There have been an awful lot of blog posts regarding the morality of Sethe’s controversial decision to kill Beloved that have all come to pretty much the same general conclusions. Inspired by Jack’s recent blog post, I’ve decided to look at Sethe’s condition from a medical standpoint.
I have it on good authority (Wikipedia) that a principal characteristic of an insane person is their inability to separate physical reality from imagination. For Sethe to be, for instance, schizophrenic, would mean that it was not a ghost that drove her sons away, in fact there was no ghost to begin with. Of course, in order to evaluate someone’s perception of reality, we need to be able to distinguish it ourselves on the authority of the novel, which becomes a bit of a problem when all of the characters seem to accept the existence of a haunting. Thus, in order to rule out Sethe’s insanity for this particular trait, we would have to put Denver, Paul D, Baby Suggs, Stamp Paid and basically all of the townspeople in the same category for acknowledging something that in our physical world, doesn’t plausibly exist. But then again, we have to remember that none of them committed the same moral infraction she did.
Alternately, we could assume that in this parallel Ohioan universe, the baby’s ghost truly does exist. If we assume it does, then we can look in the direction of psychopathy. It’s common knowledge that psychopathy is often induced by a trauma, which certainly applies in Sethe’s situation. Though she endured years of brutal slavery, it’s almost too easy to diagnose the isolated incident. By raping her and stealing her milk, schoolteacher and his hooligans contributed the single most agonizing experience to Sethe’s life, one that could potentially have acted as a trigger to her suppository insanity. Finally, we arrive at the central discussion; the moral dilemma -- in order for Sethe to be a psychopath, she must not be able to discern right from wrong. Though we could say she generally conducts herself with rationale and sensibility, how you classify this particular characteristic rests solely on your moral stance of her decision to commit infanticide.
*I’m almost positive none of you think Sethe is insane (I don’t either). But given how we’ve struggled with the supernatural aspects and the moral aspects, it’s definitely interesting to contemplate why they may be there and how they affect the images of the characters.
I balk at any suggestion that Sethe is "insane" (temporarily or otherwise) at this crucial moment, largely because the representatives of the "sane" world in this scene are the slavecatcher and schoolteacher (whose thoroughly "rational", pedagogical approach to slavery makes sanity seem cold and scary indeed!). With this as our model of sanity--perfectly reasonable to step into this woman's yard, armed with shotguns and accompanied by the sheriff, to take her and her children back into slavery--Sethe's actions seem altogether reasonable and logical. We may want to disagree with her actions, or wish she'd found some other way, but there is an undeniable logic to her choice. As she puts it to Paul, "It worked." And 18 years later, she still has no regrets.
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