Motherhood Might Matter

Terry Paul Caesar posits many ideas regarding what Beloved tells about motherhood in the essay "Slavery and Motherhood in Tony Morrison's Beloved." Motherhood, she says, is when a mother owns a daughter and the daughter owns the mother. This situation is corrupted, however, by slavery because it conditions the participants to despise the fealty owed to the other party. She also comments on how Sethe and Beloved specifically interact: Sethe feels guilt about the perceived lack of love she had for her children, and Beloved feels spiteful for not having that love, so they go about in a self-contained cycle of reminding each other in their pain until they are essentially the same broken person.

Though she thoroughly explored the mother-daughter relationship between Sethe and Beloved, Caesar does not much address Denver's spurred claim to Sethe. Though she does say that Beloved's need for Sethe is all-consuming and "tyrannical," she doesn't account for Denver's need which isn't stimulation from her mother but stimulation from her "sister." The relationship between daughter and mother, while always having the potential to be a strongly justified slavery to one another, is not so in many cases. As Denver can find entertainment in sources other than her mother, I don't have a very close relationship with any of my family and instead rely on friends to connect with others or feel contractual responsibilities. By that I mean that the same dual-ownership situation described by Caesar is what I encounter in friendship, since I feel that both parties in a friendship have a responsibility to help one another. Overall, though I found this essay a very interesting and topical analysis of Beloved, I believe the exploration of more situations than just those found in the book or worst-case scenarios could have lead to a more nuanced analysis of motherhood.