"The best thing [Sethe] was, was her children. Whites might dirty her all right, but not her best thing, her beautiful, magical best thing -- the part of her that was clean" (250). She had been made to endure a lot which most slave women experienced during enslavement. They were brutally raped, used and beaten and often had to work as prostitutes. "I got close. I got close. To being a Saturday girl. I had already worked a stone mason's shop. A step to the slaughterhouse would have been a short one" (203-204).

Sethe's sense of abandonment was what gave her an imbalanced torn personality. She wanted a mother's love which she was denied and then she later did the same thing to her daughter and thus suffered immensely. In a way she was both Beloved and herself since she could feel Beloved's feelings of deprivation, abandonment and loss. When...
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