A Beloved Tale of Black Motherhood

Motherhood can be a beautiful and natural experience that sculpts the path of life and creation as we understand it to be. Motherhood is a journey that comes with some immense hardships along the way, and as it exists in American culture, there is no shortage of prejudice against mothers and how they are supposed to mother. Toni Morrison was a Nobel Prize winning author who put in heart and soul above all else to create her art. Beloved is a novel that details the impact of the legacy of slavery and the tribulations of black motherhood. As one of Morrisons' most captivating works, Beloved is a story crafted with the purpose of both enlightening and moving its readers.

With any gender specific role, there are always going to be some questions as to where they came from, who they benefit, and who they hurt. Motherhood is a gendered role in more than one way because of the different forms that it may take. There is motherhood and there is fatherhood, and on the surface, these can be seen as the journey a woman takes when she takes on the responsibility of a child versus the journey a man takes when he takes on the responsibility of a child. One may assume that motherhood is not a gendered construct because of the biology that it sometimes entails. To try and understand why motherhood is a gendered construct within our culture one has to grasp the duality and flexibility of what motherhood really is. Motherhood is not just giving birth to a child and raising it, motherhood is a responsibility to care for and nurture a life whether or not you created it. Being a woman who gives birth is not a gendered construct, but motherhood is, and this is because of the unwritten rules and expectations placed on mothers. As with any construct created by a patriarchal culture, the drawbacks are heavily geared towards women.

"Grown don't mean nothing to a mother. A child is a child. They get bigger, older, but grown? What's that supposed to mean? In my heart it don't mean a thing" (Morrison 54).

The impact of motherhood in Toni Morrison's Beloved can be most genuinely seen and understood through its female characters. Whether it be it through a mother-character or just a "mothering" character, the thoughts, dialogue, and actions of these young and mature women represent the influence that the crossover of gender roles and slave legacy have had on black women. The experiences endured by black men and women in slavery were nothing short of hell, but Morrison carefully uses Beloved to magnify and examine more closely the struggle of the black woman during that time.

For a black woman on the run from slavery to be with child was dangerous and downright scary. This fear exists as a result of the trauma of slavery and wanting something better for your child but not even knowing if something better is a real option. Sethe, the main character in the novel, is devoted to motherhood, so much so that her children dictate a lot of the important decisions that she makes. The most notable one being her decision to kill her baby girl rather than let her live a miserable life. From the perspective of a reader, one may judge Sethe for her decision to kill her baby, but motherhood and especially black motherhood is incredibly difficult, and no one can truly say what the right thing for her to have done was. Prejudice can be defined as a preconceived notion or expectation of someone, a group, or something that it not based on actual experience. A reader judging Sethe has preconceived expectations of how a mother should behave and even if the reader themselves is a mother, they do not have true agency because they have not experienced Sethes' trauma. An example from the text that shows how the gendered construct of motherhood and the prejudice against mothers hurts women would be the community's shunning of or evasion from Sethe and all who are tied to her. While these expectations do not directly benefit men, it can be clearly seen that there is far more pressure on mothers than fathers to act a certain way and do everything perfectly.

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