Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye,

Sula, Beloved, and A Mercy

Author(s): Amanda Putnam
Source: Black Women, Gender + Families , Fall 2011, Vol. 5, No. 2 (Fall 2011), pp. 25-43
Published by: University of Illinois Press

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5406/blacwomegendfami.5.2.0025

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Mothering Violence: Ferocious Female Resistance in
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, and A
Mercy

Amanda Putnam, Roosevelt University

Abstract
Racially exploited, sexually violated, and often emotionally humiliated for years or
decades, certain black female characters within four of Toni Morrison’s novels make
violent choices that are not always easily understandable. The violence—sometimes
verbal, but more frequently physical—is often an attempt to create unique solutions
to avoid further victimization. Thus, violence itself becomes an act of rebellion,
a form of resistance to oppressive power. The choice of violence—often rendered
upon those within their own community and family—redirects powerlessness and
transforms these characters, re-defining them as compellingly dominant women.
However, their transformation often has multidimensional repercussions for them
and those with whom they have chosen to be violent.

B
lack female characters within Toni Morrison’s novels are often
scarred—physically and/or emotionally—by the oppressive environ-
ments around them. Racially exploited, sexually violated, and often
emotionally humiliated for years or decades, these women often learn to
coexist with their visible and invisible scars by making choices that are not
easily understood. Specifically, many of Morrison’s female characters turn
to violence—sometimes verbal but more frequently physical—and, in doing
so, attempt to create unique solutions to avoid further victimization. This
process demonstrates the ways in which violence itself can become an act
of rebellion, a form of resistance to oppressive power.
Ranging in age from children to adolescents and adults, these female
characters choose violence to find an escape—a disruption of the multifac-
eted oppression they have suffered within a white patriarchal society where
black women are tormented and subjugated by social and racial domination,
Black Women, Gender, and Families Fall 2011, Vol. 5, No. 2 pp. 25–43
©2011 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois

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26   amanda putnam

exclusion, and rejection. Their choices of violence—often rendered on those

within their own community or family—redirects that powerlessness and
transforms it. Wreaking havoc on societal expectations for their behavior
and thoughts, these violent actions establish a new vision of African Ameri-
can femininity and femaleness. Black women are not powerless or without
options; instead, they can create new patterns and refuse socialized gender
and racial identities that attempt to constrain them.
Sometimes their violent choices negatively affect other members of the
African American community in which these female characters reside; how-
ever, it reflects the often racially motivated violence of the world around
them. In other words, while the violence may be wasteful or even damaging
to individual psyches and broader communities, it is also a reprojection of
the white oppression that has been forced on their very souls. By taking the
violence forced on them and redirecting it, these characters redefine them-
selves as compellingly dominant women.
This pattern of violence emerges in some during early childhood. Real-
izing their own worth is in question, young black girls attempt to upset
white oppression by redefining the limits of their power and powerlessness.
Young black girls reacting to the oppressiveness of white dominance or to the
stringency of traditional female-behavior expectations counter with physi-
cal violence to find strength within what often are positions of weakness.
Likewise, other black female children react verbally to withstand the force
of ever-present white-societal beauty standards that could otherwise crush
their self-identity.
Most of Morrison’s youthful characters learn about violence within a
matrilineal home setting, when they are exposed to violence toward, and
then from, their mothers and grandmothers. At times enslaved but always
oppressed, these adult women characters are abused frequently by multiple
sources: spouses, parents, employers, slaveowners, and community members.
Consequently, the women’s mistreatment is then redirected toward others—
often children—within the family. While painful to absorb, this redirection
can also be seen as an additional mothering lesson—an instinctive message
teaching black children coping mechanisms within a world that denies and
exploits their self-worth.
Maternal abandonment, either literal or emotional, is one common mani-
festation of these lessons in Morrison’s texts, often resulting in child-driven
violence. Regardless of whether the abandonment is intentional or desired,
the child perception of being abandoned often drives the child to act out
violently. Disturbing the development of necessary community-based senti-
ments, such as empathy or social identification, the mother violence creates

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 fall 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families   27

children (and subsequently adults) who feel detached from others in their
community, allowing the twisted familial violence to be perpetuated. Home,
then, becomes a place to learn pain, while community becomes a place to
act it out.
Finally, Morrison establishes child murder as the ultimate form of mother
violence, exposing the complexities of the mothering construct in terms of
creation and destruction. By not only deciding on death for their progeny
but also performing the murder themselves, these black women assert their
motherhood over societal mores. By choosing death for their children, these
mothers claim their motherhood in ways that are challenging to under-
stand—yet, in doing so, these female characters achieve astonishingly pow-
erful personas.
In The Bluest Eye, nine-year-old Claudia begins to discover the need
for rebellion when she encounters her invisibility in popular culture. Her
hatred of white baby dolls begins with an aversion to a famous white child
star. With an adult-like understanding of the inequities that occur daily due
to skin color, Claudia shares her dislike of Shirley Temple, who danced with
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, a famous black tap dancer, in various films: “I
couldn’t join [Freda and Pecola] in their adoration because I hated Shirley.
Not because she was cute, but because she danced with Bojangles, who was my
friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and
chuckling with me”1 (Morrison 1994, 19). In Claudia’s explanation, it’s clear
that she feels something has been stolen from her (and others like her)—and
given to the white child star instead. The performance pairing of the adult
black male and the small white girl highlights the absence of the small black
girl performer—the performer who looked like Claudia. Instead of shar-
ing the spotlight, the black girl becomes invisible, and Claudia’s feelings of
anger due to that invisibility are projected onto Shirley Temple: someone
out of reach and yet within view. Claudia’s feelings of black invisibility are
magnified via the white baby dolls she receives as gifts. By dismembering
them, Claudia disrupts the obsessive desire to worship white/light attributes,
rejecting them for her own blackness. She rebels against white oppression,
forcing others to see her and not a reflection of whiteness.
The outward violence Claudia feels is not unlike the heartbreaking inter-
nal violence another black girl in The Bluest Eye, Pecola, demonstrates against
herself for similar reasons. Despised by her mother and ignored by her father,
Pecola is a tragic example of the destructive power of accepting white beauty
standards. Realizing that the “white immigrant storekeeper” who she is buy-
ing candy from, shows only “distaste . . . for her, her blackness” (ibid., 48–49),

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28   amanda putnam

Pecola accepts a self-hatred and embraces all things white: Shirley Temple,
white baby dolls, the white Mary Jane on the candy wrapper, and eventually,
her quest to attain blue eyes. Kathy Russell, Midge Wilson, and Ronald Hall
(1992) discuss the effects of white beauty standards among black children:
“According to psychiatrists William Grier and Price Cobbs, authors of Black
Rage, every American Black girl experiences some degree of shame about her
appearance. Many must submit to painful hair-combing rituals that aim to
make them look, if not more ‘White-like,’ at least more ‘presentable’” (43).
Without argument, Pecola accepts the shaming of her blackness, bowing
to (and eventually breaking under) the heavy weight of white oppression.
In Morrison’s novels, young black girls, taught by society to worship white
femininity and white motherhood by the community adoration of them,
must either believe in their own deficiencies, as Pecola does, or attack the
source of oppression, as Claudia does.
Thus, some of Morrison’s females resist white beauty ideals by using
verbal violence to sustain a positive self-image. Claudia and Freda use verbal
aggression against Maureen Peal, a “high-yellow dream child,” (Morrison
1994, 62), eventually disintegrating into a yelling fight about skin color.2
Maureen represents yet more devotion to white beauty standards as the light-
skinned, straight-haired black child who baits a dark-skinned girl. Grasping
that Maureen is using “black” as a derogative description (and recognizing
her own presence within the same category), Claudia’s mindset shifts as
she understands that she is also under attack. The final insult by Maureen
is used to draw acute awareness of her own highly favored light skin color:
“‘I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos’” (ibid., 73). Claudia
and Freda sink under the wisdom, accuracy, and relevance of Maureen’s last
words:
If she was cute—and if anything could be believed, she was—then we were
not. And what did that mean? We were lesser. Nicer, brighter, but still lesser.
. . . And all the time we knew that Maureen Peal was not the Enemy and not
worthy of such intense hatred. The Thing to fear was the Thing that made
her beautiful, and not us. (ibid., 74)

Their community at large has accepted white (and light) skin as beautiful—
and thus has negated beauty in black (and darker) skin. The girls, living in
this oppressive reality, must either accept the emotional violence forced on
them, believing in their ugliness (which Pecola does) or fight back as aggres-
sively as possible to maintain a positive self-image. They must rebel violently
for their own self-preservation.

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 fall 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families   29

And so they do. Focusing on Maureen’s weaknesses—being born with six

fingers, having a “dog tooth,” and a childish play on her name—Claudia and
Freda attempt to restore power to themselves. Their verbal assault upends
the power of white/light, refusing the racialized and gendered expectations
for young black girls and instead creating a new vision of themselves as the
dominant figures. While they still suffer from the realization that their dark
skin is not as valued as Maureen’s light skin, their verbal attack becomes
their own act of rebellion, denying society’s oppression of them. Claudia
and Freda’s self-esteem remains intact, if dinged, by society’s white obsessive
compulsion.
Likewise, the young girls in Sula also engage in childhood teasing, but it
quickly escalates into self-mutilation, the accidental murder of a childhood
friend and then conspiracy to avoid discovery and punishment. In an early
scene, the title character and her best friend Nel attempt to outmaneuver four
white teenage boys who enjoyed “harassing black schoolchildren,” forcing the
girls to take “elaborate” paths home from school (Morrison 1982, 53). One
day, Sula confronts the boys, pulling out her grandmother’s “paring knife. . .
. Holding the knife in her right hand, she . . . presses her left forefinger down
hard on its edge. . . . She slashed off . . . the tip of her finger” (ibid., 54). Then,
staring at the boys, Sula says, “‘If I can do that to myself, what you suppose
I’ll do to you?’” (ibid., 54–55). While some critics believe Sula’s action is
an “internalized . . . lesson of racist oppression” (Bouson 2000, 63), it also
can be read as an extreme example of redefined power. Sula’s willingness
to mutilate herself is a means to show strength, offering new realizations of
what is capable within violence. Instead of pitifully attacking the boys, who
are taller, older, and stronger, and not succeeding, she chooses to harm that
which she has the most control over: herself.3 Attacking herself shows Sula’s
inner courage and imagination to the boys, who quickly leave, realizing that
their petty bullying is no match for Sula’s actual self-violence and audacity.
Thus, Sula transforms her status, reflecting child and female powerlessness
into a terrible ferocity from which the bullying white boys cannot depart
fast enough. Regardless of her age, her skin color, or her size, Sula becomes
the dominant person in this altercation. She succeeds in rebelling against the
standards others have set for her (and others like her), forcing everyone—the
boys, Nel, and even readers—to view her differently afterward.
Interestingly, many of the girls in these novels learn their violent behav-
iors from within their own families, frequently from other female characters,
and often from their mothers or grandmothers, making the violence inter-

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30   amanda putnam

generational and matrilineal. Many of the women in Morrison’s novels are

mothers who have been enslaved or otherwise victimized by intense racism
and oppression, which then embodies itself in violence toward their own,
albeit sometimes as a mothering tool.
The home, then, becomes both a place of inspiration and violence, min-
gling the two in ways that are not easily separated. As bell hooks discusses in
“Homeplace,” the black domestic arena created by black women has been
crucial to the reassurance of black children and their self-identities. She states,
“Black women resisted [white oppression] by making homes where all black
people could strive to be subjects, not objects, where we could be affirmed in
our minds and hearts despite poverty, hardship, and deprivation, where we
could restore to ourselves the dignity denied us on the outside in the public
world” (hooks 1990, 42). Connecting hooks’s point with Morrison’s stories
means realizing the possibility that daughters may have learned violent pat-
terns from loving mothers, as well as those who accepted white oppression.
In other words, some black mothers may have intentionally taught violent
behaviors to their daughters to prepare for their daughters’ future survival in
a world that devalued them. Claudia Tate states, “[T]here’s a special kind of .
. . violence in writings by black women—not a bloody violence, but violence
nonetheless. Love, in the Western notion, is full of possession, distortion, and
corruption. It’s a slaughter without the blood” (as quoted in Hinson 2001,
147). When children learn violence from within the home and from their
caretakers, it becomes ordinary and natural and, later, is incorporated into
their own behaviors and thoughts. Thus, while readers definitively notice
the violence between generations, often the characters themselves do not
articulate their feelings about the learned violent behaviors.
Even so-called “good” mothers in several Morrison novels show slight
violence at times toward their children, wreaking havoc on their self-esteem
and teaching them to engage in violent behavior with others.4 In one of
the first scenes of The Bluest Eye, both Claudia and Freda get sick and the
narration reflects the impatience of their typically caring mother: “How . . .
do you expect anybody to get anything done if you all are sick?” (Morrison
1994, 10). Claudia’s narration continues: “My mother’s voice drones on. She
is not talking to me. She is talking to the puke, but she is calling it my name:
Claudia” (ibid., 11). The sick girls feel unloved and miserable, even though
their parents are normally nurturing and attentive. These simple acts of
slight violence evoke pity for the girls, while showing readers a world that is
often uncomfortable or painful: sometimes even loving mothers will inflict

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 fall 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families   31

emotional abuse on their children, which, in turn, teaches them to repeat

the abuse on each other.
Similarly, in Sula, Helene Wright’s desire to remove herself and her daugh-
ter completely from the taint of the whorehouse Helene had been born in
manifests itself in quashing Nel’s curiosity: “Any enthusiasms that little Nel
showed were calmed by the mother until [Helene] drove her daughter’s
imagination underground” (Morrison 1982, 18). Helene’s worry that Nel will
portray any semblance of the qualities of Helene’s prostitute mother indi-
cates her willingness to sacrifice strong qualities of creativity or intelligence
for meek obedience. In doing so, Nel’s “parents had succeeded in rubbing
down to a dull glow any sparkle or splutter she had” (ibid., 83). The girl’s
obedience is steadfast, but the parental violence to her maturation process
forces Nel to develop into a woman who does not understand the options
available to her as an adult. Unlike Sula who becomes a dominant force in
her own life, Nel meekly follows along, having suffered the passive violence
of her mother’s repression.
In several Morrison novels, maternal emotional abandonment changes
children (usually daughters) in unfavorable ways, causing them to inflict
violence on others. In The Bluest Eye, Geraldine met all the “physical needs”
of her son Junior, but it is painfully clear to him (and to readers) that she
prefers the cat (Morrison 1994, 85–86). The subtle but emotionally effective
violence of withholding motherly affection contributes to Junior’s eventual
desire to “bully girls” (ibid., 87), and he becomes a tyrant to any child younger
or smaller than him.
In Morrison’s newest novel, A Mercy, another “good” mother chooses
to send away her young enslaved daughter, in the hope of preventing her
daughter from being sexually abused.5 However, without acknowledgment
of the reasoning for this choice, the daughter internalizes what she perceives
as her mother’s emotional and physical abandonment, eventually erupting
in more violence against a future rival. In the first chapter of A Mercy, Flo-
rens, who is “maybe seven or eight” (Morrison 2008, 5) misunderstands her
mother’s reasoning in sending her away with a new owner as payment of a
debt, instead of going with her to the new place. Florens remembers, with
childlike sadness, “forever and ever. Me watching, my mother listening, her
baby boy on her hip. Senhor is not paying the whole amount he owes to Sir.
Sir saying he will take instead the woman and the girl, not the baby boy and
the debt is gone. A minha mãe begs no. Her baby boy is still at her breast.
Take the girl, she says, my daughter, she says. Me. Me” (ibid., 7). The betrayal
Florens feels is evident in her version—her pain as she repeats “Me. Me . . .

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32   amanda putnam

forever and ever” illustrates to readers that she cannot believe her mother
has just given her away to be separated forever from her. Of course, neither
mother nor daughter is free—so the mother actually has no options. She
simply begs to provide for both children. Unfortunately, the young Florens
understands the situation as her mother choosing a baby brother over the
older daughter. Florens shares her growing perception of the situation by
adding that “mothers nursing greedy babies scare me. I know how their eyes
go when they choose . . . holding the little boy’s hand” (ibid., 8). Instead of
realizing the great sacrifice her mother has just made for her daughter, Florens
only understands her own abandonment—and this shapes her entire future.
Thus, even though Florens’s mother actually had pure intentions—valu-
ing her daughter more than herself to save the child from potential sexual
abuse—the outcome of not choosing to stay with Florens negatively affects
the girl throughout her life, wreaking havoc on the child’s self-esteem and
her ability to nurture any other relationship successfully. Eventually, readers
discover that Florens’s mother chooses to send her daughter because she
believes “Sir” has “no animal in his heart” (Morrison 2008, 163) versus the
men in the house in which they are currently residing, who have raped the
mother multiple times and are already noticing Florens’s changing body
(ibid., 162). The mother sees her chance for Florens: “Because I saw the tall
man see you as a human child . . . I knelt before him. Hoping for a miracle.
He said yes” (ibid., 166). Begging to save her infant son (who will likely die
without her care) as well as provide a life-altering opportunity for her daugh-
ter, this mother gives away her own chance of living a better life so that both
her children will survive. In this case, Florens’s mother shows a similarity to
other enslaved mothers. As hooks explains, “In the midst of a brutal racist
system, which did not value black life, [the slave mother] valued the life of
her child enough to resist that system” (1990, 44). While hooks is actually
revising Frederick Douglass’s negative description of his own mother, who
walked twelve miles whenever possible to hold him at night, the description
is a valid one in this case, too. Florens’s mother goes to great strides to give
her children the best opportunity available.
Unfortunately, the lack of explanation for her mother’s actions and
choices creates a distrust in Florens, which she carries with her throughout
the novel, eventually ending in a violent reaction toward a child she views as
a competitor. Florens’s love affair with a freedman and her unwillingness to
share him with an orphaned boy reflects the violence she has felt her whole
life from her mother. When she initially meets the boy, Florens immediately
recognizes her predicament: “This happens twice before. The first time it is

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 fall 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families   33

me peering around my mother’s dress hoping for a hand that is only for her
little boy. . . . Both times are full of danger and I am expel” (Morrison 2008,
135–37). Worried that she again will be replaced or excluded, she cannot see
that her lover could love more than one person: “I worry as the boy steps
closer to you . . . As if he is your future. Not me” (ibid., 136). Assuming the
boy also wants her absence, Florens narrates her understanding of him: “He
is silent but the hate in his eyes is loud. He wants my leaving. This cannot
happen. I feel the clutch inside. This expel can never happen again” (ibid.,
137). Eventually, Florens attacks the child and shares, “And yes I do hear the
shoulder crack but the sound is small. . . . He screams screams then faints”
(ibid., 139–40). The lover reappears at this moment, having seen the attack,
and is outraged and angered, ironically rejecting Florens, not because he
favors the boy but because he has seen the violence inside her, bred and fos-
tered within slavery and that system’s forcible abandonment by her mother.
While Florens is not able to use violence to get what she wants (her lover), it
is still a rebellious action taken against her circumstances. Florens’s violent
attack on the child—and then moments later on her lover—only makes
sense when readers understand her mindset as the daughter sent away by
her mother. Sent away by both her mother and lover, Florens cannot make
sense of the past to create a new life, even in freedom. Nonetheless, in this
desperate act of violence, Florens rebels against the limitations of societal
behavior, taking action and refusing to accept abandonment yet again.
The tragedy, of course, is that Florens’s mother was trying to save her
daughter (and likewise her lover was simply being kind to an abandoned boy),
but, without that crucial piece of information from her enslaved mother,
Florens does not learn to navigate relationships or learn to trust—and so the
innocent and self-martyring act of rescue from the mother becomes also an
act of violence, setting in motion her daughter’s future brutality and ultimate
self-destruction.
Similarly, in Sula, readers see again how emotional trauma via mother
violence can affect the development of social empathy and compassion,
thereby creating subsequent generations of violent females. The pain Sula
feels upon discovering her mother’s opinion of her damages the young girl’s
self-concept, preparing Sula to become a violent and distant teenager and
adult. Sula’s first realization of her mother’s apathy to her segues into a scene
of accidental violence toward another child and later into a coldness toward
death in general. After Sula hears her mother, Hannah, explain that, while she
had maternal feelings for Sula, she did not like her, Sula feels “bewilderment
. . . [and] a sting in her eye” (Morrison 1982, 57). Interestingly, Hannah, asks

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34   amanda putnam

her own mother, Eva, “‘did you ever love us?’” (ibid., 67). Eva, angered by
the question, indicates she did not. Thus, it is not surprising that Hannah
repeats this type of phrasing (and abuse) to her own daughter, not willingly
recognizing the damage inflicted on herself in the same situation. But Sula’s
maternal abandonment is real and affects her self-image. Suddenly, Sula is
vulnerable, since (like Pecola), if a young black girl cannot expect her own
mother to enjoy her unconditionally, it is unlikely that the rest of the world
will do so.
Comprehending her vulnerability for the first time, Sula recovers via
violence toward another child. The scene quickly changes from Sula’s house-
hold6 to Sula and Nel playing near a river and trees with a little boy named
Chicken Little. After climbing up and down a tree with the little boy, Sula
playfully “picked him up by his hands and swung him outward then around
and around . . . [and] when he slipped from her hands and sailed away out
over the water they could still hear his bubbly laughter” (Morrison 1982,
60–61). However, the boy does not emerge from the water; and instead of
trying to save him, both girls wait to see what happens. In fact, the first thing
Nel says is “‘Somebody saw,’” (61) suggesting that the girls are far more
concerned about someone seeing them watch a child drown than the actual
passivity of their actions. The girls do not tell anyone what happened, and
Chicken Little’s water-engorged body is eventually found and buried a few
days later.
But the emotional violence of discovering Sula’s mother’s passive hostil-
ity for her helps create a detachment in Sula, allowing her to watch death
and other tragedies from an easy distance. Sula later watches her mother
burn to death in their backyard, and grandmother Eva believes the girl did
so out of twisted curiosity. Having learned from her mother the possibility
of loving, but remaining remote, and having learned from her grandmother
that murder may be a part of family life (as Eva murders her own son), Sula
remains aloof from her mother’s fiery death, just as she was when she acci-
dently killed Chicken Little.
In fact, later in the novel, it is clear that Sula connects her emotional
trauma from her mother with her personal detachment. The intense pain of
learning her mother does not like her blinds Sula to feeling a normal amount
of social compassion, which then manifests itself through violence toward
others. Sula recounts her new understanding:
As willing to feel pain as to give pain, to flee pleasure as to give pleasure,
hers was an experimental life—ever since her mother’s remarks sent her

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 fall 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families   35

flying up those stairs, ever since her one major feeling of responsibility had
been exorcised on the bank of a river with a closed place in the middle. The
first experience taught her there was no other that you could count on; the
second that there was not self to count on either. (Morrison 1982, 118–19)

Thus, Sula’s distant and even cruel teenage and adult behaviors toward oth-
ers are taught to her by other women in her household. Escaping the pain of
emotional maternal abandonment, Sula mimics that distance to others for
the rest of the novel. In fact, when Sula returns to the town as an adult, she
quickly puts her grandmother Eva into a nursing home, instead of caring for
her herself, and is massively condemned for it by the townspeople (ibid., 112).
And yet, her decision makes sense to her because she recognizes no personal
connection to her grandmother (or to her dead mother)—and they are the
ones who taught her how to feel that way. She rebels against standard expec-
tations for daughters (and women at large), ignoring the dictates of society
and behaving with passive violence to those who taught her those emotions.
Regardless of the community’s feelings for her, though, Sula is clearly
recognized as an empowered, tough woman. She has sexual relations with
anyone she wants, regardless of race or marital status; is insolent to her
grandmother and adult men; and puts her own needs before those of others.
In a novel where Nel’s mother turns to “custard” trying to appease a racist
white man (Morrison 1982, 22), Sula is a character foil, reflecting strength
and boldness, even though that same power occasionally hurts—and even
kills—others near her.
Other mothers in Morrison’s novels move beyond emotional child
abuse, adding stark physical violence, creating additional havoc in the chil-
dren’s levels of self-esteem. At one point in The Bluest Eye, readers witness
yet another scene showing terrible disparity in the treatment of white and
black girls, but this time the scene also highlights the potential brutality of
mother-daughter relations. When Pecola accidentally knocks over a pie in the
house in which her mother works, her legs are burnt by the blueberry juice.
Instead of comforting her daughter, Pauline Breedlove hits her “with the
back of her hand knock[ing] her to the floor” (Morrison 1994, 109). While
it is understandable that Pauline is angry—the pie is for the white family
she works for, which could cost her both time and money; additionally, the
accident has “splatter[ed] blackish blueberries everywhere” (ibid., 108) in the
pristine kitchen, essentially creating even more work for Pauline. Regardless
of the validity of the issues, Pauline’s anger at Pecola, her own daughter, is
out of proportion, especially when readers see how she comforts the white

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36   amanda putnam

daughter of the family who employs her, “hushing and soothing the tears
of the little pink-and-yellow girl” (ibid., 109). Clearly, this mother is out of
sync with her maternal feelings, lushly nurturing the child of her employers,
while physically abusing and neglecting her own daughter; but it reflects the
race-based oppression under which they all live. Likewise, the violence—both
physical and emotional—that she inflicts on Pecola is obscene, especially in
comparison to her mothering behavior toward another child. Pecola absorbs
this ill-treatment, eventually accepting abuse from all corners of her life as
her due, directing her learned violence on herself alone.
Likewise, Pauline Breedlove believes it is her Christian duty to punish
her alcoholic husband and thus co-creates constant domestic disturbances
within the family, initiating fights with her husband, Cholly, which, in turn,
encourages more violence from her children. In one such scene, after a verbal
fight between husband and wife escalates into a physical one, the son actively
joins in hitting his drunk father, eventually yelling, “‘Kill him! Kill him!’”
(Morrison 1994, 44). While Mrs. Breedlove barely reacts to her son’s emo-
tional and physical outburst, his intensity is deeply felt by the reader who sees
in him another generation of violence waiting to blossom. However, even if
readers do not care for Pauline Breedlove, it is also clear that she redirects
her own powerlessness in these situations. Mrs. Breedlove is a force to be
reckoned with—if only to her daughter, son, and husband. Regardless of
anything else, like Florens in A Mercy, Breedlove becomes powerful through
violence, redefining herself via it.
In most of these examples, Morrison positions the home and immediate
family relationships as places of potentially terrible pain. As Carole Boyce
Davies explains, “The family is sometimes situated as a site of oppression
for women. The mystified notions of home and family are removed from
their romantic, idealized moorings, to speak of pain, movement, difficulty,
learning and love in complex ways” (1994, 21). These families become real
for readers—they break hearts, they hurt each other, and they do not always
apologize. And though some of the mothers in Morrison’s novels mentioned
here genuinely love their children, they also cannot remove the violence that
is as a learned part of their lives within an oppressive culture as is their desire
to nurture.
In the most final violence possible, some mothers in Morrison’s novels
choose to end the lives of their children—in infancy and childhood (Beloved)
or even in adulthood (Sula), attempting to offer an escape from something
considered worse than death in their maternal minds. By choosing death

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 fall 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families   37

for their children, these mothers are definitively demonstrating the ways in
which fatal violence becomes an act of rebellion and a form of resistance.
In Sula, Eva Peace transforms her position of weakness into power, by
determining what kind of life is worth her son’s living and then choosing
to kill him. When her son Plum comes home from World War I addicted to
heroin, Eva waits to see if he will change his ways. Eventually, though, Eva
“threw [a lit newspaper] onto the bed where the kerosene-soaked Plum lay”
(Morrison 1982, 47), burning him to death to prevent his continued life of
drug addiction. Later, Eva explains it:
he wanted to crawl back into my womb and well . . . There wasn’t space .
. . Being helpless and thinking baby thoughts and dreaming baby dreams
and messing up his pants again and smiling all the time. I had room in my
heart, but not in my womb. . . . I done everything I could to make him leave
me and go on and live and be a man but he wouldn’t and I had to keep him
out so I just thought of a way he could die like a man not all scrunched up
inside my womb, but like a man. (ibid., 71–72)

Eva’s decision has more to do with her own state of mind than Plum’s (who
is “smiling all the time”). As his mother, she makes it her decision whether
he should live a life of addiction. Powerless to change his behaviors and/or
make him “live and be a man,” Eva redirects her status of helplessness into
dominant female strength and murders Plum.
Beloved’s Sethe, the mother of four children, is well known for her attempt
to kill her children, once she realizes they are about to be taken back into
slavery. After being free for twenty-eight days, Sethe takes control of the situ-
ation the only way she knows how: by destroying the “property” for which
the bounty hunter and slaveowner have come, because Sethe “wasn’t going
back there . . . Any life but that one” was preferable (Morrison 1988, 42).
As Boyce Davies suggests, “Beloved . . . simultaneously critiques exclusive
mother-love as it asserts the necessity for Black women to claim something
as theirs” (1994, 136). Similarly, Christopher Peterson’s analysis indicates
that Sethe must “kill her own daughter . . . to claim that daughter as her own
over and above the master’s claim” (2006, 554). Sethe’s decision can only be
understood when readers recognize the entirety of the choices available to
her and realize that, via violence, Sethe redirects her racialized powerlessness
into maternal possession and dominance.
In Beloved, readers see how maternal love can be so overwhelming that
a mother might decide to kill her offspring rather than return them to a life
not worth living. Once Sethe escapes from slavery, finally reaching her three

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38   amanda putnam

older children with her newborn baby tied to her, her mother love is plenti-
ful: “Sethe lay in bed under, around, over, among, but especially with them
all” (Morrison 1988, 93). Unlike some other of Morrison’s mothers who
deny their mother love (like Baby Suggs), Sethe revels in it, both in times of
happiness and in despair. According to Christopher Peterson, Orlando Pat-
terson argues that “slavery destroys slave kinship structures” (Peterson 2006,
549). Sethe actually shows abundant connections to her children, risking
everything for them to escape and celebrating their life together afterward.
But believing capture (and subsequent torture) imminent, Sethe rebels
against societal mores that suggest mothering is nonviolent and takes desper-
ate action. The four white men open the shed door, seeing that “two boys
bled in the sawdust and . . . a nigger woman holding a blood-soaked child
to her chest” is swinging the infant “by the heels . . . toward the wall planks”
(Morrison 1988, 149). Her actions are unthinkable and brutal, yet readers
cannot doubt the truth of both her maternal love and her power. “Because
the normative vision of maternity tends to elevate the mother/child relation
to an idealized field of ethical action, infanticide is most often read either
as an unintelligible aberration from normative kinship, or as an act of pure
love, in which case it is thought to be completely intelligible” (Peterson 2006,
551). While Sethe’s actions are ghastly, they are also compellingly domi-
nant—she chooses what will happen to her and to her children. As Peterson
argues, “What Sethe claims signifies not only her daughter, but also what
she claims for her act of infanticide: namely, that it is an act of pure love”
(2006, 555). Sethe reprojects the violence that has oppressed her for years
and takes control of what little she can. Sethe loves her children enough to
choose death for them instead of a tortuous slave life.
Even months and years later, after being faced with prison and decades
of scorn within her community, Sethe defends her maternal violence. She
explains to Paul D., “I did it. I got us all out. . . . I couldn’t let all that go back
to where it was, and I couldn’t let her nor any of em live under schoolteacher”
(Morrison 1988, 162–63). Even more telling are Sethe’s thoughts when she
recognizes the slaveowner’s hat in the front lawn that fateful day:
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. (ibid., 163)

Unwilling to sacrifice her children’s right to freedom, familial connections,

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 fall 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families   39

and even daily decision making (something she herself rarely enjoyed until
her escape), she chooses violent death inside family unity. Explaining about
cutting her own daughter’s throat, Sethe says, “if I hadn’t killed her she
would have died and that is something I could not bear to happen to her”
(ibid., 200). For Sethe, slavery (especially being owned by the awful School-
teacher) is death—a death of the spirit and mind as well as body—and it is
worse than any physical dying because it occurs without any connection to
significant others. Sethe’s lack of knowledge about her mother’s life or death,
her husband’s disappearance, and their friends’ outcomes after escape all
direct her to realize that making an awful choice can be better than having
no choice at all. As Boyce Davies explains, “Sethe’s violent action becomes
an attempt to hold on to the maternal right and function” (1994, 139). After
freedom had been achieved, Sethe accepted the burden of power that came
with keeping that freedom at all costs. She acts rebelliously, willing to die and
kill in order to claim her children as her own, above any claim of property
by Schoolteacher.
Though Sethe is the most infamous for her brutal maternal decision, she
is not the only mother in Beloved who resorts to violence—and readers can
learn how and why Sethe comes to her own ferocious mothering decision by
noticing more about her relationship (and/or the lack of that relationship)
with her own mother. Known only as “Ma’am,” Sethe’s mother works in
the rice fields and is a stranger to Sethe, but she is the only child of Ma’am’s
that is encouraged to live and thus indoctrinates into Sethe the concept of
mothers choosing life or death for their children. Another slave woman tells
Sethe about Sethe’s conception and birth after Ma’am’s death: “‘She threw
them all away but you. The one from the crew she threw away on the island.
The others from more whites she also threw away. Without names, she threw
them. You she gave the name of the black man. She put her arms around him.
The others she did not put her arms around’” (Morrison 1988, 62). The story,
which implicitly explains the horrors of multiple rapes upon Ma’am, also
recognizes the power of maternal choice. Ma’am could not escape rape and
subsequent pregnancy, but she rebelled, by refusing motherhood until she
was impregnated by someone whom she had accepted. Ma’am’s actions and
decisions are not discussed more fully in the novel, but they surely would have
taught Sethe the importance of power, choice, rebellion, and motherhood.
Although technically “unimpressed” with the story as a child, the concept
(and power) of choosing motherhood (and thus also the special burdens of
deciding life or death for your offspring) is established for Sethe from early
on in her life.

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40   amanda putnam

Additionally, in one of the few positive memories Sethe has with her
mother, violence marks the moment that focuses on possession and recog-
nition, encrypting Sethe with the understanding that maternal violence is
easily also an act of love. During infancy, it is another woman’s job to nurse
Sethe and later, an eight-year-old child watches her while her mother works
in the fields. However, Ma’am takes Sethe aside one day to show her a brand
below her ribs, burnt there by slaveowners. Ma’am shows this mark so that “if
something happens to [her] and [Sethe] can’t tell [her] by [her] face, [Sethe]
can know [Ma’am] by this mark” (Morrison, 1988, 61). Sethe, encouraged
by what is an unusual token of familiar possession between them, asks her
mother to “‘Mark the mark on me too’” (ibid.) so that they would be similar
to one another. But Ma’am slaps Sethe for the remark, not wanting her own
daughter to be burnt but not explaining why.
Readers understand this scene through multiple lenses. First, the act of
recognition between mother and daughter is key—the mother is ensuring
that, despite the probable violence that will end her own life (which is accu-
rate—Ma’am is lynched), she wants her daughter to be able to recognize her
body and know why she is then absent (i.e., unlike the mysteries of absences
related to so many others, like Sethe’s husband). But Sethe, unmothered by
slavery, is unable to understand—instead, she wants to bond with her mother
by displaying the same mark as she has—showing that she and her mother
share the same symbol. Second, and perhaps even more importantly, Sethe
learns that maternal violence—hitting the child to express your point—can
be an expression of possession and even love. Sethe learns from this poignant
memory that violence can mark the relationship of mother to child, so read-
ers should not be surprised when she turns to violence later to protect and
show her possession of her own children.
Sethe’s understanding of her mother also allows her to explain Ma’am’s
death in terms of their connection to each other. When Ma’am is lynched,
Sethe wonders what her mother did to deserve dying: “Running, you think?
No. Not that. Because she was my ma’am and nobody’s ma’am would run
off and leave her daughter” (ibid., 203). Sethe’s immediate refusal of this
particular action as the reason for the lynching—running off without tak-
ing Sethe with her—reflects her own understanding of familial connections.
Sethe would never physically abandon her children to save herself—her abil-
ity to mother them is demanded via proximity and decision making—even
to the point of choosing the time and means of their deaths, if necessary.
While other mothers in Beloved condemn Sethe for her violent mothering,
many of them also engage in maternal violence in various ways, as well as

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 fall 2011 / bl ack women, gender, and families   41

treat Sethe’s family with violence for decades. While Sethe’s mother-in-law
Baby Suggs denounces the choice Sethe makes in the shed with her children,
she also recognizes her own losses via slavery:
Seven times she had done that: held a little foot; examined the fat fingertips
with her own—fingers she never saw become the male or female hands a
mother would recognize anywhere. She didn’t know to this day what their
permanent teeth looked like; or how they held their heads when they walked.
Did Patty lose her lisp? What color did Famous’ skin finally take? Was that
a cleft in Johnny’s chin or just a dimple that would disappear soon’s his
jawbone changed? Four girls, and the last time she saw them there was no
hair under their arms. Does Ardelia still love the burned bottom of bread?
All seven were gone or dead. What would be the point of looking too hard
at that youngest one? (Morrison 1988, 139)

So while Baby Suggs does not murder her children, she does determine to
deal with the pain of losing her children by not loving them (ibid., 23)—
which does not quite work. For example, when she hears that two children
(Nancy and Famous) died on a ship waiting to leave harbor, she “covered her
ears with her fists to keep from hearing” (ibid., 144). Peterson explains that
Suggs’s methodology is due to “the threat of white violence [which] has con-
ditioned former slaves not to attach themselves too strongly to the things they
love” (2006, 153). Again, while Baby Suggs believes she is on a higher moral
ground than Sethe, the reality is that Baby Suggs forced herself to abandon
her children almost at birth, knowing that they will eventually be taken away
within slavery. In contrast, Sethe never abandons her children—she remains
constant for them, even though her method of mothering becomes brutal.
Similarly, even Ella, a woman who also does not condone the choices
Sethe has made, has her own secret mother violence: “She had delivered,
but would not nurse, a hairy white thing, fathered by ‘the lowest yet.’ It lived
five days never making a sound.” (Morrison 1988, 258–59). These choices of
maternal neglect show that mother violence takes many forms, and, while
Sethe is condemned for her public choice of brutality, there are several others
who similarly make hard decisions about their own offspring.
These female characters, all flawed but also all attempting to manage
situations far beyond their control, choose violence. In doing so, they trans-
form from powerless subordinates into dominating forces, even though that
transformation often has multidimensional repercussions for them and
those with whom they have chosen to be violent. As young girls, mothers,
and grandmothers, they act in unsanctioned ways, forcing a redefinition of

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42   amanda putnam

what black femaleness and black motherhood can and should be, especially
under oppressive conditions. Through multiple generations of violent pat-
terns (reflecting the viciousness of racist society around them), children
learn violence and become violent themselves, and violent mothers may
find themselves unmothered by murdering their own children, depicting a
repetitive ghastliness within Morrison families.
And yet these female characters remain powerful, dominant, and intrigu-
ing. They face horrendously oppressive circumstances and create new end-
ings to them, which their oppressors can hardly believe. They redirect their
powerless positions, transforming themselves into hauntingly forceful girls
and women. They choose their own destinies, even if those futures are often
lonely or tragic. Thus, these violent females provide a new understanding of
violence and its relationship to personal power and community.

Endnotes
1. Original emphasis.
2. While Carol Iannone (1987) pointed out in her criticisms of Morrison that this type
of black-on-black cruelty also repeatedly shows black life as strangely traumatic and/or
disturbing, that commentary underplays the reality of absorbed white-societal obsessive-
ness—and the need for these young girls to rebel against those constraints.
3. While some critics, such as Iannone (1987), suggest that Morrison does not take a
“stand on the appalling actions she depicts” (61), the statement of power behind Sula’s
actions is explicit and attention-grabbing.
4. The consequences of accepting mothering as a biological imperative was handled
nicely in Henderson (2009), in that the author offered a reunderstanding of the defini-
tion of a so-called “good” mother, especially in terms of parenting away from biological
children.
5. Again, Henderson’s 2009 work in BWGF is helpful as her interviews “enhance our
understandings of maternal absence by moving away from a selfish act of child rejection
to a loving attempt to ‘do what’s best for the child’” (35).
6. hooks’s concept of homeplace is interesting in understanding the link between
intimacy and violence within the home.

References
Bouson, J. Brooks. Quiet as It’s Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Mor-
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Boyce Davies, Carole. Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject. New
York: Routledge, 1994.

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Henderson, Mae C. “Pathways to Fracture: African American Mothers and the Complexi-
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Iannone, Carol. “Toni Morrison’s Career.” Commentary 84, no. 6 (1987): 59–63.
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———. Beloved. New York: Plume/Penguin Books USA Inc., 1988. Originally pub. 1987.
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———. A Mercy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf/Random House, Inc, 2008.
Peterson, Christopher. “Beloved’s Claim.” Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 3 (2006):
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