How can a mother’s most tender act—nursing her child—exist within the same story as the

decision to end her child’s life? Few scenes shock like Sethe’s choice to kill her own daughter,

but Beloved forces readers to look past the horror and ask why. Morrisons’ work question is not

“What kind of mother does that?” but “What kind of world makes a mother believe she has no

other way to protect her child?” When Paul D learns what Sethe has done, he can only stammer,

“You got two feet, Sethe, not four,” invoking this animal imagery to make sense of what seems

unspeakable (Morrison 194). Morrison insists that Sethe's infanticide is not incomprehensible but

a logical outcome of slavery's systematic destruction of Black maternal agency. The key lies in

an earlier violation: the theft of Sethe's breast milk by Schoolteacher's nephews on the night she

escaped Sweet Home. “They took my milk,” she tells Paul D, repeating it three times, forcing

recognition of this as her deepest trauma (19–20). Morrison links these two moments—stolen

milk and infanticide—as inseparable acts in a single narrative of maternal dispossession and

violent reclamation.

When Schoolteacher's nephews steal Sethe's milk, they sever her capacity to function as a

mother fully; when Schoolteacher returns to reclaim her children, Sethe exercises the only

maternal power slavery has left choosing death over re-enslavement. Both acts center on

ownership: who has the right to nourish, protect, and claim Black children.When Paul D arrives at 124 Bluestone Road nearly two decades after their shared enslavement,

Sethe tells him of fleeing Sweet Home, focusing on a specific violation: “After I left you, those

boys came in there and took my milk. That's what they came in there for. Held me down and

took it” (Morrison 19). Paul D expects her to dwell on the beating: “They used cowhide on you?”

But Sethe repeats, “And they took my milk!” (20). Her insistence on repeating this three times

forces both Paul D and the reader to recognize that this violation—not the whip, not even the

threat to her life—constitutes her deepest trauma.

Milk represents for Sethe not only nutrition for Beloved, but a piece of her identity as a

mother. “I had milk,” she begins, repeating, “I was pregnant with Denver, but I had milk for my

baby girl. I hadn't stopped nursing her when I sent her on ahead” (19). Her body announces itself

through scent—

“Anybody could smell me long before he saw me”—and evidence—

“when he

saw me, he'd see the drops of it on the front of my dress” (19). Rebecca Stone argues nursing

“feeds the mother too” by sustaining her sense of herself as mother (298). Sethe's “nobody”

statements reinforce this: “Nobody knew that but me and nobody had her milk but me”

(Morrison 19). Through milk, Sethe establishes an inalienable connection to her daughter. As

Stone argues, this bodily experience “opened up a space for her to say ‘I’ for the very first time”

(303)—milk and motherhood become the ground upon which Sethe can begin to articulate a self.

When Schoolteacher's nephews assault her, they sever this connection. The violence lies in its

specificity: “Held me down and took it” (Morrison 19). Sethe later explains, “Nobody will ever

get my milk no more except my own children. I never had to give it to nobody else—and the one

time I did it was taken from me—they held me down and took it. Milk that belonged to my

baby” (100). The possessive language—

“my milk,” “my children,” “my baby”—attempts to

reassert ownership over what slavery has rendered property of the master. But the passiveconstruction “it was taken from me” betrays the impossibility of that claim: Sethe can assert

ownership, but slavery refuses to recognize it.

Schoolteacher instructs his nephews: “Put her human characteristics on the left; her

animal ones on the right” (Morrison 228). Sethe intuits that this categorization erases her

personhood: “there was something wrong with that, something very wrong, and I couldn't get it

straight” (228). The theft of Sethe’s breast milks follows from this animalization. If Sethe's body

parts can be sorted into human and animal characteristics, then her bodily products—her milk—

can likewise be appropriated. Mohammed and Berzenji note that the boys treat her “as livestock,

extracting a commodity from her body just as one might milk a cow” (19–20). The

dehumanization is not rhetorical; it manifests in physical violation.

Hortense Spillers traces partus sequitur ventrem, where children follow the mother's

enslaved status, but mothers hold no rights to their children (469). The law recognizes the

mother-child connection only insofar as it reproduces the master's property. When Sethe claims

“the milk belonged to my baby,” she articulates a defiance of this legal structure (Morrison 100).

She reflects after her escape, “I was big, Paul D, and deep and wide... Look like I loved em more

after I got here. Or maybe I couldn't love em proper in Kentucky because they wasn't mine to

love” (190). This statement reveals that Sethe experiences an expansion of her capacity to love

once she reaches free territory—not because her feelings change, but because ownership

changes. “They wasn't mine to love” names the ontological impossibility of motherhood under

slavery. Kitanovska-Ristoska argues this condition renders motherhood an “(im)possible

mission”—enslaved women must perform the functions of motherhood without access to the

rights that would make motherhood viable (40).Between Sethe's arrival at 124 and Schoolteacher's appearance twenty-eight days later, she

experiences something approximating free motherhood: “I had milk enough for all” (118, 233).

She can feed both Beloved and newborn Denver simultaneously, her body producing abundance

rather than scarcity. Schoolteacher's approach shatters this reprieve. Morrison narrates:

When she saw them coming and recognized schoolteacher's hat, she heard wings. Little

hummingbirds stuck needle beaks right through her headcloth into her hair and beat their wings.

And if she thought anything, it was No. No. Nono. Nonono. Simple. She just flew. Collected

every bit of life she had made... and carried, pushed, dragged them through the veil, out, away,

over there where no one could hurt them. (Morrison 192)

The imagery suggests an instinctual maternal response, operating below conscious

thought. Morrison emphasizes this innate quality: “if she thought anything, it was” No.” Not a

reasoned decision, but pure negation. The repetition of “no,” building in speed and intensity,

echoes her earlier repetitions of “they took my milk”

, both are incantatory, both exceed rational

discourse. Morrison’s narrator insists on simplicity: “Simple. She just flew.” The word refuses

complexity and refuses the language of madness that might explain Sethe's act. What she does is

“collect every bit of life she had made”

, the phrase invites us to read the children not as separate

beings but as extensions of Sethe's body, “all the parts of her that were precious and fine and

beautiful.” Death becomes not destruction but refuge, the ultimate maternal protection: “over

there where no one could hurt them.”

When Sethe explains her actions to Paul D, she uses language revealing her

understanding of the murder as fundamentally protective: “I stopped him... I took and put my

babies where they'd be safe” (Morrison 190). The active verbs claim agency. The horrificparadox is that the only “safe” place she could find was death. The possessive language—

“My

children. Mine” (190)—echoes her earlier claims about milk. Both milk and children are sites of

contested ownership, and Sethe's repetition of “mine” represents her refusal to cede ownership to

Schoolteacher, to slavery, to any force outside herself.

Paul D’s response exposes the assumptions that make Sethe’s act seem

incomprehensible: “You got two feet, Sethe, not four” (Morrison 194). He invokes animal

maternity—four-footed creatures who might kill their young under threat—meaning it as

condemnation. But if Sethe has acted like an animal mother it is precisely because slavery has

treated her as one. Schoolteacher’s categorization of her “human” and “animal” characteristics,

the nephews’ theft of her milk as if she were livestock, and the legal structure defining her

children as property, all reduce Sethe to a dehumanized status. When Paul D accuses her of

having “four feet,” he unknowingly echoes Schoolteacher’s logic, the same logic that

necessitated the infanticide.

The infanticide scene itself emphasizes bodily intimacy. When Schoolteacher's party

enters the shed, they find Sethe “holding a blood-soaked child to her chest with one hand and an

infant by the heels in the other” (Morrison 175). She holds Beloved “to her chest”—the very

place where she would hold her to nurse. The blood-soaked child pressed against the milk-

producing breasts creates a terrible superimposition where the site of nourishment becomes the

site of death. Yet Morrison does not allow us to see this as simply monstrous. The holding “to

her chest” maintains the gesture of maternal care even as it enacts violence.

When Beloved first appears at 124 Bluestone Road, she emerges from water “fully

dressed” with “new skin, lineless and smooth,” arriving as both revenant and infant, ghost andgirl (Morrison 61). From her first days, Beloved's relationship to Sethe centers on a hunger that

escalates from desire to demand to devouring. Morrison structures this as a grotesque inversion

of the nursing bond that Schoolteacher's nephews interrupted eighteen years earlier: if Sethe once

produced milk to nourish Beloved, Beloved now returns to extract something far more, Sethe's

very substance, her life force, herself.

Beloved's consumption becomes physical and visible: “The bigger Beloved got, the

smaller Sethe became... Beloved ate up her life, took it, swelled up with it, grew taller on it”

(Morrison 283). The language—

“ate up,” “took,” “swelled up”—transforms Beloved from

daughter to parasite. Stone argues that breastfeeding ideally creates reciprocity, with the breast

“feeding the mother too” by sustaining her maternal subjectivity alongside the infant’s physical

needs (298). But Beloved's feeding represents a perversion of this reciprocity, becoming purely

extractive and offering nothing in return. What Beloved takes, Sethe loses.

This vampiric dynamic represents Morrison's meditation on what happens when the

nursing bond is violently severed. Beloved was killed while she was still at the breast—Sethe

repeatedly emphasizes she “had milk” for Beloved, that she sent Beloved ahead during the

escape specifically to deliver that milk when she arrived (19). The theft of the milk by

Schoolteacher’s nephews meant Sethe arrived at 124 depleted and violated, and then, twenty-

eight days later, before the nursing relationship could be properly completed, Sethe cut

Beloved’s throat. The nursing bond, already compromised by the assault, was terminated entirely

by murder. Beloved returns to claim what was denied to her, not just life, but the complete

maternal attention and physical sustenance she never received. But because she returns as a

ghost, as a revenant rather than a living child, she cannot be satisfied. The nursing relationship

cannot be resumed, only grotesquely parodied.Morrison makes this impossibility explicit in the stream-of-consciousness sections

representing the merged voices of Sethe, Beloved, and Denver. Beloved’s voice refuses

separation: “I am Beloved, and she is mine. See. She was going to smile at me. She is mine. I

have found her. I am not separate from her there is no place where I stop her face is my own…”

(Morrison 252). The absence of periods, the run-on quality of the prose, and the obsessive

repetition of “I am not separate from her” all suggest a merger that goes beyond ordinary

maternal-infant bonding into something pathological. Beloved does not want connection; she

wants fusion. She does not want to be loved by Sethe; she wants to absorb Sethe entirely into

herself.

Sethe’s voice reveals her complicity in this fusion. She promises: “I'll tend her as no

mother ever tended a child, a daughter. Nobody will ever get my milk no more except my own

children” (251). She promises Beloved that “nobody will ever get my milk no more,” as if

Beloved were still an infant who needs nursing, as if Sethe still had milk to give, as if the past

could be undone through sheer devotion. But Beloved’s demands escalate beyond what any

infant would require. Sethe offers symbolically what she once offered literally: “I have your

milk... I brought your milk” (256). But since Beloved returns as ghost rather than a living child,

she can only drain, not be nourished.

Beloved’s hunger is literally insatiable because what she hungers for—to be nursed by

Sethe, to receive Sethe’s milk, to complete the interrupted bond—is impossible. She is dead. The

nursing relationship exists in a temporality now closed to both. Beloved tries to recreate

infancy through endless need; Sethe tries to atone by giving more of herself than she has. Their

mutual collapse shows that the maternal bond, once shattered by enslavement and infanticide,

cannot simply be repaired through devotion or return. Morrison insists that trauma cannot beundone by reenactment. Instead, reenactment reenacts the original wound, amplifying rather than

healing it.

It is the community—those same women who once judged Sethe—who break the spell.

They gather outside 124 with “voices of women, calling on the Spirit” (305). Their sound

interrupts the private economy of guilt and need that has trapped Sethe and Beloved. Morrison

deliberately frames the exorcism not as an individual salvation but a communal reparation, a

form of alternative kinship. The women’s collective presence and sound counter the isolation

that made Sethe vulnerable to Beloved’s consuming demands. They restore the social world that

both motherhood and trauma require to heal.

The exorcism culminates in Sethe’s misrecognition of Mr. Bodwin as Schoolteacher,

prompting her to attack outward rather than inward. Morrison marks this shift as pivotal. Instead

of turning violence on her children or on herself, Sethe directs it at the figure she perceives as the

agent of enslavement. Though she fails to strike him, this moment signals a reorientation as

Sethe is no longer killing to protect her children from herself or from ownership; she is

defending herself and her community from perceived oppression. The gesture breaks the cycle of

inward-turned maternal violence that defines both the infanticide and the later scenes with

Beloved.

After Beloved disappears, Sethe collapses into grief and exhaustion, “laying in the

keeping room, feeling uncalled, and unclaimed” (315). Having poured herself into Beloved’s

endless hunger, she fears she has nothing left. But Paul D’s return reframes her identity when he

tells her, “You your best thing, Sethe. You are” (322), he offers an alternative to the logic of

possession that has governed her life. The line directly counters the possessive language that hasdominated Sethe’s narrative—

“my milk,” “my baby,” “my children,” “mine.” Paul D suggests

that Sethe herself is not simply a vessel of nurturing or a site of trauma; she is a self with

inherent worth, separate from her role as mother.

Sethe’s stunned reply—

“Me? Me?”—captures the radical feeling of this assertion. For a

woman whose selfhood has been repeatedly denied by legal systems, by Schoolteacher’s

pseudoscientific ledger, by her own merging with Beloved, and even by her attempts to reclaim

her children through death, the idea that she might possess herself is seemingly unimaginable.

The novel’s closing pages return to Beloved, but only to release her. “It was not a story to

pass on,” the narrator insists (323). The repetition of this line, both an injunction to remember

and an injunction to forget, encapsulates Morrison’s philosophy of historical memory. The

paradox is deliberate: Beloved is a story that must not be erased, but also one that must not

consume the living. It must be borne, not repeated; witnessed, not reenacted. Morrison’s final

word, “Beloved,” stands alone as simultaneously a name, a command, and a mourning.

Ultimately, Beloved reveals that slavery did not merely steal labor or freedom but for Sethe it

stole motherhood, making maternal agency both dangerous and impossible. Sethe’s milk and

Sethe’s infanticide are not separate events but two ends of the same wound.Works Cited

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in Beloved by Toni Morrison.” Vizione, no. 37, July 2021, pp. 39–49. EBSCOhost,

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Mohammed, Ali Baram, and Latef Saeed Noori Berzenji. “‘They Took My Milk’: A Psychoanalytic

Study of Toni Morrison’s Beloved.” Journal of University of Human Development, vol. 9, no. 3,

Aug. 2023, pp. 18–21. EBSCOhost, https://doi.org/10.21928/juhd.v9n3y2023.pp18-21.

Morrison, Toni. Beloved. Vintage Books, 2004.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics, vol. 17,

no. 2, 1987, pp. 65–81. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/464747. Accessed 20 Nov. 2025.

Stone, Rebecca. “Can the Breast Feed the Mother Too? Tracing Maternal Subjectivity in Toni

Morrison’s Beloved.” British Journal of Psychotherapy, vol. 31, no. 3, Aug. 2015, pp. 298–

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