On The Maternal Love In Beloved

Toni Morrison, the 1993 Nobel Prize Winner of Literature, is one of the most distinguished black woman writers in American literature canon. Beloved, one of her best novels, is based on a real historical occurrence. According to historical documents, a slave mother, Margret Garner, killed her daughter and tried to kill herself when the slave owner came to capture them. Morrison is stimulated by the reporting and determines to find what is the essence that a loving mother had to use a handsaw to her own child while claiming it is salvation and maternal love. In Beloved, Morrison centers on exploring the psychology of the protagonist, Sethe, to tell a slave mother's painful experience under slavery system. She also resolves around exploring the maternal love and to what extent it was damaged under the specific circumstance—slavery. This thesis tends to analyze the character Sethe in the perspective of feminism, focusing on the essence of her maternal love and how her"too thick"maternal love influences her daughters.This thesis will be conducted in five parts.Introduction gives a brief presentation to Beloved, focusing on the plot, the source, and the literary reviews of Beloved. The feminist views on motherhood and the metaphor about maternal love is presented as background information for the following analysis.Chapter One analyses Sethe's experience and her maternal loss and trauma, explores how maternal love has been affected and distorted by slavery and how Morrison has let the maternal body speak for the unspeakable and concludes the causes of Sethe's infanticide, the disastrous consequence of violated maternal love by slavery.Chapter Two shifts to analyze the other characters'function to heal Sethe's maternal loss and trauma in Beloved. Morrison emphasizes the function of black community on healing individuals.Chapter Three analyses the paradoxes of mother-daughter relationship in Beloved, which concerns with the great black mother subverted by slavery and an over-close bond between mother and daughters. The author maintains that Morrison reminds her readers that mother plays important roles in handing down the cultural heritage, and that the after generations are responsible for remembering their mother's history so as to heal themselves and better face the future.Conclusion shows that Morrison conveys a message that African-American women are the ground of wisdom and protection, and the culture transmitters who hand down African cultural tradition from one generation to another.