Parasitic Motherhood: Euthanasia and Resistance
Is it kinder to kill a child or condemn them to a life of suffering? Toni Morrison explores this question in her seminal novel Beloved, blending historical fact with critical fabulation. The novel follows Sethe as she escapes from enslavement at the ironically named Sweet Home plantation and attempts to establish a life of her own. Eroded by the dehumanizing system of slavery, Sethe's self-identity depends on her motherhood, a dynamic that leads her to see her children as extensions of herself rather than individual beings. Facing the threat of returning to enslavement, Sethe sees a future that involves only further brutality and objectification for herself and her children. Thus, in an attempt to protect her family, Sethe inflicts a single act of violence, committing the evil of depriving her children of choice in favor of protecting them from the long-term soul death of slavery. Through this 'mercy-killing,' Sethe upends the paradigm of involuntary euthanasia from a tool of inequality when used by those in power to a method of resistance.
The prolonged, systematic subjugation and exploitation of a group of people requires an ideological framework. The foundations of chattel slavery lie in humans’ domestication of animals. In Sigmund Freud’s words, “to himself, [man] attributed an immortal soul…which permitted him to annihilate the bond of community between him and the animal kingdom” (Patterson 2). In establishing a hierarchy of living things, humans were able to justify animal husbandry, utilizing the bodies of animals for their sole gain. Within this system, humans gain moral impunity to kill and abuse animals at their discretion. The inherent cruelty of these practices of “domination, control, and manipulation” became a model for how humans should treat each other (2). Animalization became a tool to establish a hated ‘other,’ and with this dehumanization, the abuse and killing of fellow humans ceased to be a mortal sin. In the words of Karl Jacoby, slavery was “little more than the extension of domestication to animals” (2).
In Beloved, Toni Morrison explores the impacts of this racialized rhetoric in mothering. Morrison highlights the destructive commodification of human bodies in a section focused on Schoolteacher’s point of view. Brainstorming plans for the future of Sweet Home, he refers to Sethe as “the breeding one” and one of her children as a “foal” (Morrison 167). In weighing their absolute market values, Schoolteacher demonstrates the violation of mother-child bonds in a system of dehumanization. This institutional paradigm seeps beyond the confines of the white mind to encroach on the living identities of enslaved people. One afternoon, while on an errand to ensure the comfort of her baby while she works, Sethe stumbles across the Sweet Home men listing her human and animal characteristics under the instruction of Schoolteacher (228). In contrasting the narrative of Sethe’s inhumanity with her act of motherly love, Morrison illustrates the complication of natural care bonds in a system that denies them. The paradoxical relationship between Sethe’s natural maternal impulses and the violent man-made disruption of them yields a bond of sinister resilience to her children that is ultimately parasitic.
Arriving at Sweet Home at only fourteen, Sethe is forced into early and solitary motherhood. Years later, she reflects to Paul D as she spins around her kitchen, “I wish I’d a known more, but, like I say, there wasn’t nobody to talk to. Woman, I mean” (Morrison 188). On the plantation where Sethe grew up, mothers relied on their community both for literal childcare and for collective knowledge in childrearing practices, such as the sling apparatus that Sethe recalls but is unable to recreate. In childhood, Sethe was deprived of a robust maternal figure, due to the labor demands of enslavement. At Sweet Home, she was deprived of a collaborative community as the only enslaved woman and the only mother. Thus, enslavement robbed her of the generational knowledge of her foremothers, knowledge that was rightfully hers.
Without the support of a community, Sethe inherited only a legacy of deprivation-driven mothering. She recalls that, as a child, “there was no nursing milk to call my own” (Morrison 236). She continues to reflect, “I know what it is to be without the milk that belongs to you; to have to fight and holler for it, and to have so little left”. These memories, of being left in a field while the nutrient-rich milk naturally destined for her instead fed “whitebabies,” inform Sethe’s own mothering. As an infant, Sethe had to “fight and holler” for milk to sustain herself, and as an adult, she continues to fight to ensure her milk nourishes only her children (236). It is the necessity of bringing milk to her babies, not the promise of her own freedom, that empowers Sethe to persevere through her harrowing escape from Sweet Home and the trauma of her sexual assault. It is in service of her children, “her beautiful, magical best thing—the part of her that was clean,” that Sethe taps into her personal resilience and survives (289). Sethe sees her children, the products of her natural power, as a fresh part of herself, unsullied by the cruel realities of her life. Under her protection, they are shielded from the dehumanization of enslavement and, in turn, affirm Sethe’s humanity.
When faced with returning to enslavement, Sethe confronts her greatest fear. She is no longer able to protect her children from the destruction wrought by white men. Sethe, having experienced slavery’s annihilation of independent identity, seeks a permanent method of protecting her children from this fate. Standing in the shed, she “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” (Morrison 192). Morrison illustrates Sethe’s frantic efforts by using a series of repetitive clauses that seem to trip over and contradict one another. In her desperation, Sethe reduces her children to “parts of her,” depriving them of the very individual autonomy she seeks to protect by sparing them from enslavement. Though intended as protection, Sethe bears the weight of carrying, pushing, and dragging her children from the reach of the annihilating white man. In an attempt to resist the system that reduces her motherhood to that of a “brood mare,” Sethe resorts to animal instinct, just as “a mother cat will eat her babies as the ultimate act of protection” (Demetrakopoulos 2, 3). Moreover, since Sethe’s children embody a fantasy of a free future untouched by slavery, in murdering Beloved, she also aims to establish maternal protection for herself.
In a modern context, the term ‘mercy killing’ most often refers to physician-assisted suicide or voluntary euthanasia. The troubling historical context of such practices is often raised in ethical discussions of supportive legislation. Dr. George Dawson articulates the reservations of disenfranchised Americans who already face discrepancies in medical care; that the legalization of physician-assisted suicide will permit “outright murder of unsuspecting persons by unscrupulous health-care providers” (Dawson 1). This is a fear born of past applications of euthanasia by the powerful class to control and ‘cleanse’ the demographics of their societies. Dawson cites the Nazi bioscience program, whose third pillar in achieving racial hygiene was euthanasia, as well as the frequency of unreported euthanasia-related malpractice in the Netherlands, which is often lauded as exemplary in their application of physician-assisted suicide (2). In the specific context of Black Americans’ concerns, he also references the likelihood of euthanasia in the era of slavery: “I wonder what became of the sick and irreversibly infirm enslaved Africans, including babies? Were they killed as an economic necessity?” (1). Dawson’s analysis hinges on the application of euthanasia as a tool to optimize a society in the interest of the ruling class. In Beloved, Sethe’s utilization of euthanasia in resistance to the ruling class acts both as a violent reversal of historical context and a tragic consequence of it. In the context Morrison constructs, the tool of optimization and control is slavery, and euthanasia becomes the escape from this social death. Yet, though she thwarts the economic interests of her enslavers, Sethe endures painful repercussions for her choice.
The artificial human hierarchy created by slavery perverts Sethe’s maternal love into violence. In securing her freedom, Sethe invokes a primal violence so excessive that it overcomes the desensitization of her oppressors. The murder of a child is an act so shocking and unnatural that they believe she is beyond their control (Morrison 176). Despite her loving intentions, this act, at once an overreach and also a violation of her natural maternal bonds, settles into Sethe’s self-perception and torments her. Shunned by her community, Sethe seeks moral validation so desperately that she allows the resurrected Beloved to devour her (281), In Stephanie Demetrakopoulos’s words, “to see the very flawed mothering of other women often develop impossible ideals of what good mothering is” (6). As a young woman, Sethe reduced her self-identity to motherhood, being the carrier of her children’s milk. Insecure in her deficient generational knowledge, she is unable to live in peace with her decision to kill Beloved, and her self-doubt causes her to waste away.
Though Sethe faces the burden of psychological turmoil in the wake of Beloved’s killing, her punishment is undeserved. Denver’s narration provides the most salient reflection on Sethe’s conscience: “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” (Morrison 295). Contrasting earlier references to Sethe’s children as the clean part of herself, Morrison’s repetition of the word “dirty” evokes a personal violation. The controlling agent of slavery extends beyond “work, maim, or kill[ing]” control of the body, into the destruction of the self. Though the mercy-killing is intended as an escape, it instead traps Sethe in a web of self-hatred orchestrated by her oppressors. It is not Sethe who is evil, but the system that forces her into violent action. At the hands of white men, her one “precious and fine and beautiful thing,” her motherhood, becomes dirty, and Sethe is lost (192).
Enduring the dehumanizing brutality of enslavement forces Sethe to relinquish her self-identity. Rather than an individual, she becomes only the protector of her children, leaving no metaphorical milk to sustain herself. Though she utilizes euthanasia in defiance of her oppressors, the moral tax of her actions works in their favor regardless. Attempting to preserve the sanctity of her motherhood, Sethe begins to see herself as the wild animal the ruling class believes her to be. Trapped in a cycle of atonement, Sethe fades both physically and mentally. Yet, in the end, she is found. When Paul D tells Sethe, “You your best thing, Sethe. You are.”, he provides her the permission she has been awaiting (Morrison 322). Surrendering her fierce motherhood, Sethe finally assumes selfhood.
Works Cited
Dawson, George. “An African-American physician's perspective on mercy killing and physician-assisted suicide.” Journal of the National Medical Association vol. 90,2 (1998): 69-72.
Demetrakopoulos, Stephanie A. “Maternal Bonds as Devourers of Women’s Individuation in Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” African American Review, vol. 26, no. 1, 1992, pp. 51–59. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/3042076. Accessed 6 Mar. 2025.
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York, Vintage Books, 1987.
Patterson, Charles. "Animals, Slavery, and the Holocaust." Logos 4.2 (2005).