the problematics of motherhood in twentieth century women's fiction

than enslavement at the hands of the brutal slave-owners
Sethe argues that by killing her baby, she kept her safe
5 2
from the dehumanization of slavery
The children are her
only self, her "best thingsu - she clalms she wouldn't draw
breath without her children and she wlll destroy rather than
surrender them.
that allows her
Sethe's 'thick-love" is an excessive love
to destroy what she has created, to deny
lrfe to her own chlld.
Even Paul D, who knows Sethe's
reasons, finds them hard to accept
He is so horrlfled when
he flnally learns about her crime that he leaves her for a
tlme, telllng her that she has two legs, not four
lmplies that she was beastly xn kllllng the baby,
When he
Sethe
asks, who was the beast? Her alm 1s only to keep Beloved out
of the hands of an owner who would see her only as an
an~mal
Paul D however 1s incapable of understanding
maternal loss, and how the potentlal for loss could compel a
slave woman to become both vlctlm and an agent of a daemonlc
desire for famlllal survival. Beloved, however, understands
her mother's mot:ve when she returns as a ghost elghteen
years later What she could not see as a "crawling -
already?" baby, she is now able to see as an adult, that her
mother's action was lndeed one of love
2.2.3.5. This sllent and acquiescent yet potentially
destructive mother is able to see beyond her mother - role
Only towards the end of the novel when she loses her