk was animalistic, which Sethe describes, “after they handled me like I was the cow, no, the goat, back behind the stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses” (236-237). However, this is not the
For Sethe, it causes her to commit the infanticide of her third child, Beloved. For Paul D, he locks all of his feelings up in his “tobacco-tin heart.” The physical and emotional scars of rape and assault during enslavement leave Sethe and Paul D questioning their identity and self-worth, which in effect prevents them from recognizing their value. Until accepting and overcoming the abuse, Sethe and Paul D are prevented from progressing towards self-love and the extension of love to others.
One of the strategies of slavery is to break the spirit of slaves so they have no will to fight back. Slave traders purposefully separate families in order to diminish the amount of resilience a slave has, since they have no family members to protect or fight for. It leaves slaves in a …show more content…
Morrison uses rape figuratively and literally to illustrate the horrors and results of slavery even after being freed. Although not explicitly stated in the novel, the two nephews’ violent assault of Sethe did have characteristics of rape when they were stealing her milk as “the two teenaged white boys [held] her down and [sucked] her breast milk” (Field 3). Additionally, as Robin Field notes, “Sethe considers her milk to be greater value than her body itself. Yet this single-minded concentration upon her milk also may be Sethe’s way of repressing another trauma – a rape by the white boys, left unnarrated in the text, but the trace of which emerges during her subsequent flight to Ohio and in her panicked violence against her children when schoolteacher and the boys arrive at Baby Suggs’s house” (3). Sethe’s fixation on her milk could be either her regret for not being able to nurse her children or a coping mechanism for her to slowly deal with the fact that she was raped by the nephews, but both lead Sethe to have the same belief as Baby Suggs that “there is no bad luck in the world but whitefolks” (Morrison 105). Additionally, the manner in which the nephews stole Sethe’s milk was animalistic, which Sethe describes, “after they handled me like I was the cow, no, the goat, back behind the stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horses” (236-237). However, this is not the