Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni ...

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32 amanda putnam forever and ever” illustrates to readers that she cannot believe her mother has just given her away to be separated forever from her. Of course, neither mother nor daughter is free—so the mother actually has no options. She simply begs to provide for both children. Unfortunately, the young Florens understands the situation as her mother choosing a baby brother over the older daughter. Florens shares her growing perception of the situation by adding that “mothers nursing greedy babies scare me. I know how their eyes go when they choose . . . holding the little boy’s hand” (ibid., 8). Instead of realizing the great sacrifice her mother has just made for her daughter, Florens only understands her own abandonment—and this shapes her entire future. Thus, even though Florens’s mother actually had pure intentions—valuing her daughter more than herself to save the child from potential sexual abuse—the outcome of not choosing to stay with Florens negatively affects the girl throughout her life, wreaking havoc on the child’s self-esteem and her ability to nurture any other relationship successfully. Eventually, readers discover that Florens’s mother chooses to send her daughter because she believes “Sir” has “no animal in his heart” (Morrison 2008, 163) versus the men in the house in which they are currently residing, who have raped the mother multiple times and are already noticing Florens’s changing body (ibid., 162). The mother sees her chance for Florens: “Because I saw the tall man see you as a human child . . . I knelt before him. Hoping for a miracle. He said yes” (ibid., 166). Begging to save her infant son (who will likely die without her care) as well as provide a life-altering opportunity for her daughter, this mother gives away her own chance of living a better life so that both her children will survive. In this case, Florens’s mother shows a similarity to other enslaved mothers. As hooks explains, “In the midst of a brutal racist system, which did not value black life, [the slave mother] valued the life of her child enough to resist that system” (1990, 44). While hooks is actually revising Frederick Douglass’s negative description of his own mother, who walked twelve miles whenever possible to hold him at night, the description is a valid one in this case, too. Florens’s mother goes to great strides to give her children the best opportunity available. Unfortunately, the lack of explanation for her mother’s actions and choices creates a distrust in Florens, which she carries with her throughout the novel, eventually ending in a violent reaction toward a child she views as a competitor. Florens’s love affair with a freedman and her unwillingness to share him with an orphaned boy reflects the violence she has felt her whole life from her mother. When she initially meets the boy, Florens immediately recognizes her predicament: “This happens twice before. The first time it is
fall 2011 / black women, gender, and families 33 me peering around my mother’s dress hoping for a hand that is only for her little boy. . . . Both times are full of danger and I am expel” (Morrison 2008, 135–37). Worried that she again will be replaced or excluded, she cannot see that her lover could love more than one person: “I worry as the boy steps closer to you . . . As if he is your future. Not me” (ibid., 136). Assuming the boy also wants her absence, Florens narrates her understanding of him: “He is silent but the hate in his eyes is loud. He wants my leaving. This cannot happen. I feel the clutch inside. This expel can never happen again” (ibid., 137). Eventually, Florens attacks the child and shares, “And yes I do hear the shoulder crack but the sound is small. . . . He screams screams then faints” (ibid., 139–40). The lover reappears at this moment, having seen the attack, and is outraged and angered, ironically rejecting Florens, not because he favors the boy but because he has seen the violence inside her, bred and fostered within slavery and that system’s forcible abandonment by her mother. While Florens is not able to use violence to get what she wants (her lover), it is still a rebellious action taken against her circumstances. Florens’s violent attack on the child—and then moments later on her lover—only makes sense when readers understand her mindset as the daughter sent away by her mother. Sent away by both her mother and lover, Florens cannot make sense of the past to create a new life, even in freedom. Nonetheless, in this desperate act of violence, Florens rebels against the limitations of societal behavior, taking action and refusing to accept abandonment yet again. The tragedy, of course, is that Florens’s mother was trying to save her daughter (and likewise her lover was simply being kind to an abandoned boy), but, without that crucial piece of information from her enslaved mother, Florens does not learn to navigate relationships or learn to trust—and so the innocent and self-martyring act of rescue from the mother becomes also an act of violence, setting in motion her daughter’s future brutality and ultimate self-destruction. Similarly, in Sula, readers see again how emotional trauma via mother violence can affect the development of social empathy and compassion, thereby creating subsequent generations of violent females. The pain Sula feels upon discovering her mother’s opinion of her damages the young girl’s self-concept, preparing Sula to become a violent and distant teenager and adult. Sula’s first realization of her mother’s apathy to her segues into a scene of accidental violence toward another child and later into a coldness toward death in general. After Sula hears her mother, Hannah, explain that, while she had maternal feelings for Sula, she did not like her, Sula feels “bewilderment . . . [and] a sting in her eye” (Morrison 1982, 57). Interestingly, Hannah, asks
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