PTSD In Beloved

“Her brain was not interested in the future. Loaded with the past and hungry for more, it left no room to imagine, let alone plan for more, the next day” (Morrison, 70). In Toni Morrison's novel Beloved, she captures the emotion and anguish that those enslaved in America experienced and allows her readers to understand it through her words. Sethe’s past experiences literally haunt her and prevent her from being able to move on to the future because even though she was not physically someone’s slave, she still has to deal with her psychological PTSD. The suffering she felt as a slave, getting her milk stolen, and murdering her own child interfered with her ability to get up and move on to a brighter future. Every step she took, every choice
Sethe did not want her children to go through the same experiences that she went through, so she felt that the only way to prevent that from happening is to kill her. Even though she only killed one of her children, Beloved, it was one of the biggest mistakes she could have ever made. “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom” (Morrison, 3). Beloved haunting 124 was only the start of Sethe’s problems. Having to live in a home with the angry spirit of the child that you killed is hard to move on from. “Anything dead coming back to life hurts” (Morrison, 35). Beloved was dead and when she came back as a human it caused Sethe so much pain. “Like a familiar, she hovered, never leaving the room Sethe was in unless required and told to” (Morrison, 68). When Beloved comes back, she slowly starts sucking the life force out of Sethe like a leach. She always wanted all of Sethe’s attention, much like a baby who needs to constantly be around her mother. Having Beloved consistently around made it extremely hard for Sethe to move on from what she did in the
Being a slave and getting rapped made her want to kill her children so that they never have to go through something that horrific. She thought she made the right choice, but her mistake came back to literally haunt her. She tried to make up for killing Beloved by trying to always make her happy when she came back in human form, but that ended up hurting more than it was helping anyone. It seemed that everytime Sethe tried moving on from the past and trying to look at the future ahead, something was always in