It seems that we’ve read many books featuring mothers with ambiguous morals, Beloved being the latest. I’m sure we all also remember Edna from The Awakening, who drowns herself and leaves her children behind. In some ways (many ways), Sethe is Edna’s complete opposite. She will do anything to care for her children, including make an arduous journey while pregnant so she can feed her young child. She would never even think about drowning herself while her children lived. At one point, she even thinks up an explanation for Beloved: she wanted to lay down in the grave with her but couldn’t while Denver, Howard, and Buglar were alive. She sacrifices herself, in some sense, when she kills her baby girl. It’s horrifying for us to simply contemplate—think how much worse it was for Sethe to kill her own child, because that was the only way she thought she could save her.
In other ways she’s similar to Edna. Kind of. Well. I mean. Edna is trapped like Sethe, but Edna is trapped more figuratively, having basically because very apathetic about her life and seeing no path out of it. Sethe, on the other hand, was not only literally enslaved; she’s also trapped by 124 and by her past, by the judgement of the people in the town. The difference is that Sethe claws her way out of slavery, and continues on despite the oppressive rejection by others, while Edna chooses to leave life altogether. So I would say that Sethe’s devotion to her children is much greater than Edna’s. I feel slightly bad judging Edna, as I’ve never walked in her shoes, but I just think that she’s such a stark contrast to Sethe. And yet the novels are also similar…after all, both portray the negative effects that entrapment, whether it be literal or figurative, has on the relationship between a mother and her children.
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Interesting comparison. I also think there's another similarity between the two women, however opposite they seem to be, and that is the impact of their stories on the audience. Both evoke some degree of sympathy for their plight despite how morally complicated their situations might be. In Edna's case, one could argue (someone like Sethe, perhaps) that leaving her children behind when she committed suicide was totally wrong. She was forced into motherhood and into being a wife by societal conventions, but she nevertheless was responsible for those children. Others would say that she had no obligations to a life that entrapped her, and her walk into the ocean was symbolic of freedom. In Sethe's case, one could (and many have) argue that no matter the circumstances, killing one of her children was just ethically unacceptable. And on the other hand, as we've discussed in class, one could say that she was freeing and protecting her child from a life of unimaginable, unspeakable torture and misery.
So, although both women and their situations/choices are very complex, I think that in both cases readers would tend to feel sympathetic towards them even if the readers themselves do not "agree" with the mothers' decisions regarding their children.
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