Hello everyone. Thanks for reading a second critical lens close reading blog of mine for Beloved.
Another passage in Beloved that shows something about the Feminist Lens that I have chosen is when Sethe tried to kill her children when Sweet Home men went to Cincinnati and found Sethe and her children. When they were about to be brought back Sethe tried to kill her kids so that they didn’t have to live through slavery. And this happened chapter 16.
I find this passage and chapter to be related to the feminist lens because stereotypically mothers are “supposed” to be nurturing, kind, loving, and motherly. But then when Sethe goes to try and kill her children to save them from slavery she went against what the motherly and “womanly” thing to do was. She managed to kill her daughter Beloved who later comes back to haunt her. She wounded her two sons. And she was threatening to kill Denver while swinging her baby by her ankles. Beloved was buried and the boys were taken from Sethe at first but she brought Denver to jail with her. Later on the boys leave home and it is my suspicion that they left because they her scared of their mother more than they were scared of the ghost of baby Beloved.
I find this whole act of Sethe’s to be extremely disturbing but in some ways I see it is somehow motherly and caring for their mother to try to kill them in order to save them from the experiences of slavery. I see how she tried to save her boys from the experiences of being treated like cattle and from being lashed. And she tried to save her daughters from the experiences of being raped and sullied by the white masters and being impregnated by them.
In a way Sethe is trying to save her children from something that is worse than death by killing them herself. In that way I can see how Sethe is acting on her motherly instincts but this example of motherly instincts is rather far fetched and shows how slavery dehumanizes the slaves to the point that mothers can’t really even seem like mothers!
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