When viewed from the perspective of the slave catcher, recapturing Sethe and her children is just another job. He even reminices about the different strategies that other escaped slaves have used to try to avoid capture as if it is just workplace banter. From the perspective of Schoolteacher it's a financial move, capture the woman who still has 10 good breeding years left and pick up her children as profits. But for Sethe it is the unthinkable. So she does what she thinks must be done in order to keep her children from experiencing the suffering and the horrors that she experienced.
Another example of this perspective is when Paul D. confronts Sethe about this after Stamp Paid shows him the newspaper clipping. Sethe dances around the topic for a while before finally confirming what she did. Paul's reaction is to say "you have two legs, not four," implying that what she did was subhuman, animalistic even. This is another matter of perspective, again, Sethe thought she was saving her children from a lifetime of suffering, but in Paul D's eyes she acted like an animal.
An earlier example of this, is when Sethe overhears Schoolteacher teaching his nephews about characteristics, and how he analyzes Sethe's "human characteristics" along side her "animal characteristics." To Sethe this is the ultimate offense and what drives her to send her children away and make a break for freedom, but for Schoolteacher it's just another lesson about another creature.
I agree that it is quite jarring to hear the story of what happens in the woodshed from the schoolteacher's view, especially because of his perspective as someone who isn't really bothered with the horrific nature of what Sethe has done but rather just disappointed that there is nothing for him to claim. With Sethe being damaged goods in his eyes, he sees nothing that he can profit from and talks about it as a good teaching moment for how to treat slaves, but nothing more.
ReplyDeleteI think Sethe's story provides an interesting perspective on what it means to be human. It's been said before but I'll say it again -- the novel revolves around a gruesome act that was guided by Sethe's maternal instincts, which while in essence was one of the most impassioned and love-motivated sacrifices of mankind, it is also seen by almost all but Sethe as the most coldblooded and bestial of deeds. It really strikes me how tragically misunderstood Sethe is, not only because everyone around her is revolted by what she did, but also because by the way she stands by the decision she made, you can almost feel how brutal her experiences as a slave were to have motivated this.
ReplyDeleteI agree that perspective plays a huge roll. While the slave catcher is sitting on his horse thinking about the job, we don't get a whole lot of insight of what is going on in Sethe's mind. One of the only things we get is her thinking "no no no no no" when she sees schoolteacher's hat. I think that seeing this through an outsiders eyes helps to make the reader understand what other people think of the act, rather than everything going through Sethe's mind.
ReplyDeleteIt is jarring--and in some ways, disappointing--when Paul D "counts Sethe's legs," in large part because the language of animal husbandry as applied to human beings is a particularly loaded form of discourse for these people. And schoolteacher's assessment of Sethe's drastic act, to draw from it a "lesson" in how not to "overbeat" one's livestock, only a few pages earlier does seem to align Paul D and schoolteacher to some extent here. But there's an important difference: schoolteacher isn't talking *to* Sethe at all, only *about* her (as is appropriate if one is indeed talking about livestock). He doesn't "dehumanize" her; she already *is* less than human in his eyes. But Paul finds an extreme and arresting way of expressing disappointment in Sethe, as if he expected better from her. He implicitly denounces her actions as not worthy of a human being, but he's "reminding" her that she should be better than that. It's disappointing when we want to see Sethe get that understanding she craves, and Paul's language echoes schoolteacher's--but there are important differences, and these leave room for Sethe and Paul to reconcile at some point.
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