Sethe struggles daily with the haunting legacy of slavery, in the form of her threatening memories and also in the form of her daughter’s aggressive ghost. For Sethe, the present is mostly a struggle to beat back the past, because the memories of her daughter’s death and the experiences at Sweet Home are too painful for her to recall consciously, “Winter in Ohio was especially rough if you had an appetite for color. Sky provided the only drama, and counting on a Cincinnati horizon for life's principal joy was reckless indeed. So Sethe and the girl Denver did what they could, and what the house permitted, for her. Together …show more content…
Sethe was uneducated. She did not have a reasonable way of dealing with an instantaneous problem because of her ignorance. When the schoolteacher came to 124 Bluestone searching for Sethe and her children, she became confused, frightened and illogical. She was utterly helpless. There was no aid for her. In a fit of frightened confusion, she killed Beloved hoping that her dead daughter would not have to undergo the psychologically torturous experiences of sexual assault and rape. She is hunted by the ghost of her daughter, Beloved. Sethe is a strong woman who lives under an oppressive cultural and social system that does not permit her to be nurtured or to nurture others reliably. Sethe was hurt severely. Sethe understands the horrors of slavery in its most intimate violations, the violations of family trust between mother and child. She also understands the violation of being treated as an animal and is determined that her own children will not endure the treatment she has received at the hands of white slaveholders. Since she believed that the next world would be a safer place than this one, she tried to kill all her children rather than seeing them grows up in slavery. Even though she believed she was acting reasonably and in good faith, she also knew that she had a right to take her baby's life. As a result, she is haunted by guilt …show more content…
She lost her husband where, how and why she does not know. Frightened by the murder of Beloved by their mother, her two sons ran away from her. When the community at 124 Bluestone knew about the trial of Sethe on charge of murder, she was ostracized by her community. Therefore, she lived in isolation. In her small house across the 124 Bluestone Road she lived a life ravaged by alienation, corroded by ostracism, crushed by her repressed erstwhile suffering. By her mother's inability to care for her because of the slave environment in which they lived; taken from her mother as an infant, she only saw her a few times in her life. As a result, she has pitifully few bits and pieces of memory of her mother. As an adult, Sethe understands that her mother was constrained by slavery and, therefore, literally unable to tend to her. As a child, however, she could not understand the lack of attention she received from her mother. She felt only abandonment and