Slaves as defined are groups of people who are owned, manipulated and serve as a property of others or a slaveholder, to the extent that they have almost no privileges and any freedom at all. Slaves are not compensated for their work, aside from clothes, food and shelter required for basic survival. Meanwhile, slavery is defined as a practice of having possession of slaves or a manner of production in which slaves comprise the main labor force. Slaves cannot go away from a slaveholder without a clear and explicit permission. They must have consent to leave and they will be send back to their slaveholders if they run away.
Hence, the structure of slavery entails authorized or extensive implicit measures with the authorities, by masters who have some supremacy because of their social, political or economic status. The pathetic reality about slavery was that, it was a horrifying society that degraded a race of people. Women slavery was undeniably different from that of men. It was not lesser when it comes to the degree of cruelness, but it was unusual. Beloved by Toni Morisson, a novel based on the effects of slavery, discovers themes of love, family, and most especially, motherhood.
The ghost of the killed child, Beloved, came back for uncertain purposes, personified as a lady at the time that the baby would have lived if she have been given the chance to be alive. Morrison raised some issues and queries on how to express love and care and to act the role and duties of being a mother to a child in a complicated situation and time where life was often unsuccessful to know its real essence. The importance of what it’s like to be owned and controlled by other people and the predicaments and complexity of owning oneself is what the novel strongly represents.
Through Sethe’s character, Beloved’s idea of motherhood is reflected and powerfully exemplified in the novel which is an intense and tremendous love that can do whatever would it take just to protect her child. The feminine capacity for love is very great and enormous. Moreover, the desire and eagerness to endure all the sufferings and to surpass all the difficulties for her children and not from any individual survival intuition is can be seen on Sethe’s break away from slavery. Sethe’s motherly instincts nearly direct her to the path of her destruction.
Despite the fact that the murder was an entirely a motherly loving act, Beloved is a furious character seeking to inflict a vengeance on Sethe for murdering her. Beloved serves as a representation of a terrible heritage of slavery and epitomes the strength of the past to exist and haunt tremendously the survivors. Before she becomes a spectator of her child’s slavery, Sethe would rather take away the life of her child and witness her child dwell in serenity. The duties of being a mother of Sethe were repressed because of slavery, first by killing her child.
Sethe became childless this is due to Beloved’s revenge that caused her two boys leaving for the reason that they could not stand the pressure of living in a haunted house. Definitely having no children there will be no motherhood at all. The guilt feeling of Sethe at Beloved’s death shows that she is very much willing to give up her restless life just to pay off the act of killing her child Beloved. Sethe is just as hopeless and very desperate for Beloved’s forgiveness. The necessity for Beloved’s acceptance and understanding points out Sethe’s own unbearable burden of guilt.
Her feelings of guilt, makes Sethe living in the present so impossible. Meanwhile, in the book of Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, illustrates the various faces and duties of women as slaves and having to deal and recuperate from the sexual abuse they had experienced. The physical and emotional sexual violence, conceiving a child as slaves, and the child care tasks and responsibilities in raising a child influenced the women’s pattern of opposition and the manner how they behaved and conducted their lives.
Some women were continuously exposed to sexual harassment from their masters as they grew up as slaves. They were obliged to discover what it meant to be slaves that were women and the cruelties that they would have to suffer. The abuse and brutality that slave women suffered from their owners molded the options they chose in their lives. Their masters were constantly throwing foul and unpleasant words to their slave women, giving them so much pain and hurt which leave scars on their weary hearts.
At the early part in their lives, a number of of them were forced to drop their ingenuousness. By owning them, their masters were able to maltreat them and violate their purity and innocence as they pleased. Slave women felt that they had committed immoral by letting their innocence collapse. In a little while, they have became aware on how they were out of the ordinary by being slaves that were women. The slave women’s options in their lives were not restricted to their joy and happiness, however they had to think and consider their children.
They had to deal with different task and responsibilities as mothers. The bodily relief which liberty and freedom provided was inadequate reward for the agony and torture they experienced for those runaway slave women who left their beloved children in slavery. Morisson and Jacobs works really demonstrates how determined they are to convince the world of the upsetting and demoralizing effect of slavery on women. Women suffer the agony and pain of being wrenched from their beloved children compared to the physical brutalities undergone by enslaved men.
Generally, slave women were appreciated for their capability to give an offspring while slave men’s worth were for their physical capabilities that can contribute to the labor force. In their feminist perspective, one can feel their strong emotions regarding women slavery. What was to become a women slave is not and never that simple. Words would never be enough to describe the feeling of being a women slave, manipulating their lives and limiting their roles in the society as women.
