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The novel Beloved is based on slavery whose influences can be reflected almost everywhere. Sethe, one of the main characters, escapes from her slave owner’s house and seeks for new life for herself. In order to keep her children away from the evil slavery, she cuts her daughter’s throat, which is a horrible and abnormal behavior to others. After about 18 years of infanticide, she meets a girl called Beloved, who is actually her dead daughter’s spirit. Then Sethe lives with the ghost together, but the memories of infanticide remind her of her guilt.
Based on “self” theories in psychology including the definition of “self”, the ways to find “self” and the relationship between “self” and environment, the paper endeavors to analyze how confused Sethe is when she tries to find her “self” according to her memories on infanticide. The progress of finding “self” is related to how to live meaningfully. The theories of the ways to find “self” help tell Sethe’s behavior of finding “self”. The theories of the relationship between “self” and environment help analyze why Sethe has so many contradictory feelings about infanticide.
The author tries to analyze Sethe, a female negro’s inner changes from the fragmentary memory of infanticide combined with “self” theories based on psychology. The word “self” in this paper simply means someone’s own consciousness and thought which he is determined to put into practice. This paper focuses on what Sethe thinks instead of what she has suffered physically, and probes what negroes think when they have suffered from those terrible experiences. The author hopes to inspire more scholars to concern more about negroes’ mind than their physical insult.
2 Literature Review
Scholars have made many studies on Beloved by Toni Morrison. As this paper tries to analyze Sethe’s finding “self”, based on psychology, the literature review involves previous studies and theories basis applied in the following discussion, including the background of slavery, analysis on Sethe and relative “self” theories.
2.1 Background of Slavery
American slavery is a kind of power which allows a man to forcefully use others’ bodies and souls as wealth. Slaves are treated as animals. They are wealth, with their virtue, conscience, wisdom and emotion abandoned by their owners(Yang, 1978). In the novel Beloved by Toni Morrison, the main character Sethe is a female slave who has escaped temporarily to Ohio from the Sweet Home in slave owner’s. In American slavery, Negro is down to the lowest social status and most seriously discriminated. They are forced to move in with family separation, away from their native land. They have to experience nightmares during their sea voyages and arrive in America. Then they will be traded like cattle all over America. In the rest of their lives, they will be engaged in a variety of overloaded work with no personal freedom. After War of Independence, Americans declared independence. America was finally free from domination and plunder of European colonialists, however, most lives of the Negroes were not essentially changed. During the American Civil War in 1860s, the majority of blacks had a hard struggle in order to completely overthrow slavery. After the war, American abolished the inhuman slavery from the law and declared that the Negro free.
Although slavery was abolished, American negroes were not free in the real meaning. There was no big change in their social status. Racial discrimination didn’t stop but became more and more serious. In addition, racial conflicts became increasingly prominent. At the end of nineteenth century, a large number of negroes continued to leave south for north because the south plantation was difficult to sustain the life and white racists abused lynching(Guo & Fu, 2008).