Deformed Motherhood—A Psychoanalytic Study Of Sethe's Infanticide In Beloved

Toni Morrison is the most spectacular superstar in today's African-American literary circle.In 1993,Toni Morrison was awarded the Noble Prize for literature,becoming the first honored African-American writer.Beloved,written in 1987,is Morrison's most influential masterpiece,which is considered as the most classic in American contemporary literature.The book takes Cincinnati,Ohio,America in 1873 as the context,telling the life of slave Sethe escaping from slave owner' s farm and her daughter Denver;they live an almost-isolated life in a haunted house.The novel reveals Sethe's crazy infanticide of her daughter,Beloved,out of deformed maternal love.This paper attempts to analyze Beloved from psychoanalytic perspective,especially the theory of Personality Structure of Freud,taking Sethe' s infanticide as the main object and researching Sethe's psychological mechanism from three aspects:deformed maternal love,infanticide and liberation.Psychoanalytic perspective always explores the inner world of characters,including id,ego,superego,hysteric trauma and so on.Freud divides personality structure into three parts:id,ego and superego.Under the influence of trauma,maternal love of black women becomes twisted and Sethe loses maternal love.Sethe' s id reflects in the pursuit of freedom,humanity and maternal love,which is in conflict with social reality;however,Sethe's ego is releasing maternal love which is reflected in Sethe' s deformed maternal love to her daughters;finally,Sethe fulfills infanticide under the influence of superego.Denver's maturity and Beloved's disappearance have positive effect on Sethe' s psyche liberation,making her recover from trauma and gain triumph of ego.This thesis contains six chapters:Chapter One is the introduction.Toni Morrison and the novel Beloved are introduced in this part.What's more,the purpose and the framework of this thesis are included in this part.Chapter two is about the literature review both at home and abroad.Chapter three mainly analyzes Sethe's id,which includes eagerness for maternal love and freedom.It is one of the reasons of infanticide.Chapter four attempts to analyze Sethe' s ego which is deformed maternal love.Chapter five is the key part which is about Sethe's superego—infanticide.It analyzes Sethe' s killing of her just-crawling daughter out of control from psychoanalytic analysis.The last part of the paper is the conclusion.This research applies related psychoanalytic theories especially the Personality Structure to explore the essence of Sethe's maternal love.The evil of slavery causes psychological trauma to black slaves,making them hard to find themselves and enjoy life.Black slaves should unite,seek their spiritual home and build their own bravely-new world.By providing a new interpretation on Sethe,s psyche of maternal love from psychoanalytic perspective,this thesis hopes to contribute the academic research on the novel.The thesis is also expected to broaden both readers' and critics' comprehension of the novel and psychoanalytic theory.