Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni ...

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36 amanda putnam daughter of the family who employs her, “hushing and soothing the tears of the little pink-and-yellow girl” (ibid., 109). Clearly, this mother is out of sync with her maternal feelings, lushly nurturing the child of her employers, while physically abusing and neglecting her own daughter; but it reflects the race-based oppression under which they all live. Likewise, the violence—both physical and emotional—that she inflicts on Pecola is obscene, especially in comparison to her mothering behavior toward another child. Pecola absorbs this ill-treatment, eventually accepting abuse from all corners of her life as her due, directing her learned violence on herself alone. Likewise, Pauline Breedlove believes it is her Christian duty to punish her alcoholic husband and thus co-creates constant domestic disturbances within the family, initiating fights with her husband, Cholly, which, in turn, encourages more violence from her children. In one such scene, after a verbal fight between husband and wife escalates into a physical one, the son actively joins in hitting his drunk father, eventually yelling, “‘Kill him! Kill him!’” (Morrison 1994, 44). While Mrs. Breedlove barely reacts to her son’s emotional and physical outburst, his intensity is deeply felt by the reader who sees in him another generation of violence waiting to blossom. However, even if readers do not care for Pauline Breedlove, it is also clear that she redirects her own powerlessness in these situations. Mrs. Breedlove is a force to be reckoned with—if only to her daughter, son, and husband. Regardless of anything else, like Florens in A Mercy, Breedlove becomes powerful through violence, redefining herself via it. In most of these examples, Morrison positions the home and immediate family relationships as places of potentially terrible pain. As Carole Boyce Davies explains, “The family is sometimes situated as a site of oppression for women. The mystified notions of home and family are removed from their romantic, idealized moorings, to speak of pain, movement, difficulty, learning and love in complex ways” (1994, 21). These families become real for readers—they break hearts, they hurt each other, and they do not always apologize. And though some of the mothers in Morrison’s novels mentioned here genuinely love their children, they also cannot remove the violence that is as a learned part of their lives within an oppressive culture as is their desire to nurture. In the most final violence possible, some mothers in Morrison’s novels choose to end the lives of their children—in infancy and childhood (Beloved) or even in adulthood (Sula), attempting to offer an escape from something considered worse than death in their maternal minds. By choosing death
fall 2011 / black women, gender, and families 37 for their children, these mothers are definitively demonstrating the ways in which fatal violence becomes an act of rebellion and a form of resistance. In Sula, Eva Peace transforms her position of weakness into power, by determining what kind of life is worth her son’s living and then choosing to kill him. When her son Plum comes home from World War I addicted to heroin, Eva waits to see if he will change his ways. Eventually, though, Eva “threw [a lit newspaper] onto the bed where the kerosene-soaked Plum lay” (Morrison 1982, 47), burning him to death to prevent his continued life of drug addiction. Later, Eva explains it: he wanted to crawl back into my womb and well . . . There wasn’t space . . . Being helpless and thinking baby thoughts and dreaming baby dreams and messing up his pants again and smiling all the time. I had room in my heart, but not in my womb. . . . I done everything I could to make him leave me and go on and live and be a man but he wouldn’t and I had to keep him out so I just thought of a way he could die like a man not all scrunched up inside my womb, but like a man. (ibid., 71–72) Eva’s decision has more to do with her own state of mind than Plum’s (who is “smiling all the time”). As his mother, she makes it her decision whether he should live a life of addiction. Powerless to change his behaviors and/or make him “live and be a man,” Eva redirects her status of helplessness into dominant female strength and murders Plum. Beloved’s Sethe, the mother of four children, is well known for her attempt to kill her children, once she realizes they are about to be taken back into slavery. After being free for twenty-eight days, Sethe takes control of the situation the only way she knows how: by destroying the “property” for which the bounty hunter and slaveowner have come, because Sethe “wasn’t going back there . . . Any life but that one” was preferable (Morrison 1988, 42). As Boyce Davies suggests, “Beloved . . . simultaneously critiques exclusive mother-love as it asserts the necessity for Black women to claim something as theirs” (1994, 136). Similarly, Christopher Peterson’s analysis indicates that Sethe must “kill her own daughter . . . to claim that daughter as her own over and above the master’s claim” (2006, 554). Sethe’s decision can only be understood when readers recognize the entirety of the choices available to her and realize that, via violence, Sethe redirects her racialized powerlessness into maternal possession and dominance. In Beloved, readers see how maternal love can be so overwhelming that a mother might decide to kill her offspring rather than return them to a life not worth living. Once Sethe escapes from slavery, finally reaching her three
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