Sethe's choice: 'Beloved' and the ethics of reading

Style, Summer, 1998 by James Phelan

This inability to fix a position on the central action complicates our relation to Sethe as the central actor without disrupting our sympathy for her. Sethe becomes a character who was once pushed beyond the limits of human endurance and reacted to that pushing in this extraordinary way. Consequently, we turn our judgment on the institution that pushed her beyond the limits: slavery. It is of course easy to say that slavery is evil, but it's another thing for readers in the late twentieth century - especially white readers - to feel the force of that statement, to comprehend the effects of slavery on individual human lives. Morrison's treatment of Sethe's rough choice moves readers toward such comprehension: in the space where we wrestle with the ethical dilemma presented by Sethe's choice, we must imaginatively engage with Sethe's instinctive decision that, when faced with the prospect of slavery, loving her children means murdering them. Such engagement transforms slavery from an abstract evil to a palpable one. Such engagement is also crucial to Morrison's larger purpose of challenging her audience to come to terms with slavery's continuing effects on the United States.(8)

At the level of author-audience communication, Morrison's unusual treatment of Sethe's choice also creates an unusual ethical relationship with her audience. The treatment is simultaneously a challenge and a compliment. She challenges us to have the negative capability to refrain from any irritable reaching after ethical closure about Sethe's rough choice, even as that challenge implies her faith that we will be equal to the task. Morrison's treatment retains the basic reciprocal relation between author and audience that underlies the ethical dimension of their communication, but it gives a new twist to that reciprocity. By limiting her guidance, Morrison gives up some authorial responsibility and transfers it to the audience. By accepting that responsibility - and attending to the parameters within which Morrison asks us to exercise it - we have a more difficult and demanding but also richer reading experience. By guiding us less, Morrison gives us more. By exercising the responsibility Morrison transfers to us, we get more out of what she offers. For this flesh and blood reader, this ethical relationship is a key reason Beloved is one of the most unsettling and most rewarding narratives I have ever read.

Notes

1 In the eleven years since its publication, Beloved has attracted a great deal of critical attention, becoming the subject of over two hundred books and articles, yet no one, to my knowledge, has directly addressed the ethics of Sethe's choice. The existing criticism is especially strong on the novel's many thematic components from history and memory to motherhood and identity as well as on its relation to previous American narratives and its mingling of Western and African cultural values. For a sample of this work, see Christian, Handley (on Western and African culture), Armstrong, Moreland, Travis (on relation to previous traditions), Hirsch, Wilt, Wyatt (on motherhood and its related issues), and Hartman and Moglen (on history and memory). For essays that focus on issues of narrative theory and technique, see Homans, Rimmon-Kenan, and Phelan.