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’s beating,’ she said. ” She felt that it was the first time for her feel her heart beat in her life. Without the freedom, she might just have to live the dead life till death. The oppression of slavery was so wicked that it could kill an individual’s spirit.
Sethe’s oppressed and deprived motherhood is more obviously demonstrated in the novel. She lived in the house “full of baby’s milk venom ” for eighteen years, bearing the baby’s haunting as her way of atonement. When she told Paul D about how the two nephews took her milk, she repeated twice “and they took my milk !” For her, the physical pain from the whipping seemed to be relatively easy to bear, but the deprivation of the food for her children was unforgivable.
When Denver says that the ghost of the baby is very powerful, Sethe answers “no more powerful than the way I loved her ”. She could not bear to let her children to suffer the fate of slavery, to be measured by the schoolteacher, and to be treated as animals. She killed the baby girl and would have killed all her children if not stopped by others. Her motherly love was so deep that she believed death would be a better place for her children compared to being slaves all their life. This kind of love could not find normal way to be realized in the slavery society and led to the tragic death of the baby and the distorted and isolated life for Sethe and Denver.
2.3 The Emasculated Black Men
The black men also suffered in the anthropocentric white society. Their physical and psychological sufferings shared similarities and differences with women. As they were also influenced by the androcentric beliefs, they bore even heavier burden than black women in their search for an identity that transcended both the anthropocentrism and androcentrism. They were physically and psychologically deprived of manhood.
For the slave owners, black men were also the reproductive machines. In Baby Suggs’ comparison between Sweet Home and other plantations: “He didn’t stud his boys. Never brought them to her cabin with directions to ‘lay down with her,’ like they did in Carolina, or rented their sex out on other farms. ” Sweet Home was different from other plantations in that Mr. Garner, the owner, did not treat the black men as stud like other slave owners did. Instead, he labeled his slave men as men, in the time black people were not treated as human. He even bragged about his possession of “nigger men”:
“Y’all got boys,” he told them. “Young boys, old boys, picky boys, stropping boys. Now at Sweet Home, my niggers is men every one of em. Bought em thataway, raised em thataway. Men every one.”
“Beg to differ, Garner. Ain’t no nigger men.”
It seemed to be a great progress compared with other white slave owners’ attitude toward black men. And this treatment did influence the men at Sweet Home. They waited for Sethe to choose one of them as husband except raping her or fighting with each other for her, “only because they were Sweet Home men ”. They looked up to the treatment of men, or so-called “men-bred slaves ” instead of animals. However, Baby Suggs worried about this “special kind of slavery ” the Garners ran. And Mr. Garner, though bragged about his Sweet Home men, never let them out of the farm without his company. Baby Suggs realized that his order “was not so much because of the law, but the danger of men-bred slaves at loose. ” The rest of the society would not allow black men to live as men. And the fake freedo