Choose to Live Again
What does it mean to be human according to Beloved?
A mother's love toward her children is seen as one of the highest, most powerful, and unconditional forms of love in a the modern world. This love is not only seen in human mothers, but also reflected throughout nature as mother bears, lions, and almost all other mammals, fiercely protect their babies. Toni Morrison's Beloved, a magical realist piece, details a mother's love for her children, as well as the unconventional manner in which she displays her love.
Morrison's protagonist Sethe, an escaped slave, is the first character whose humanity the reader may rightly question. After escaping to Ohio with her four children, Sethe lives a peaceful twenty-eight days before Schoolteacher, the master of the farm on which she worked, comes to Ohio to return her and her children to slavery. Rather than allow her children to become slaves, Sethe takes a handsaw to the neck of her third daughter and murders her. The initial reaction--shared by readers and Sethe's two oldest boys--is one of utter disgust. A mother murdering her child, much less her infant daughter, is seen as one of the highest forms of cruelty and perhaps even insanity in our world. However, Sethe is quick to defend her actions, claiming that she killed her daughter out of the highest form of love. Sethe planned to murder herself and her family, allowing them to all be united on the "otherside," instead of subject to slavery.
Sethe's actions raise the question of whether an act of cruelty can be outweighed by its motivation of absolute love. Was Sethe's murder of her daughter, whom she refers to as Beloved, an action that, through her love, made her more human? Or, did the absolute cruelty of her action outweigh her motivation and ultimately rob her of her humanity?
I think the evidence for Sethe's humanity, despite the difficult circumstances that have plagued her life, is seen as Beloved reappears, in the flesh, eighteen years after she was murdered. Upon Beloved's arrival at 124, Sethe obsessively cares for her daughter in a manner which is so self-sacrificing it actually becomes detrimental to her. Sethe does everything Beloved asks, and even gives up her dinner portions to her daughter, wasting away while Beloved stays strong and healthy. Here, I think Sethe's humanity--an image of a self-sacrificing mother at its pinnacle--is at sharp contrast with Beloved's lack of humanity. Beloved is also obsessed with Sethe, but she fails to demonstrate her love in a way that contributes to her humanity. As the only form of love Beloved has even known was violence (her own murder), Beloved in incapable of displaying anything but violence, anger, and selfish tendencies toward Sethe. However, in obsessively caring for something that does not display the best traits of humanity (Beloved), does Sethe lose some of her humanity?
Although Sethe does display traits of humanity, I propose that Sethe reveals a woman striving for humanity amid a world filled with a terrible human condition: the world of slavery. Sethe has been dehumanized by the cruelty of Schoolteacher and later by her own obsession with her selfish daughter Beloved. Sethe is representative of the difficulty of choosing humanity when one is surrounded by animalistic behavior on all sides. Similar to how Beloved learned only violence in her short life, Schoolteacher taught Sethe violence and hate. Instead of criticizing a possible moment of inhumanity in Sethe, the reader should perhaps focus on Sethe's incredible capacity to love after all the hate she has been taught. According to Beloved, being human doesn't seem to involve the morality, but whether or nor one is able to step back after difficult circumstances and find the capacity to love again. Being human is about the ability to recover, without resentment, without hate, and choose to live again.
In fact, Sethe's youngest daughter Denver may demonstrate the best example of humanity. Although Denver hasn't gone through the level of hardship her mother has, instead living a relatively sheltered life in which she has hardly left 124, Denver ability to face the world to help her mother demonstrates courage and love, two of the best pieces of humanity. Denver's journey to get help for her mother demonstrates her own ability to recover from her mother's lack of attention and her own lack of experience by responding with courage to face the unknown and an overwhelming love for her mother. By the end of the novel, Denver has taken on two jobs to help support her mother, who seems to almost be more childlike than Denver.
Throughout Beloved, the past returns to haunt Sethe through memories and finally in the flesh with the appearance of Beloved. However, it is Sethe's ability to recover from her past to look towards a future with Paul D, and Denver ability no only look towards the future but embrace it that make Sethe and Denver truly human characters. Humanity is perhaps not always centered on overcoming vice with virtue, but knowing how to recover with love and hope for the future after the mistakes of the past.
