Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni ...

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38 amanda putnam older children with her newborn baby tied to her, her mother love is plentiful: “Sethe lay in bed under, around, over, among, but especially with them all” (Morrison 1988, 93). Unlike some other of Morrison’s mothers who deny their mother love (like Baby Suggs), Sethe revels in it, both in times of happiness and in despair. According to Christopher Peterson, Orlando Patterson argues that “slavery destroys slave kinship structures” (Peterson 2006, 549). Sethe actually shows abundant connections to her children, risking everything for them to escape and celebrating their life together afterward. But believing capture (and subsequent torture) imminent, Sethe rebels against societal mores that suggest mothering is nonviolent and takes desperate action. The four white men open the shed door, seeing that “two boys bled in the sawdust and . . . a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest” is swinging the infant “by the heels . . . toward the wall planks” (Morrison 1988, 149). Her actions are unthinkable and brutal, yet readers cannot doubt the truth of both her maternal love and her power. “Because the normative vision of maternity tends to elevate the mother/child relation to an idealized field of ethical action, infanticide is most often read either as an unintelligible aberration from normative kinship, or as an act of pure love, in which case it is thought to be completely intelligible” (Peterson 2006, 551). While Sethe’s actions are ghastly, they are also compellingly dominant—she chooses what will happen to her and to her children. As Peterson argues, “What Sethe claims signifies not only her daughter, but also what she claims for her act of infanticide: namely, that it is an act of pure love” (2006, 555). Sethe reprojects the violence that has oppressed her for years and takes control of what little she can. Sethe loves her children enough to choose death for them instead of a tortuous slave life. Even months and years later, after being faced with prison and decades of scorn within her community, Sethe defends her maternal violence. She explains to Paul D., “I did it. I got us all out. . . . I couldn’t let all that go back to where it was, and I couldn’t let her nor any of em live under schoolteacher” (Morrison 1988, 162–63). Even more telling are Sethe’s thoughts when she recognizes the slaveowner’s hat in the front lawn that fateful day: No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe. (ibid., 163) Unwilling to sacrifice her children’s right to freedom, familial connections,
fall 2011 / black women, gender, and families 39 and even daily decision making (something she herself rarely enjoyed until her escape), she chooses violent death inside family unity. Explaining about cutting her own daughter’s throat, Sethe says, “if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her” (ibid., 200). For Sethe, slavery (especially being owned by the awful Schoolteacher) is death—a death of the spirit and mind as well as body—and it is worse than any physical dying because it occurs without any connection to significant others. Sethe’s lack of knowledge about her mother’s life or death, her husband’s disappearance, and their friends’ outcomes after escape all direct her to realize that making an awful choice can be better than having no choice at all. As Boyce Davies explains, “Sethe’s violent action becomes an attempt to hold on to the maternal right and function” (1994, 139). After freedom had been achieved, Sethe accepted the burden of power that came with keeping that freedom at all costs. She acts rebelliously, willing to die and kill in order to claim her children as her own, above any claim of property by Schoolteacher. Though Sethe is the most infamous for her brutal maternal decision, she is not the only mother in Beloved who resorts to violence—and readers can learn how and why Sethe comes to her own ferocious mothering decision by noticing more about her relationship (and/or the lack of that relationship) with her own mother. Known only as “Ma’am,” Sethe’s mother works in the rice fields and is a stranger to Sethe, but she is the only child of Ma’am’s that is encouraged to live and thus indoctrinates into Sethe the concept of mothers choosing life or death for their children. Another slave woman tells Sethe about Sethe’s conception and birth after Ma’am’s death: “‘She threw them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island. The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him. The others she did not put her arms around’” (Morrison 1988, 62). The story, which implicitly explains the horrors of multiple rapes upon Ma’am, also recognizes the power of maternal choice. Ma’am could not escape rape and subsequent pregnancy, but she rebelled, by refusing motherhood until she was impregnated by someone whom she had accepted. Ma’am’s actions and decisions are not discussed more fully in the novel, but they surely would have taught Sethe the importance of power, choice, rebellion, and motherhood. Although technically “unimpressed” with the story as a child, the concept (and power) of choosing motherhood (and thus also the special burdens of deciding life or death for your offspring) is established for Sethe from early on in her life.
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