Slavery and Motherhood

        Toni Morrison’s Beloved is full of strong relationships between characters in the novel, specifically between former slave Sethe and her children. Sethe’s tragic past influences her actions and these relationships in this literary piece - only one of her children at the start of the novel is still living with her, two have ran away, and one she murdered nearly twenty years prior. Sethe’s complicated and intense relationships with her children, especially hers with Beloved, the almost supernatural being that appears to be her dead daughter reincarnate, help illustrate the theme that our personal relationships can be bindingly the most important part of our lives, what simultaneously keep us in the past and the future.

        After Beloved arrives early on in the novel, we begin to see Sethe’s behavior and attitude towards her free life change. In the absence of most of her children, she became anxious and unsure of her direction, but when she realizes Beloved has a frightening amount of the infant she killed years ago, she sees it as a second chance to reconnect with this generation of people she raised, the first for her to spend their early lives out of slavery.

        Terry Paul Caesar claims that this novel depicts motherhood and slavery as being mutually inclusive. He notes that a mother is “a slave to her daughter”, and vice versa (Slavery and Motherhood). As it is true that a child relies on its mother for life and comfort, it is also true that a mother must be there for her child, and is therefore tied to them forever. This theory is evident in Beloved when we see Sethe and Beloved’s relationship deepen, and Sethe ends up spending more time in Beloved’s company than with her other daughter Denver, maybe in an effort to make up for the time she lost after she murdered the then unnamed daughter in order to save her from suffering. Because of this, we can see that the majority of a mother’s life, like Sethe, is spent developing relationships with her children, as it is her job.

        Besides Sethe’s relationship with Paul D, she and her children are the driving force in Beloved’s plot. Sethe, after hearing Beloved singing a song she only sang to her children, has no doubt that Beloved is the human form of the ghost that once roamed her house. She becomes enamored with this being, while still haunted by the fact that the community shuns her for killing this same child. We see Sethe continue to be a "slave" to Beloved until her departure in the end of the book.