A Fabricated Reality: Sethe's Motherhood

"Motherhood in Toni Morrison's Beloved: A Psychological Reading" by Sandra Mayfield offers a complex illustration of Sethe's "risky" motherhood and explains the parts of Sethes's early life that "led her to view her position as a mother as a meaningful vocation". Mayfield describes several issues of injustice in society such as sexism, racism, and objectification that would lead any woman towards feelings of loneliness and "Desire" for "connection". By acknowledging and rationalizing the historical context it enlightens readers about the larger issues that contribute to the making of Sethe's motherhood, her greatest struggle and triumph.

Mayfield describes that Sethe's powerful calling to be a mother, a good mother, was initially sparked during the traumatic experience of "witnessing her mother's death". The severe isolation she experienced at an age before twelve, is compared to and further explained by the "external break" philosophy originated by Jacques Lacan. Lacan believed that children develop several images and narratives based on their human interactions in the part of the mind that her termed the "imaginary". The imaginary is the space that the child a sense of self and the basis of narratives that can only be understood by the child themselves. The "imaginary" is very similar in theory to Sigmund Freud, the godfather of psychology, and his belief that the unconscious and personal desires are influenced by childhood events.

It is also pointed out that Sethe's experience as a young slave woman, particularly the sexual assaults, had grounded her passion for motherhood in a commitment to "give her [children] a better life than she had experienced". This too, adds to the her personal devotion to achieve a passionate motherhood. In fact, it can even be argued that, in terms of Lacanian analysis, Sethe wanted to be the object of desire of her own children, just as they were hers.

Mayfield's early reflections on maternal memory-never good enough to remember the good (especially the mentioning of when Baby Suggs agonizes about all the details about her eight children she cannot remember) and never bad enough to forget the pain-are replaced later on with maternal rememory which is like weather . It is always there, "not the breath of the disremembered to be accounted for, but wind in the eaves, or spring ice thawing too quickly. Just weather." Maternal rememory, once Sethe fully experiences it in the novel, may indeed be capable of performing a task deemed impossible in the beginning of the novel-to remember the beautiful trees of Sweet Home and the bodies hanging from them. As the story of the past embodied in Beloved emerges, such distinctions and separations vanish and no one position remains comfortably distinguishable, categorizable in schoolteacher-style into separate characteristics . A series of counter narratives, of counter families, offers a metonymic escape route out of the master narrative
of family and Motherhood.