Loss in Beloved

In Beloved, Toni Morrison examines a plethora of themes that are impossible to ignore. Last week, I wrote about identity and how the three female characters struggle with the impact of slavery on their identities. As I read this week, I pondered the recurring theme of loss and how the characters are impacted by the many important elements of their lives that they have lost.

Arguably, Sethe has lost the most of any character in Beloved. She loses her dignity and autonomy (that is, as mush autonomy as a slave can have) after being raped at Sweet Home. She tries to flee with her family, but loses her husband in the process. She never finds out what happened to him, and Sethe chalks that loss up to being the price of she had to pay for freedom. Once free, she loses her older daughter when she kills her rather than let her grow up as a slave. As a result of killing her daughter, she loses the trust, and then the presence, of her sons. She also loses the respect of the community in which she lives. The townfolk shun her for killing her baby, but they do atone for their role in the baby’s death with the exorcism near the end of the book. When Sethe loses the community, she also loses Baby Suggs. Sethe’s mother-in-law was a well-respected preacher in the black community, but she stops giving her services in the Clearing after the event in the woodshed. Paul D leaves Sethe too, on account of Beloved’s place in the house.

Morrison links all of these losses in Sethe’s life back to the inhumanity of slavery. The schoolteacher’s nephews treat Sethe like an animal, stealing her milk and raping her like the sexually frustrated Sweet Home men do to the calves. The schoolteacher’s brutality drives Halle and Sethe to flee, but the things when he was hidden in the hayloft break Halle. Sethe would rather kill her children than allow them to become slaves again, for which other characters compare her to an animal. In truth, the atrocities committed against her drive her to that act. The rest of her losses all stem from the baby’s murder. Killing her child was an extreme action, but considering the brutality Sethe experienced at the hands of the schoolteacher and his nephews, the reader can understand her choice. It is particularly significant that Sethe kills her female child but not her sons, which implies that she believes her daughter is in more danger than her male children, likely the result of the rape.