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

Style, Summer, 1998 by James Phelan

Inside, two boys bled in the sawdust and dirt at the feet of a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other. She did not look at them; she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time, when out of nowhere - in the ticking time the men spent staring at what there was to stare at - the old nigger boy, still mewing, ran through the door behind them and snatched the baby from the arch of its mother's swing.

Right off, it was clear, to schoolteacher especially, that there was nothing there to claim. [. . .S]he'd gone wild, due to the mishandling of the nephew who'd overbeat her and made her cut and run. Schoolteacher had chastised that nephew, telling him to thin - just think - what would his own horse do if you beat it to beyond the point of education. Or Chipper, or Samson. Suppose you beat the hounds past that point thataway. Never again could you trust them in the woods or anywhere else. You'd be feeding them maybe, holding out a piece of rabbit in your hand and the animal would revert - bite your hand clean off. [. . .] The whole lot was lost now. Five. He could claim the baby struggling in the arms of the mewing old man, but who'd tend her? Because the woman - something was wrong with her. She was looking at him now, and if his other nephew could see that look he would learn the lesson for sure: you just can't mishandle creatures and expect success. (149-50)

By unraveling the mystery this way, Morrison provides a highly unsettling experience for the audience. After seeing Sethe from the inside for so long, we feel emotionally, psychologically - and ethically - jarred by seeing her from what is such an alien perspective, one that thinks of her as "a nigger woman" and as a "creature" equivalent to a horse or a hound. Indeed, Morrison has chosen to narrate this first telling from an ethical perspective that we easily repudiate. Not only does schoolteacher regard Sethe as a dog who no longer trusts its master, but he is also concerned only with himself and his loss, not at all with Sethe or her children. Strikingly, however, Morrison's strategy of moving away from Sethe's perspective and describing her actions from the outside highlights both the inadequacy of schoolteacher's racist perspective and the horror of what Sethe is doing: "holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an infant by the heels in the other [. . .] she simply swung the baby toward the wall planks, missed and tried to connect a second time." If the shift in perspective is jarring, the revelation of Sethe's action is shocking. The physical description is not pretty, and it is not possible to find a way to make it pretty. At the same time, the physical description is not loaded with any ethical evaluation from Morrison. Instead, she just leaves it out there uncorrected - the description may be from the slave catcher's angle of vision, but there is no sign that the angle distorts his view of the physical action - and asks us to come to terms with it on our own.