In Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved, the conditions of the environment that Sethe grew up in while a slave strongly affected her personality and the way she viewed the world. For the first eighteen or so years of her life, Sethe lived as a slave in the South. She was born into slavery, her mother, assumably already a slave when Sethe was conceived. No mentions are made of her father as a child, but Sethe hardly made any contact with her mother. Their time together was so little that he mother showed her the brand on her torso so that if she were to die, Sethe would be able to identify her as her mother. By having such a scarce relationship with her mother while watching as she’s worked to death like a farm animal, a sense of depersonalization is given when it comes to Sethe’s relationship with her mother, which is magnified when her mother is no longer mentioned throughout the rest of this text.
Eventually when Sethe reaches her teens, she is sold off to Sweet Home. At her arrival, she was the only girl on the plantation, which left her male counterparts expecting her to choose one of them to marry. It takes her over a year, but when she finally chose Hal, it was revealed that she chose him because of how he treated his mother, working every Sunday for five years to buy her freedom. Her reasoning in choosing Hal showed that, despite not having much of one herself, that Sethe highly valued one’s relationship with their mother, which contributes to her strong desire to be the best mother that she could be.
The theme of motherhood is more evident in the text when Sethe has her own children. After having her children, protecting them became the most important thing to her, which leads to her escape from Sweet Home. Growing up as a slave, Sethe had suffered years of abuse and dehumanization, from sexual assault to being openly compared to an animal by her slave owners. Her constant abuse left her traumatized, and once her boys started getting close to the age in which they could be sold, she realized that if she didn’t take actions into her own hands, all of her children would be subjected to the same life, the same abuse, that she had been experiencing her whole life.
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The conditions in which Sethe was raised under, motivated her to leave Sweet Home in order to provide a better life for her children. Despite leaving Sweet home, her traumas continued to haunt her, as when her family is threatened to be put back into slavery, she murders her youngest child Beloved, and attempts to murder the rest of her children. While this would typically be considered an inhumane act, Sethe saw is as an act of love; protecting her children from slavery was the equivalent of protecting them from the worst fate possible.
Eighteen years away from Sweet Home managed to change Sethe dramatically; not in the sense of her attitude towards motherhood, but in her ability to protect her children. Living independently with the support of her family, Sethe was able to grow to protect her children from foreseen threats without killing them, which is shown at the end of the novel when she attacked who she believed to be Schoolteacher, instead of Beloved’s reincarnated form. With that action, Sethe shows the strength of motherhood that she never saw as a child.
