Internalizing Subjugation Beyond Slavery

            Being born and raised slave—a commodity, a thing to be bought and sold at another person’s discretion—has obvious lasting effects that linger inside (and on the skin of) a person even when liberty is obtained. Sethe has internalized her subjugation so that rather than being a slave to a white colonist, she is now a slave to her own home and past.

            While at Sweet Home Sethe attempted to subvert the feeling of subjugation, of belonging to someone else “because she wanted to love the work she did, to take the ugly out of it, and the only way she could feel at home on Sweet Home was if she picked up some pretty growing thing and took it with her” (27). But when Sethe escaped she was subjugated not to Sweet Home, but to her own home—or to the spirit haunting her home. Even with the house/ghost driving Denver mad, Sethe refuses to leave: “No moving. No leaving. It’s all right the way it is,” (17) she tells Paul D. Despite being free from the yoke of Sweet Home, Sethe surrenders her autonomy to the house that binds her to itself and to her past.

            Sethe may have physically obtained her freedom, but she has internalized the slave mindset so that she is still mentally subjugated to a force outside of herself. While at Sweet Home she leaned on it as though “it really was one. As though a handful of myrtle stuck in the handle of a pressing iron propped against the door in a whitewoman’s kitchen could make it hers. As though mint sprig in the mouth changed the breath as well as its odor” (28). Though Sethe now has her own kitchen it seems all the mint sprig in the world couldn’t change the odor of subjugation that lingers in her home and in herself.