Beloved

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slave owners but Sethe does eventually manage to escape without Halle. Sethe makes it out of Kentucky and gave birth to “Denver” the night before she crosses the river to Ohio. For 28 days Sethe and her children happily live with Halle’s mother, Baby Suggs, but she is soon found by the slave-owner who had come to retrieve them. To avoid a return to slavery, Sethe decides to kill her children and herself. She is only able to kill her toddler, later known as “”. At the novel and films opening, which takes place after slavery has been abolished, the entire family is tortured by the ghost of the baby girl haunting the house, and the Black Community has turned their back on Sethe for her seemingly horrendous actions. Observations The character Sethe is presented as a former slave woman who chooses to kill her baby girl rather than allowing the child to be exposed to the physically, emotionally, and spiritually oppressive horrors of a life spent in the confines of slavery. Sethe’s ...

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strange thing about her statement lies in what she does not say. She omits the terrible fact that her moral stand was based upon the murder of her child. This presents clarity to the aspect that Sethe has totally detached herself from her actions. Even when Paul D. learns of what Sethe has done and confronts her with it, Sethe still avoids the reality of her own selfishness. Sethe describes her reasoning to Paul D., “…So when I got here, even before they let me out of bed, I stitched her a little something from a piece of cloth Baby Suggs had. Well, all I’m saying is that’s a selfish pleasure I never had before. I couldn’t let all that go back to where it was, and I couldn’t let her or ...

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