Reaction To BelovedThe movie Beloved was a tale of a woman who is so devastated by the evil of slavery.
Therefore she is willing to kill her toddler daughter rather than allow her to be taken back into the horror. This murderous act proves itself to be a choice, which only further enslaves her soul as her daughter’s ghost haunts her life. The movie was set in the 1800’s. Sethe is a pregnant slave on a Kentucky plantation named Sweet Home. She was under control by a violent slave master.
To me there is no reason or excuse for this kind of evil. The enslavement and brutal treatment of our fellow human beings is a spiritual scar. When Sethe gives birth to Beloved and is reunited with her children in Ohio. The happiness of this reunion is turn into a tragic event as she sees her former master riding up to the house with the local sheriff.
Sethe knows that he is coming back to take her children back into slavery, she runs into the shed, cuts the throat of her two year old daughter, Beloved, and hits her sons’ heads with a shovel. Her sons didn’t die but beloved did. Soon after the tragic event the spirit of Beloved haunts Sethe’s house. The scene of seeing Sethe kill Beloved is very disturbing to witness. The ghostly tantrum of Beloved comes back over and over again to disrupt Sethe’s home.
Her two sons become very scared by the haunts of Beloved. Sethe’s younger daughter, Denver becomes calm with her mother and the ghost, and she never leaves the house and yard. Sethe also becomes ok with the ghost presence in the house. She keeps denying that she did anything wrong by killing Beloved. So she feels that she doesn’t need any help. This is often the way evil take over our lives.
Rather than having the courage to face the evil we suffer, as Sethe did she affected her own children with this violence. Sethe became in denial with her responsibility. She accepted the pain of her guilt and shame with a lie towards her dignity. She felt everything was right and didn’t want to ask for forgiveness and victory over the evil. But soon a physical form of Beloved comes to Sethe’s house.
The girl who act as Beloved is real and demanding like a spoiled child. She is a grown woman who has a toddler’s tastes, emotional needs and self-centeredness. The girl destroys everything in her path, mainly because she is packed with evil. When Denver confesses to her grandmother’s friend about her mother and what happen, this is where the healing begins to take place. A group of former slave women who are Christians come to Sethe’s home to sing, pray and hold up crosses.
Sethe may have been destroyed by the evil she experienced, but the intervention of God helps her. Through his people they provide Sethe and her daughter a path for healing. In conclusion, the movie “Beloved” is a disturbing film about the impacts of the evil of slavery on multiple generations. From my perspective, “Beloved” was a spiritually harsh experience for Sethe. It left her enslaved in her obsessed pain for her daughter Beloved.
But some people probably felt that the movie had a sense of hope. Thinking that Christ had entered into the deepest evil of slavery and freed its daughters with a faith that is deeply felt to this day.
