What a Mother will do for her Children Essay

Brianda Fonseca
3rd Period
31 October 2014
AP English Literature
What a Mother will do for her Children If there is one person with whom everyone empathizes, it is a mother. The entire connotation of the word is in itself love and sacrifice. There is nothing a good mother would not do for her children, whether it’s as simple as waking them at dawn for school or as sacrificial as not eating so they can. Mothers always and only do what is beneficial to their children, bypassing themselves, no matter what the consequences for themselves are. In Toni Morrison’s novel, Beloved, Sethe’s murdering of Beloved is understandable due to the life everyone knew her daughter would have had due to the time period she was living in.
Sethe always felt the greatest love for her all of her children, having been herself taken from her mother and never knowing what having a real mother was like. Even after Beloved’s death, she still loved Denver, the only child she had left. Paul D even though that “For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children that she had settled on to love” (54). This lets the reader know how perceivable the love Sethe has for her children is. After losing Beloved, Sethe stopped enjoying life. She wasn’t capable of living after what she had done, but after Beloved returns, Sethe is able “to look at things again” (237), meaning that since she felt absolved of her sin she could start existing again.
When Sethe killed Beloved, she was making a desperate attempt to save her children by any means necessary. By definition, saving means to keep someone safe from harm or danger, or to rescue. The obvious danger to Sethe’s children at that moment was schoolteacher and the punishment they would without doubt receive; they would most likely be whipped, like Sethe was after she was raped. But there is another maybe even greater threat to the children: the imminent threat of slavery that hung over their heads. These children would be forced to endure the suffering that all slaves had to live with if they went with schoolteacher to Sweet Home. Worst of all would have been Beloved’s life. As Sethe saw it, Beloved would lead the same style of life that she had. She would have been taken from her mother before she could even remember her, only to be taken to a worse place than she could have ever imagined.
Beloved would be tortured, whipped, and generally mistreated like her brothers, but being a female, she would be raped by anyone who felt like they had a claim over her body, namely her owner and men. As a woman, Beloved would be forced to marry at a young age and be bred for her master’s benefit without any say in where her children would be, just like her mother and she had been. Sethe decided, in that moment, to break the cycle. No one would take Beloved; no one would ever rape her, take her children, or steal her milk; she would never be whipped or beat to death. She even thinks: “She had to be safe and I put her where she would be…if I hadn’t killed her she would have died” (236), talking about how Beloved’s death saved her from a life of pain and an equally painful death. Sethe decided that it was worse for Beloved to suffer for her entire life than to not have a life at all, and that’s what she gave her.
The first response we get from one of the other characters is indifference from schoolteacher. He sees what Sethe did as an animalistic action from a woman who, as the book conveys, had gone insane due to his nephew’ mishandling of her, like a horse beat past the

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