“Rememory” and the withholding of Beloved’s cause of death
Beloved is an extremely complicated book, and Toni Morrison’s choice to withhold the information of Beloved’s cause of death from the reader until we are well acquainted with her (similarly to Paul D.) is no accident. Morrison does a good job of making the reader sympathetic towards Sethe’s situation by making them understand the cruelty and trauma of her experiences with slavery as much as they possibly can. The point is not to make them feel that they would have done the same or that what she did was right, but rather to see it from her perspective and understand that in her eyes it was an act of love.
Loving and courageous are two traits of
Sethe’s that stand out at least after reading the first part of the book. The
telling of Denver’s birth story where Sethe was crawling through the woods,
trying to get to her children despite her seemingly low chance of survival
because she was determined to survive for them, “not to have an easeful death,”
(Morrison, 38). Her motivation for staying alive being her children undoubtedly
puts us in a position to believe she is a great mother, especially because her situation
seems to be one where many people would have given up.
However, this understanding of Sethe gets
flipped on its head when the reader and
Paul D. finally learn what happened when Schoolteacher arrived and saw Sethe
“holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the
heels in the other,” a sight that is incredibly difficult to process (Morrison,
175). Judging Sethe’s character for her actions on this day is a struggle
because it’s such an unfathomable situation, and most of us don’t feel comfortable
enough to put it as bluntly as Paul D., who said “what you did was wrong,”
(Morrison, 194).
These convoluted feelings result from
Morrison’s strategically slow revealing of this information. We get so
comfortable with the idea of Sethe being a good mother and someone who has been
unhappy for many years because she was so focused on “keeping the past at
bay,” above all else (Morrison, 51). Before knowing this horrifying
information, it seems to us that this past she’s trying to escape is simply the
trauma of Sweet Home, and letting her guard down to enjoy Paul D.’s company has
helped her overcome that trauma. In retrospect, it seems more like that
involves the day Schoolteacher arrived and how it changed the way her children
and the community saw her forever.
Sethe defends herself well to Paul D., too.
She told him “I couldn’t let her nor any of em live under Schoolteacher… It
worked,” and here, it becomes clear to Sethe that she doesn’t feel regret for
her actions, because she was successfully able to keep her children safe from
being taken back to Sweet Home by Schoolteacher, a fate worse than death in
Sethe’s eyes (Morrison, 192). It makes sense how this lack of regret disturbed
Paul D., but again, it’s impossible to say positively whether or not Sethe did
the right thing, having been in such unimaginable circumstances. Morrison does
a fantastic job at framing this central event of the novel in a way that the
reader can understand or attempt to understand all the details that pertain to
the tragedy of Beloved.
I think that the withholding of crucial information about them is important because its very heavy information. If they said what Sethe did at the start our view of Sethe would be ruined. And understanding the reasoning required not opening with the information.
ReplyDeleteYou describe and justify the "circling around the subject" structure of this novel very well--and again, I'll propose that when you reread this book, you will be amazed at how many hints and suggestions Morrison has threaded into the earlier pages. But I do think it is crucial that the reader not only view Sethe as a sympathetic and even heroic character but a MOTHER who is heroic to an almost superhuman degree: the inscription on the baby's headstone ASSERTS that she was loved, even when we don't yet grasp why that assertion needs to be made, or why it would have been in doubt.
ReplyDeleteOne aspect of the flashbacks to Sweet Home that we didn't focus on enough in class is the moment when Halle conveys to Sethe how they WILL need to try to escape at some point, that things are changing under schoolteacher, and the "freedoms" they have enjoyed under Garner are coming to an end. Halle uses the phrase "while the children are young," and it freezes Sethe in place: she suddenly grasps that they are raising their children to be enslaved when they come of age, and that all these pretenses that they are a "family" don't matter at all to the man who is going to take over the administration of the plantation. So Sethe's core impulse to escape is not to ensure freedom for HERSELF but to "get the children out" before schoolteacher can "get" them. So the escape itself is premised on the same idea that the shocking act in the woodshed is premised on--and we reflect that the escape plan is every bit as "illegal" as the murder in the shed.
This is a great post! As we followed Sethe's narrative without knowing what happened 18 years prior, we were able to understand the other parts of her character. The withholding of this information asserts that this event is only one part of her (even though the event overlaps into almost all other aspects of her life). I'm not sure if this was to make the reader understand why Sethe did what she did, but more to see her as a person as opposed to the newspaper's spectacle. We sympathize with her before we separate ourselves mentally from her. I found your post really interesting!
ReplyDeleteThe order of events in this novel was extremely strategic and I like that we find out Beloved's backstory later on. It provides a sense of mystery and a shock factor once we finally learn about what happened in the shed. I also think it's hard to judge Sethe for what she did but it is also hard to understand why she did it. Great post!
ReplyDeleteI agree with you that Morrison's reluctance to describe the tragedy to the reader at the beginning of the novel was strategic. It allowed the reader, similarly to Paul D, to get to know Sethe as a character more before we were allowed to make some kind of judgement on her actions (although even then, it still seemed impossible to judge her). This was a great post!
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ReplyDeleteI think it is very interesting that Morrison waits for readers to get to know Sethe as a character before offering any explanation into how her child died. No one character in the novel is ready to understand and sympathize with Sethe, regardless of whether or not they are familiar with her personality or her "thick" love or the very traumatic things she's been through. Everyone judges her for it without trying to understand or give her time. Morrison offers us the chance to understand her and what she did, although there's no way we possibly can begin to comprehend the situation or the causation behind it, as it was inexplicably traumatic -- the expectation in the novel seems to be giving Sethe the space and the time she needs to recover from the things she was forced to do without calling her an animal or shunning her from Cincinnati society. Great post!
ReplyDeleteToni Morrison's decision to wait to tell us about Beloved's death was such a smart and unexpected one. It allowed us to get to know Sethe like any other community member, and hear about the event only after we got to know and like her so much. It made my reaction feel much more complicated and unclear as there is no true way to really understand her situation and say whether it was right or not. Your point about us being comfortable with Sethe being a good mother is so important to mention because it's not like the shed scene was entirely random; it happened after we saw how much she loved her children and it's arguable the scene only solidified that.
ReplyDeleteMorrison keeping that cruical bit of info about the truth of what happened with Sethe and Beloved makes the reveal much more impactful. It just wouldn't be the same if Morrison told us that at the start. I personally really like the way Morrison handled the structure of the book. Good blog post!
ReplyDeleteI think Morrison's choice to withhold what Sethe did is a very smart one, because it does force the reader into having a stronger understanding of where Sethe could be coming from. I think without the backstory we get about Sethe's escape from slavery and the information we get about Sethe's current life it would be a lot easier to write her actions off as simply "wrong" with no nuance to it. Instead, we get acquainted with Sethe as this superhero of a mother who would do anything for her kids, and the implication that the murder of Beloved could be coming from any place other than a place of love begins to seem impossible. With the backstory we get of Sethe, it becomes impossible to write her off as an unloving mother because that is quite literally the furthest thing from what she is, so it forces us to look at her actions as driven by love, nuancing them and making the reader empathize with something unthinkable. This was a really interesting blog post, great job!
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