Sethe's and My Mirrored Emotions

As with nearly all stories, there is always a central message that eventually is unveiled. Beloved is no exception. It brings nothing but truth and insight into the challenging, unimaginable, and impossibly relatable experience of slavery. Its finely layered revelations produce many stories depending on the angle with which they are peeled away. For me, it is with a feminist lens that I have found meaning in the novel. 

Thus far, the story has defined one very clear thing for me; within the experience, slavery for a women is far from the same as slavery for a man. Toni Morrison speaks to an aspect of slavery that I have never contemplated before. It is that, from the experiences Sethe has faced so far in the book, she and the rest of the black female population enslaved had to endure multiple levels of internal and external conflicts that exceeded men's by miles. 

With this understanding, I'm not attempting to undermine the extreme strife men had to endure while enslaved, dehumanized, and treated like another piece of livestock. But in my opinion, stripped from the stereotypical role of a female, enslaved women had to overcome challenges that conflicted with one another violently. As Sethe's experience explains, the maternal instinct to protect an additional individual conflicted with the self-preservation mentality that was forced upon all those who were enslaved when treated like animals. In either outcome, whether it was taking on the extra burden of caring and protecting the life of another human being, or bearing through the incomprehensible emotional hardship of letting one's own child die, the added challenges brought upon enslaved women gave them an undeniable strength and dominance not seen before. 

Without a doubt, it is impossible to ever say an experience of mine has compared to Sethe's, or any enslaved women's, on the same level. Nor can I ever relate on a maternal level to the responsibility or self hatred that accompanies mothering a child, or letting it die. What I connect with, is the struggle women unanimously face when dealing with adversity. What I see in myself, and see in Sethe's character, is the strife of how to combat our emotions. I bury my true emotions as deep and as far from my conscience as possible as form of security, but also as a way to appear strong. The last thing I want to do is fall in line with the ever so cliche stereotype of being an emotionally vulnerable girl. But like Sethe, I find it completely unfair, and find it a completely unique circumstance just for women, that we have to balance those two conflicting goals in the first place. Her and I alike are still searching for a solution.