A person’s memories and past can often disturb their ways of life. Tragic occurrences experienced by others are influential factors on the choices people make everyday. In Beloved by Toni Morrison, there are multiple characters displayed that act a certain way because of their dreadful pasts.
Setha is the protagonist of Beloved, and a former slave who hardly knew anything about her mother. Setha is determined to prove her competent motherhood skills, however a past incident does not let her fully achieve this goal.
As I analyzed Beloved through the feminist lens, I saw how the character of Setha was mentally abused by her own “flashbacks” throughout the text. These unpleasant flashbacks tied her to her dreadful past. Even after she was no longer a slave, she did not feel like a free person.
When Seth was young and lived in the planation of Sweet Home in Kentucky, she was raped by the nephews of Schoolteacher(her master at the plantation). Constant sexual and physical abuse forced Setha to think differently after her time as a slave. This incident from her childhood sparked her to have tough love for the men in her life and her children as well. At one point of the novel, Paul D thinks to himself “Risky, thought Paul D, very risky. For a used-to-be-slave woman to love anything that much was dangerous, especially if it was her children she had settled on to love” (chapter 4). This phrase shows how slavery impacted these characters in the book negatively. They began to think that if you loved something too much it was bad. Past traumatic incidents can force anyone to believe their life must be exempted from certain things. In this case it was loving something too much, because it was something Paul or Setha were not used to.
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