Last night’s reading began with Paul D contemplating the complexity of manhood with an enslaved past. Now that he is liberated from slavery, he wants to be able to exercise liberty over his life and is deeply disturbed by the power that Beloved, representative of his past, seems to hold over him. He resolves to confess to Sethe, but ultimately cannot bring himself to tell her of his turmoil and instead tells her he wants to have children with her. Sethe ruminates on motherhood, concluding that for her, “unless carefree, mother love was a killer”. The rain that had emancipated Paud D turned cold and fell as snow in a curious twist on pathetic fallacy. Later in a flashback, four horsemen come to take Sethe back to slavery, clearly painting slavery as certain hell itself. Rather than have her children returned to slavery, to hell, Sethe murders one with a saw and is ready to murder the rest and herself when Schoolteacher decides that they are too manicly feral to be enslaved. He describes her in animalistic terms as a creature that was too severely abused in an effort to break its spirit into submission. The infanticide draws a parallel to the historical infanticide of Margaret Garner, whom we learned tangentially of in a Harpeth Hall history classroom. I researched and found that the book may be based loosely upon that historical event. Our reading ended with Paul D confronting Sethe about the murder that Stamp had told him of. Sethe defends that it was an act of love. Paul D tells Sethe that she has two legs and not four, that she is yet a human and not an animal, but Sethe remains defensive of her actions. Our reading carefully examined the struggle of enslaved and emancipated people to grasp personal identity and humanity, a life of their own, while being dehumanized and subjected to hell on earth.
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