Motherhood in Flesh and Blood

Slavery is a deconstruction of the human experience. Told through the lives of former slaves, Toni Morrison’s Beloved is an analysis of the generational impacts of a loss defined by the bounds of flesh and blood. Sethe and Denver begin the novel in a spiteful 124, freed from Sweet Home but enslaved by the traumas of their past. The act of dehumanization, not slavery itself, haunts the characters of Beloved long after their escape from Sweet Home. For the women of 124, it is the ability to love others—to exhibit the most primal instincts of motherhood and maternal love—that defines both freedom and the human experience.

The relationship between mother and child defines Sethe’s interpretation of freedom. For her, freedom is not sustenance. Rather, it is the ability to “[claim] ownership of that freed self”—to unify the fragments of a self that is her own (112). Sethe’s children are an extension of a self that is not hers to control. Although Beloved’s murder is a division of the physical connection that is motherhood, it is fundamentally an act of maternal love. As Sethe“[collects] every bit of life she [has] made, all the parts of her,” she is attempting to sever the extensions of herself to protect them from “anybody white” who “could take your whole self for anything that came to mind”(192, 295). After twenty-eight days of freedom, Sethe once again loses ownership of her freed self. The Misery is this loss of a mother’s child—the loss of both freedom and motherhood. Bound as she was on Sweet Home, Sethe’s motherlove is now forbidden. The rusting of the enslaved heart—the creation of a “tobacco tin”—is the true dehumanization of slavery (138). To “love anything that much [is] dangerous” for a tobacco tin in place of a red heart (54). Rusted by the threat of enslavement, the tin within slave mothers dismembers the fragments of their flesh that are their children. Motherlove in the absence of children to love is nothing more than an affair with a captive and rusted-shut heart—forbidden “motherlove is [the] killer” of freedom (155).

Both primitive and fundamental to the human experience, the loss of motherhood represents the loss of humanity. For Sethe and the slave mothers who died in the binds of slavery, the feeling of motherhood is a primal instinct. Sethe’s attempted murder of her children is an act to defend this motherlove. Much like a bird protecting its offspring from prey, Sethe “snatch[ed] up her children like a hawk” and ran toward a shed stocked with saws and shovels (185). The brutal and primitive nature of motherhood consumes Sethe, driving her own instinct to preserve the humanity of her children. In this sense, slavery, in both its physical and psychological forms, forces the breakdown of both motherhood and the human experience. The bodies of enslaved women belong to neither themselves nor their children—they embody a form of white property. This deconstruction of motherhood begins with the forced transport of Africans to the Americas on the Middle Passage. Sethe is told of her own mother who was “taken up by the crew” of her slave ship. The children birthed after the repeated rape of Sethe’s mother, the ones “from more whites...without names,” are thrown into the sea beneath her ship (74). The Atlantic is a passage between the free human world and the world of the bound. In representing the first division of mother and child, the Middle Passage is where the legacy of slavery begins to take form. It is the supremacy white power holds over black women that drives both Sethe and her mother to take the lives of their own. The fundamental right to birth a child that is a mother’s, rather than the property of “men without skin,” is lost in the threat of enslavement (249). Motherhood is fundamental to humanity—the free ability to love the extensions of a self defines the human body.

It is only the restoration of maternal love that rehabilitates the freed self of a mother. Sethe’s twenty-eight days of freedom began with the birth of Denver during her escape from Sweet Home. As Sethe reaches the Ohio River, the final crossing between slavery and freed land, her “own water [breaks] loose to join it” (98). “A foot [from] the river bed...kicked the bottom of the boat and Sethe’s behind,” pushing out Denver’s body from Sethe (98). In a river lined by spores of bluefern, Sethe frees herself from the binds of slavery by creating new life. She has reached “a place where you could love anything you chose” (191). Sethe, in those of twenty-eight days, did “not need permission for desire—well now, that was freedom”(191). The allowed love and ownership of a self and its extensions is the freedom of the human experience.

At its most basic level, Beloved is a story of a mother and a child. For Sethe, the love that ties the generations of the sixty million together—motherhood—is fundamental to freedom and humanity. The danger of love in enslavement forbids motherhood, forming a tobacco tin in the place of a heart that cannot claim ownership of its self or children. The loss of carefree love in slavery transforms children into fragments of their mother—now chattel, rather than free humans. Motherlove is more than just freedom—it is humanity itself. Sethe’s brutal and primitive motherhood consumes her, driving her murder of Beloved. Her only twenty-eight days of freedom before the threat of a white man returns begins with the reconstruction of motherhood. It is only the ability to love a child without permission that can restore Sethe’s freedom and humanity.