Sethe's Rememory and Defense Mechanisms

Text: Beloved by Toni Morrison

Critical Lens: Psychoanalytic

Sethe claims,“If a house burns down, its gone, but the place--the picture of it--stays, and not just in my rememory , but out there, in the world. What I remember is a picture floating around out there outside my head. I mean, even if I don’t think it, even if I die, the picture of what I did, or knew , or saw is still out there. Right in the place where it happened.”

Denver states, “If its out there still waiting that means that nothing ever dies”. (p.44-45)

In this passage Sethe looks back and reflects upon her life which is mostly affected by her past. Denver asks her to share what Sethe is thinking about her life and comes to the conclusion that “nothing ever dies”.  Sethe leaves us insight on how the past does not let her move on to the future. Sethe states “rememory” as a combination of remember and memory. She feels Sweet home is there waiting for her and she can never escape her past. Sethe killed her oldest baby girl in the hopes that they will never have to go through what she went through. Sethe in this passage feels guilty because she can never take back what she did although in the moment it was the only thing she could think of. Out there in the world in the paper or in the small town no one will ever look at her the same. Everything is a reminder of what she has done and can not escape it because it will be waiting for her. Sethe is trapped in the past and in the house and in her own memory.  As Paul D (one of the last sweet home men) appears those old memories come back to her of Sweet home that eventually led to her mistake. In this whole book it seems the only one paying the price is Sethe because no one states the awful things that happened in slavery.  Beloved is another thing that is waiting for her and is an image of her baby girl. As Denver says “nothing ever dies” it is like her baby girl never died and is haunting 124.

Memory is a very important part of the novel and how Sethe struggles with moving on with her past. Memory although in the novel is the enemy to Sethe is essential to our lives. Without our memory we would not be able to have our past help us with our present and our future. The process of memory is through encoding, storage, and retrieval.  Encoding is the ways it can be stored usually through our senses and whether it has meaning or not. Sethe might have taken deeply this information of obviously killing her daughter has a lot of meaning to her.  Then the memory is stored in either short term or long term memory. This is how we retrieve information and in this case Sethe has these memory’s in her long term memory. The memories stored in the long-term memory can last a lifetime.

In all Sethe uses defense mechanism which is a mental process when a person unconsciously tries to avoid conscious anxiety and stress. A defense mechanism she uses is Rationalization. Rationalization involves explaining an unacceptable behavior in a rational and logical way, but avoiding the truth. Sethe avoids the truth that she killed her daughter and tries to justify it by saying that she was preventing them from going back to Sweet home. Although there could have been other alternatives like hiding them and such. In all Sethe was abused and therefore terrified in which motivated her to make a terrible mistake.