Farley, Beloved, and I

In the last of my three-post set that has involved mostly Farley’s work on woundedness, passion, suffering and sacrifice. This last post is my reading of parts of Toni Morrison’s beloved through a Farley-ian lens. At the height of the novel, Sethe sees School Teacher’s hat on the porch and bolts, seemingly without thought. Sethe thought of one thing “And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected every bit of life she had made, all the parts of her that were precious and fine and beautiful, and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away, over there where no one could hurt them. Over there. Outside this place, where they would be safe” (Morrison, 190). Sethe had been enslaved, molested, her milk had been stolen, she was, even as the smallest violation, refused a marriage: Sethe had been de-humanized beyond all imagination in her Experience as slave. She suffered for her children, to the point that I call her children her passions for which she sacrificed. I used this same quote from Farley for my last post and I have read it every other day since this reading, obsession over it: “Sacrifice is a temptation to violence against ourselves when it extracts good works from us without unleashing this power…. The divine image in us perfumes the world with its desire for good, but it requires a person to incarnate it. The temptation of self-sacrifice disguises the dissipation of our personhood by presenting it as an ideal of the highest religious or social virtue. But the crippling of personhood weakens the powers of the soul to shine with the divine image. The demons are pleased, but they never believed that maiming was a pleasing sacrifice in the first place” (84-85). Sethe Sacrificed so much for her children, ignoring her own needs and pain and focusing on the needs of her children. Thus, they are truly her passions or demons, according to Farley, an investment she has given so much of her life to preserve. She ended the life of her girl-child without thought or contemplation because Sethe had endured a breaking experience and would not allow her Sacrifices to be ruined or her beloved children to be put into bondage. Later in the novel, which we did not read, this point is made clearer yet: “That anybody white could take your whole self for anything that came to mind. Not just work, kill or maim you, but dirty you. Dirty you so bad you couldn't like yourself anymore. Dirty you so bad you forgot who you were and couldn't think it up..... The best thing she was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing” (Morrison, 251). In my mind, allied with that of Sethe’s, I would have taken that life, too, to avoid anyone of my flesh, blood, and Spirit having to go through that same breaking. Sethe was so incredibly wounded from her sufferings as a slave that her Spirit’s will to resist that for her daughter, her passion, overcame any mental thought process telling her it was not right or just to kill her daughter. Rationality has no place in the Sethe’s choice.

I try to make the most of each post, each reading we do, by relating it to my life. I can usually do so in so many words, so many thoughts. This time I am only left with knowing I want to be nothing like Sethe in terms of her passions, cycle of woundedness (until her eventual reconciliation), and her difficult choice.