Maternal Love In Tony Morrison's Beloved

Toni Morrison is one of the most famous and prominent writers in contemporary American literature. In 1993, she was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature for she "gives life to an essential aspect of American reality" through "novels characterized by visionary force and poetic import." Morrison is the eighth woman and the first black woman to do so, and her works are well-known for vivid images, copious emotions and profound thoughts. Her works are always presented on behalf of the black women and full of tragedies. With a special sensitivity of a black writer, Morrison examines the obstacle that the value of white society imposed on the development of black culture and the distortion of black humanity. Meanwhile, she also reveals the exclusion and harm caused by the black community and the blacks suffering psychological torture in racial discrimination society vividly and incisively. It discloses the tragic adversity of American black people before the abolishment of the slavery. Her masterpiece—the Pulitzer-awarded novel Beloved which has become the enduring classic in contemporary literature is the most shocking one. The main plot of the novel is based on a true historical event. It narrates a stunning story: Nineteen-year-old Sethe, a pregnant slave mother escaped from Sweet Home—the plantation in Kentucky to seek asylum in Cincinnati, and she had sent her three children safely with their grandmother in advance. But unfortunately, the pursuers wanted to capture them a few days later. She decided to kill all her children so that they would not have to suffer the way she had as a slave. She succeeded in slashing the throat of the two- year-old baby girl and was caught and serves a prison sentence. Eighteen years later, Beloved as a baby ghost came to haunt her mother's house at 124 Bluestone Road to take revenge and obtain love from her mother.Sethe, the protagonist of novel, struggling and resisting by exceeding and ambivalent way, devoted all her life to her children. Although Sethe loves her children deeply, she has to kill her daughter faced with the deprivation of maternal love. This approximate crazy abnormal maternity is immersed in a mother's tears and helplessness, full of muted complaint to the slavery system. Beloved challenged the traditional values of maternal love and gives a good interpretation of maternal love through destruction. Many experts and scholars began to analyze and research the novel since it was published, some focused on black culture, some focused on feminism or racial mutilation. However, this paper tries to analyze the five stages of the protagonist's maternal love and explore the different forms of representation which reflect the complexity of maternal love in a specific historical period and social setting.