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o. That’s not the way. I told you to put her human characteristics on the left; her animal characteristics on the right. And don’t forget to line them up. ” For the schoolteacher, Sethe and other black slave were merely animals in a human shape. The teaching he gave was clear manifestation of anthropocentric dualism, dividing the human and nonhuman and making the latter as inferior, wild, and be controlled by the former. This assumption is typical anthropocentrism, and under this belief, the white society justified their wrongdoings of treating the colored people as inferior and nonhuman. The violence they impose on black women’s bodies was only the external embodiment of such a narrow and abnormal, yet universal belief that is called science in Western society.

2.2.2 Their Oppressed Womanhood
Under the belief system of Western anthropocentric dualism, black women slaves were treated as animals and instruments by the white. However, as human beings, as women, they had the natural desire to live a decent and joyous life under that limited conditions. But the white slave owners would not give them that kind of opportunities. Their humanity and womanhood was severely oppressed in that kind of environment.
Labored at Sweet Home for more than ten years, Baby Suggs never bothered to ask why Mr. Garner called her by “Jenny”, which was not her real name. The tragic life before Sweet Home numbed her, making her unconscious or indifferent about what happened around as long as “nobody knocked her down (or up) ”. Her desire for a bearable life was eaten away by all the sadness and miseries of her previous life. In her pursuit for freedom before she was bought by Mr. Garner, she lost connection with her husband, who she believed had escaped for freedom and her children were either died or bought away by others. As a woman, she was deprived of both rights of wife and mother.
With the only and last son, Halle with her, she felt that breathing was enough for living. So when she knew that Halle would do extra years of labor to pay for her freedom, she only thought, “What for? What does a sixty-year-old slavewoman who walks like a three-legged dog need freedom for? ”. Years of sadness had taken away her wish to be free. But later she suddenly experienced the ecstasy of being free, looking at her hands, she found that “These hands belong to me. These my hands .” Finally she did not belong to anyone, was not owned by anyone, and she realized the autonomy she got. When this occurred to her, “she couldn’t stop laughing, ‘My heart’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本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。