A "Murderous Love" We Cannot Understand

In “The Bonds of Love and Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison’s Beloved” by Barbara A. Schapiro, a “motherly-instinct”, and (more deeply) the love between all of the characters is analyzed. Schapiro talks of a “murderous love” that exists between many of the characters but literally exists between Sethe and Beloved. A situation Schapiro quotes from the beginning of the book introduces this “murderous love” extremely well: Denver comments about the ghost in 124, “‘For a baby she throws a powerful spell,’ to which Sethe replies, ‘No more powerful than the way I loved her’(4).” Schapiro goes on to explain how the wrath and anger of the ghost baby is equally as strong as the love that Sethe had for the baby. The murder of baby Beloved is something the reader, along with Paul D, Ella, and countless others, struggle to understand; how could a mother, no matter how much danger her child is in, kill her own child? 

Schapiro writes a little to the impact slavery life has on the “mental freedom” of Sethe and the other characters. In summary, the chains that slavery has on Sethe’s mental state is what eventually leads to her killing her own child. Sethe actually says “if I hadn’t killed her she would have died and that is something that I could not bear to happen to her” (200). In Sethe’s mind, murdering her child was showing mercy to her; if she hadn’t killed her, Beloved would have grown into slavery and never have been truly “free” just like Sethe. This concept of “murderous love” is one that a reader of Beloved would struggle with immensely; the chains slavery would have on slaves like Sethe does not exist in this time, so the reader really has no way of making that critical connection to that “murderous love” that would “save” Beloved.