Trauma In Toni Morrison's Beloved

Trauma can be defined as: an occurrence so disturbing and painful it never seems to leave ones mind, leaving an emotional scar for life. There is an abundance of trauma within the pages of Beloved by Toni Morrison, but there are three specific instances that can be dissected and are extremely unique to the text in terms of language and what the author is conveying. These three instances are when Sethe is sexually assaulted by the teacher’s nephew, when Paul D almost drowns in the mud while in prison, and when Sethe kills Beloved to save her. With regards to the first instance, it is the general view that no matter who you are being sexually assaulted would be a traumatic experience. Being violated in any place that is private to yourself
The three (no four-because she’d had the one coming when she cut) pickaninnies they had hoped were alive and well enough to take back to Kentucky, take back and raise properly to do the work Sweet Home desperately needed, were not. Two were lying open-eyed in sawdust; a third pumped blood down the dress of the main one-the woman schoolteacher bragged about, the one he said made find ink, damn good soup, pressed his collars the way he liked besides having at least ten breeding years left. But now she’s gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew who’d overbeat her and made her cut and run.” (Morrison, 175-176) This passage is extremely lengthy but fertile in language and in analyzing. For starters, the beginning of the passage describes the shed where Sethe and her children were when the slave catchers came to take her and her children away. It notes how the boys were bleeding, showing a sign of weakness, and there was another blood soaked child Sethe was holding to her chest. Then, it shows her trying to hurt the baby and put it out of the misery it would be in if forced into slavery describing her swinging the baby against the planks of the shed, or at least attempting to but missing and luckily a boy coming in just in the nick of time. Then, Morrison goes on to give the schoolteacher’s point of view that he thinks Sethe and her children have all gone mad and that they are definitely not worthy of bringing back to Sweet Home. He attributes their madness to, none other than his nephew, who was the one who sexually assaulted Sethe in the first place, and thus caused her trauma that led to more trauma in killing her child to protect that child from the trauma the nephew invoked on