Black Feminism in Beloved - Essay Example

The main character in Morrison’s piece( Sethe), embodies not only an individual who struggles in life due to her race but also who struggles due to her gender.  Sethe is not only a slave but a female slave. Like many who were victims of slavery, Sethe endured a great deal of suffering and torment, but specifically so as a female slave.Sethe comes to a place in the novel where she is able to escape for a time. She has her freedom but only for a period of time just under a month. Sethe comes to a point at which no mother wants to find herself.

She comes to a juncture where she decides that killing her children would be better than to subject them to a life like the one she has led. She is only successful in killing her youngest child, however, and is ultimately is haunted by that child later in the story. Her other three children are also haunted by the death of their sibling which delivers a message of consequence onto children based on the actions of their mother. In other words, Sethe is placed in a position in which she feels she has no choice but to kill her children.

This is an agonizing example of what women in Sethe’s situation are capable of, primarily because there are simply no other options, as far as they can see. For centuries, women have had to make decisions similar to the one Sethe felt she had to make. In the face of extreme violence or danger, a mother will go to great lengths to protect or defend her child. In the time of the Holocaust, Jewish women with multiple children would often kill their infants in order to keep the SS officers from detecting all of the children due to the crying of the one infant.

Decisions like this are impossible but are often ones that only a mother would have to make.