“’Love is or ain’t.…It ain’t my job to know what’s worse [than Sweet Home]. It’s my job to know what is and to keep them away from what I know is terrible. I did that.” (Morrison 195).
Sethe, as an enslaved young woman, already was born to and lives in a nightmare in which she has no power nor protection from threats. Sethe as an enslaved mother leads an even more nightmarish existence: despite the fundamental “jobs” of motherhood is to protect your vulnerable from harm. But how can the powerless protect anything, however much they love and care for their child? And so, when caught by slavecatchers who threaten to take her and her children back to such a nightmare, she does her job- and keeps Beloved away from Sweet Home by killing her (Morrison 191-195). Whether or not this was “right,” as Paul D challenges her, Sethe’s love for her children cannot be denied, and only its expression potentially disputed (Morrison 195). More importantly, through quotes like this and by making Sethe the main character of the novel, we come to understand her and the hellish reality she faced. As a result, the reader may not agree, but we can understand.
For Sethe is not an abstraction: her feelings and choices are drawn from real histories, namely that of Margert Garner (Morrison, xvii). Also with four children, Maragret escaped slavery and was resting at a relative’s house when the slavecatchers came (Carroll, “Margaret”). Like Sethe, she only managed to “slit the throat of her 2-year-old daughter,” and intended to kill the others before stopped and arrested for destruction of “property.” (Carroll, “Margaret”). Like Sethe, this violence was likely done out of desperation, for even contemporary newspapers reported at the trial she appeared in “extreme sadness,” and held her youngest even while testifying, not focusing on the baby except “’only once, when it put its hand to her mouth, [they] observed her smile upon it, and playfully bite its little fingers with her lips.’” (Carroll, “Margaret”) Beloved helps recover the emotions of desperation to protect in impossible circumstances- the smile, sadness, and playfulness indicate this was a mother who loved her children. This understanding is important when considering narratives like below:
The above 1867- and thus post-war and post-slavery- “The Modern Medea” image offers none of the humanization started in the newspaper article and transformed totally in Beloved, and implicitly assures the necessity for Beloved as a text. The lack of humanization to Margaret appears in the title itself- the mythological Medea kills her children in revenge for being cast aside, making the fatal decision one of pride. Sethe and Margaret killed their child to save them from pain, no matter wrongly or rightly, because enslavement is that terrible. The title obscures the motivation for the action itself, creating a false equivalency that subtly withholds sympathy for Margaret in rooting her decisions based on anger rather than systemic desperation and pain. The Margaret of the image conforms to this in glaring at the slavecatchers at the expense of her living and dead children- her remaining children cling to her, but she pays them no mind, unlike the real woman even at her trial. Though we cannot say for sure what Margaret felt in that fateful moment, this depiction does not afford her any dimensions beyond Medea-like fury. She shows (righteous) anger to the men, sure, but what does she feel intrapersonally? This image gives no indication, diminshing Margaret’s likely three-dimensional pain.
Most troublingly of all, the muted depiction of the slavecatchers obstructs of the reasons for Margaret’s anguished act: their invasion, and the slaveholding system they represent. In some way, their horrified expressions and physical recoil in their leg stance credit them with the most “human” reaction to the murder of a child, despite them being the problem. Indeed, one would need context to know these are slavecatchers- they carry no visible weapons, and thus do not appear to pose a threat in the image, not reality. Instead, the pointed hands of both the slavecatchers and Margaret point to the deceased children, emphasizing the horror in the infanticide rather than the cause of the slaveholders. If the portrait had wanted to connect the cause and the result, Margaret’s image might point at the slavecatchers and the children and thus link them. Instead, in emphasizing the horror of the action, “The Modern Medea” hides why this tragedy happened, and the real, impossible pain for a mother trying to save her children from infinite earthly misery. Sethe loves her children, and from what little we can tell of Margaret Garner, she loved her children, too. Images like these prove why Beloved has such power and urgency; whether the action was “right” or not, it was done in great desperation and pain, and whatever opinion on morality, we at least owe it to the “sixty million and more” from Morrison’s dedication to understand (Morrison, xiii).
Works Cited: