The setting, time, and main characters of the film Beloved all point to struggling aspects of African Americans and African American women in particular. Sethe, the mother, is determined to keep her children from slavery no matter what the cost. She knows what the life of slavery entails so she takes her children and escapes from their master. Within 29 days the master finds her at her mother-in-laws house. Sethe takes a drastic measure and slays her two sons, harms her daughter Beloved, while her other daughter goes untouched. A man who befriends her takes Beloved off somewhere to hide her. Meanwhile Sethe's master decides to walk away after witnessing this horrific event. So the story begins with the two sons haunting the house and it's not until later on does it start to bring about an understanding. Sethe was a woman in the late 1900's forced to either take or make her own freedom. It was because of women like her that African Americans have more control over their own freedom today. .
Beloved has left some unanswered questions, but maybe for a reason. It gives you enough backbone for each character to make some connection with. Just enough to allow you to draw your own conclusions on what was real and why certain things happen. The big question for me would be if Beloved herself really existed when she came back into Sethe's life and were her two sons truly ghosts? I"ll see if I can answer my own question by reviewing the movie's aspects. .
In Beloved, African Americans were basically understanding their freedom and struggling to make due with what little they did have. Taking place in a little town of Ohio, many African Americans traveled a road past Sethe's place, and often were leery of it because of what she did to her children. These people before hand, especially Sethe, dealt with prejudice, but that was just a little aspect of it. We have prejudice today, but it was what they went through that we can define racism.
