Expert Firgurations of Rape

The ideal of institutionalized rape during slavery and post-emancipation haunted slaves and freed African Americans alike. The whiter pigmented used they slaved in any, disgusting measure they pleased. Throughout Beloved, characters memorialize their traumatic sexual assaults in an attempt to escape and evade the situation and avoid the memories themselves/ However, according to the “Beyond the Pleasure Principle: those who are “suffering from traumatic neurosis” occupy themselves with memories and are “more concerned of not thinking about the traumatic event”. For Sethe, rape became the worst occurrence and feeling in the world and hid herself and family as much a possible. Shielding Denver and Beloved from the possibility became Sethe’s top priority as a mother. The haunting of rape not only held power over women but slave men as well. Sweet Home men’s desire and “dreams of rape” (10,11) scarred Paul D into enclosing himself in a “tobacco tin’ heart” (113). Repressing and preventing the spread of rape through memories and action became the task of Sethe after her traumatic sexual assault from the Schoolteacher’s nephews. Sethe felt as though it was her ultimate responsibility to protect her daughters from “undreamable dreams” of becoming “dirty” by the whites because of their horrific fascination with invading others “private parts”(Barnett).  Sethe believed that “dirty” persons who experiences rape felt as though they could not love themselves. Her dark past caused her to panic in fear for her childrens lives if they were to be sexual assaulted, in or out of slavery. This dread threatened Sethe and her family when she had first arrived at 124, when she was still being searched for. Her repulsion of rape scared her into believing that “dying at the hand of one’s mother is subordinate to rape”(Barnett). In the panic of being found and shipped back into slavery, Sethe refused to let her daughters experience the miseries as well. When Sethe saw Schoolteacher, her instinct to protect her family from slavery and rape sprung into action, causing her to take them to “over there, where no one could hurt them” and raised a “handsaw” to her older daughter for her “safety” (193). Killing her children became the solution to avoiding slavery but tormented the residence of 124 because of the deceased child's haunting. The residence and Baby Suggs were frightened and timorous at the event and spirit, so Sethe remained alone in the house to care and stay close to her daughters. Sethe’s decision to murder her child oscillates between a “crisis of life” and “death”(Barnett). When such a deep opposition to letting her kin be susceptible to rape, she found that sending them to the underworld was safer than the possibility of slavery or sexual assault. Her phobia was carried away into avoidance of any possibility, running deep into her heart. For a women who wanted to love her children so much, she chose to have their lives end rather than allowing them to be sent away into slavery. Former slaves used repression of their memories to “diffuse the power of the past” as Sethe must have felt after Schoolteacher left. Although it possibly stopped Schoolteacher from capturing the family, Sethe must dwell with the haunting of her murdered child. Sethe’s love for her family provokes her refusal to leave her daughters. For Sethe’s “thick love” keeps her family always together (193).