Like Mother, Like Daughter: A Beloved Analysis

In Beloved, Toni Morrison explores the complicated relationships between mothers and children. The use of flashback and perspective comparison reveals how Sethe’s brief and broken bond with her mother translated to the distance in her relationship with Denver and to some extent, the girl Beloved. Sethe did not have a strong, impressionable bond with her mother, remembering/identifiying her not by her face, but by a brand upon her breast. However, in a flashback, Sethe remembers a woman named Nan telling her as a small child that her mother “threw them all away but [her]” (74). The word “them” refers to the other children Sethe’s mother bore, sired by white men who raped her. By describing Sethe’s mother as “thr[owing] them all away,” Morrison dehumanizes the other children, almost as objects of little importance, like trash. Simultaneously, this charactarization shows that Sethe was the only child her mother loved like an actual child, the only one not forsaken. Sethe describes her reaction to the story as a child as “unimpressed” (74), but goes on to say that “as grown-up woman Sethe, she was angry, but not certain at what” (74). The word “unimpressed” shows that as a child, Sethe probably could not understand the nuance of the tale. As an adult, however, Sethe describes her feelings as “angry,” possibly because as an adult with children of her own, she now mentally understands depth of love in her mother’s actions, but emotionally cannot reconcile the woman whose face she barely knew with a woman who would save her above countless other misborn children. By comparing these two viewpoints—child and adult—Morrison reveals how Sethe’s feelings have changed as she has aged to have children of her own. Finally, as Sethe looks towards Denver and Beloved, she says that “they seemed little and far away” (74). Sethe only realizes this percieved—as explefied in the word “seemed”—distance between her and her daughter after remembering her own relationship with her mother, and perhaps seeing the similarites between the two. In this scene, Toni Morrison appears to imply that part of the distance between Sethe and Denver as mother and daugher stems from Sethe’s complicated relationship with her mother: a woman she barely knew.