Abuse Of Women In Garner's Sweet Home Plantation

readers could feel that men are more open to psychological damage than women. This is proved with Paul D’s flashbacks. Sethe and Paul D being the victims, the perpetrators are the schoolteacher, the sadistic man in charge of the Sweet Home Plantation, men in the chain gang and Beloved, being the female abuser.
The multiple forms of rape starts with Sethe as a normal clichéd abuse in the place where she grew Sweet Home Plantation where she was abused by the schoolteacher, a sadistic man who was in charge of the plantation house whom no one suspected until he showed up with his two boys. The schoolteacher doesn’t seem to come out as a frightening cause to the men in Garner’s house but unexpectedly, he ruins it all for all of them.
“I am full
God damn it of two boys with mossy teeth, one sucking on my breast the other holding me down, their book-reading teacher watching and writing it up.” Beloved, (70)
When Sethe opens up to Paul D about her chokecherry tree, she tells him about how the schoolteacher and his boys took her milk. It’s more like living it all again for her because the typical Sethe would always think and live in the past. She keeps on living that day for over eighteen years, every day without forgetting. One important thing to notice here is that she reremembers this incident not because she was raped but because she couldn’t feed her baby girl who was waiting for her. “After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s why they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em. She had that lump and couldn’t speak but her eyes rolled out tears. Them boys found out I told on em. Schoolteacher made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.” Sethe, (20-21)
Sethe as a mother is more sensitive than the Sethe who’s a woman.
Sethe, when she utters “Nobody was going to nurse her like me…nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me.” (19) This explains us how she never had a chance to be with her mother, to have a real mother-daughter quality time. Being an over obsessive mother to her sons and daughters is because she didn’t want them to go through the things that she went through. And this elucidates that Sethe thought process of killing her baby girl is the only way of protecting her baby girl from being raped in future just like her. A mother’s instinct is a dangerous thing because a mother cannot be wrong about her gut feeling. Just as Sethe predicted, Beloved after eighteen years when returned, she was beautiful, shining and glowing with soft hands and slippery feet with no cracks on her heels. If Beloved was given a chance to live her life by Sethe, she would have probably gone through the same thing as her ma’am or even worse. Now, how this tells us anything about Sethe psychologically affected? Her body is healed, her scars are closed; it is bygone, it happened eighteen years before. Does that mean she got over the incident that changed all those lives that surrounded her? Sethe recalls the day she got raped by the two boys and how they stole her milk. For eighteen long years she pretends to have forgotten her slave life, her abuse, and her wounds. But in reality, every day she relives it and it is not easy to set
back such a memory and continue to live a normal life. “What she knew was that the responsibility for her breasts, at last, was in somebody else’s hands.” Beloved, (21)
As a woman, she knew that being a black woman, that too a slave she had to lose her own self one day without her consent.
She accepted this fact and what she couldn’t accept was that she couldn’t feed her baby girl, couldn’t try to protect her breasts which already were in
the