How Does Toni Morrison Use Milk In Beloved

In Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the bonds between individuals, whether in a church, community, or town, greatly affect the people who thrive within them. Milk is used to symbolize familial bonds and is used throughout the novel to demonstrate slavery’s negative effects on these bonds. Sethe’s family unit uses the corruption of milk to describe how slavery damages these bonds; meanwhile, the more stereotypical slave stories use the absence of milk to show the prior destruction of the relationships.
The corruption of milk appears at pivotal points in Sethe's family unit to highlight slavery’s destruction of a loving bond. The first time Sethe's family is really affected in this way is when Schoolteacher's nephew assault her and steal her milk. This dirtying of an

Halle witnessed this brutal assault and, realizing his own powerlessness, lost his mind. Baby Suggs also lost her very last child due to this, the only one out of eight she was allowed to keep for any real amount of time. Suggs always scoffed at the importance of a man in one’s life, but insisted till the day she died that “a son...that’s somebody” (13, 14). After this corruption of milk by the Nephews, Suggs lost yet another child to the brutality of slavery and was left childless, her family of nine all in the wind. Baby Suggs lost her child in Halle, but Sethe is left without someone to share “the responsibility for her breasts” (11). Halle’s job was to help carry the burden of keeping the family going with Sethe, to share the responsibility of the milk that kept their family together, but instead he was forced to “[leave] his children” by the mental breakdown his owners caused (40). Nephews corrupted