Examples Of Motherhood In Beloved

The novel, Beloved, by Toni Morrison is a multi-lane story which aims to highlight female identity, and especially black female identity, through the use of elements such as history, magic and the transformation of the self under the encompassing idea of motherhood in the context of slavery.
The novel incorporates supernatural events as a manner of contradicting reality with the unnatural, and maintains this supernatural element in an often too close for comfort, realistic world. However, eventually the recollections of the past and the pain and suffering that goes with it becomes gruesome to such an extent that the element of supernatural aspects aim to highlight that there is almost no longer a contrast between the true events and the supernatural …show more content…
Instead, the positive, warm and soft connotations normally associated with motherhood are replaced by the darker side of motherhood and the extent to which a mother’s love can be pushed, challenged and executed. There is a constant struggle for Sethe to attempt to get away from her memories of the past. Sethe attempts to transform herself in order to rectify the past mistakes imposed on her due to her (and her mother’s) history of slavery. She wants to break this chain so that her own children do not have to experience it. Therefore, maybe Sethe wanted to be less like her mother. However, she ironically has much more in common with her mother by the time she kills her child, as Sethe’s mother also killed some of her children. This may also be part of the reason that Sethe bcomes Sethe may not even have had time to think about her actions, the only thing that was tangible in that moment was the fact that there was immediate danger, raw and urgent and that she had to do something to keep her children from experiencing the same pain she had. She may have felt that it was her duty as a mother. Sethe shows that there is no set definition to maternal love and that maternal love does not only consist out of the ‘good’ connotations. Sometimes, love is gruesome and urgent and shocking. Sethe does not have the luxury of falling into the category of this warm and fluffy maternal love, and this may very well be one of the messages that Morrison aims to convey with the disturbing action of a mother killing her