Close Reading Of Sethe Beloved

Although slavery in the United States no longer exists in the twenty first century, American society and African American culture remain embedded by the grievances and the devastation that resulted from slavery. Toni Morrison, a black feminist writer, published Beloved in 1987 to fictionally depict fragmented slave families through her intricate plot and rich characters. Sethe, a fugitive slave, who lives in the free state of Ohio, is relentlessly plagued by her experiences as a slave. Each character’s account has authentic stories of loss and oppression, but Sethe’s struggle with the past is particularly violent and traumatic. The image of breast milk exemplifies how Sethe’s past has been restrained by slavery throughout each stage of her

Sethe’s mother, her ma’am, was not a stable figure in Sethe’s early development, because her mother was forced to work on the plantation. Under those circumstances, Sethe didn’t identify or interact her with ma’am because more broadly, slavery as an institution separated families. In her attempts to recall her childhood, Sethe refers to her mother as “the one among many backs turned away from her”(16) working in the fields. This brusque mention of a mother seems disrespectful to outsiders, but in the context of slave life, it is instead painful and saddening. However, Sethe also fails to remember relevant details of her upbringing, naming the plantation “that place where she was born”(17). For further emphasis, Sethe was only nursed by her ma’am for “two or three weeks”(36) and then, in her own words, “sucked from another woman whose job it was” (36). Sethe and her mother were separated because they were viewed as commodities. Instead of her ma’am, “Nan was the one [Sethe] knew best”(36), and Nan acted as the caretaker for Sethe and both the slave and white children. But even Nan, a slave wet nurse, did not provide proper nourishment for Sethe because the white slave owner’s children were fed first(114). Young Sethe never had enough. Breast milk represents the physical deprivation that Sethe, and slave children as a collective group, suffer from. This lack of sustenance and family connection in Sethe’s past as a daughter, as illustrated with the image of milk, pushes Sethe to seek extreme connection with her own