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Jean Wyatt (1993)
Giving Body to the Word: The Maternal Symbolic in Toni Morrison's BelovedPMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 108
Comparative Critical Studies 2, 3, pp. 365â80 © BCLA 2005 CHAPTER TWO Toni Morrisonâs novel Beloved revolves around one central act: a runaway slave, Sethe, cuts the throat of her infant daughter rather than let her be taken back to slavery. Schoolteacher, the slavemaster who has come to reclaim them, attributes Setheâs reaction to a beating one of his nephews gave her before she ran away: But now sheâd gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew whoâd overbeat her and made her cut and run. Schoolteacher had chastised that nephew, telling him to think â just think â what would his own horse do if you beat it beyond the point of education? ⦠you just canât mishandle creatures and expect success. (pp. 149â50)1 However, for Sethe, it is not the nephewâs beating but rather Schoolteacherâs classification of her as animal that makes slavery ultimately unbearable. She recognises that this classification undergirds every atrocity committed against her as a slave. She knows that it is the fact that Schoolteacherâs nephews saw her as âthe cow, no, the goat, back behind the stable because it was too nasty to stay in with the horsesâ (p. 200) that
Comparative Critical Studies – Edinburgh University Press
Published: Oct 1, 2005
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