The Ethics of Infanticide: Motherlove in Toni Morrison’s Sula and Beloved

Abstract

Readers and critics of Toni Morrison have intense, most often negative, reactions to the ideas and scenes of child-killing throughout her novels Sula and Beloved. To these readers, the mothers who slay their children in these stories can only be characterized as cruel or unnatural. As a response to these reactions, this paper explores Morrison’s representation of a different, preservative side of motherlove that is clearly seen in the impoverished African-American communities Morrison portrays. By exploring how these novels deconstruct the Western image of a “good mother” and offer a differing view, this paper explicates Morrison’s counter-narrative of motherhood. Rather than a site of powerlessness for the African-American mother, I will show how motherhood can be a locus of empowerment and agency that resists the racist and sexist culture that surrounds the protagonists of Sula and Beloved.