“O Lord, she thought, deliver me. Unless care free, motherlover was a killer.” (Beloved, page132)
In many ways Baby Sugg’s relationship with her kids is a contrast to the relationship that Sethe has with her kids. Baby Suggs experience as a slave included the loss of seven of her eight children and also included serving her master sexually. Baby Suggs spent the rest of her life in bed, mourning over everything that happened while she was a slave. Unlike Baby Suggs, Sethe understood that while she was at Sweet Home, her children did not belong to her, which intern made her not love them. This made Sethe fight for her kids and she escaped Sweet Home.
When comparing both relationships you can see that Baby Suggs never fought for her children. I believe that this is the underling difference between Baby Suggs and Sethe. From the beginning, Sethe wanted to be a nursing mother, while she was at Sweet Home but Schoolteacher and his nephews took way that right from her by stealing her milk. By not being there for her kids and with Sethe’s experience as a slave her maternal protective impulse grew stronger, when Schoolteacher came to take her and her kids back to Sweet Home. To protect them and to keep them out of slavery, Sethe attempts to murder her children.
This is true. Baby Suggs was never a caring mother because she never really got the chance. She was always a slave until he last and only child was old enough to buy her freedom. While Baby Suggs was her children as other property, and Sethe's mother saw her children as outcomes of these horrible circumstances-all of these mothers have in common that one child made a huge difference in love. Sethe being alive was because Sethe's mother loved Sethe's father, so then she loved Sethe. Baby Suggs did not know real love till she saw it through her last and only child Halle who gave her something she never thought she could want, but really was the most important part of her life. And Sethe love Beloved to the point of where she knew that death was a better option for her than slavery and everything Sethe herself had been through.
ReplyDeleteI agree with what Allison said about how the two women (Baby Suggs and Sethe) saw their children. While in slavery, Sethe knew that her children did not belong to her. Baby Suggs knew this as well. But, the difference is that Sethe knew that she had to get her children out of slavery in order for them to be rightfully hers. She wanted a chance to love her children with her whole heart, and she knew she couldn't do that while in slavery.
ReplyDeleteUnfortunately, I feel as though Baby Suggs never saw that connection. She was never able to fully love her children, and I think that idea is very important to her development as a character.
It's not that Sethe and Baby Suggs didn't love their children, as you said, it is because they could not love them freely. They were not free and could not love and be loved like a free person can because someone owned them and not even their heart beat was their own. Baby Suggs did not have the opportunity to love her children like Sethe did after she left Sweet Home and did not understand that Sethe killed her baby girl because she loved her so much. Baby Suggs only saw pain in her life. Everything and everyone hurt her. All her children were taken from her which is why she gave up in the last years of her life. Sethe was a mother first and would not let her children be taken away from her and to have to live as she had lived in slavery.
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