Film Deets:
Director: Jonathan Demme
Screenplay: Akosua Busia, Richard LaGravenese, Adam Brooks
Actresses: Oprah Winfrey, Thandiwe Newton
Category: Maternal Grief
Themes: The Institution of Slavery, Guilt
Why do these screams matter?
Notable for its uncompromising depiction of maternal bereavement and the enduring legacy of American slavery, Jonathan Demme’s Beloved (1998) tells the story of Sethe (Oprah Winfrey), a woman who is haunted by the memory of killing her daughter to spare her from a life of enslavement. When a young woman named Beloved (Thandiwe Newton) appears, claiming to be the reincarnation of Sethe’s deceased child, complex themes of grief emerge which force Sethe to finally confront the family’s legacy of intergenerational trauma. Based on Toni Morrison’s award-winning novel of the same name, Beloved resists easy characterizations of motherhood opting instead for a complex narrative that ultimately demonstrates the importance of community care.
Our first set of screams come when Sethe sees that the Schoolteacher, the violent plantation owner from whom she escaped, has arrived to take her and her children back to the plantation.
That these screams are emanating from a place of deep fear is unquestionable. Flashbacks of the unimaginable brutality Sethe endured while on the plantation, including being gang raped of her breastmilk while being compared to a farm animal, frame the deep levels of trauma informing her screams as she tries to escape with her children. These screams also provide a counterpoint to the silence that greets the Schoolteacher and his posse as they find Sethe in the barn, bloodied and having seemingly killed her children rather than allow them to be returned to the plantation. The reveal that only one of her children has died does little to combat the tragedy of the scene. That Sethe’s incomprehensible violence was motivated by love for her children is unquestionable, and her silence in this moment is a direct extension of her previous screams. Her screams for help come with a hope that someone on the farm will intervene and save her children. But it is a yearning that can never be. While the formerly enslaved people who also work on the farm are “free,” they are still bound by racist laws that view people as property and offer only very narrow means for people to secure their freedom. Because she escaped, Sethe and her children are still considered the property of the Schoolteacher and there is no way for those around her to intervene without risking punishment.
The juxtaposition of Sethe’s screams to her silence demonstrate the extent to which her grief is inexpressible. Her silence is a devastating cacophony of trauma response to the violence she has endured, shock at her actions, and grief for the children she loves desperately. But it is also the moment that Sethe stops expecting others to come to her aid, a moment when she admits to herself that she alone must make the hard decisions and carry the weight for those decisions.
Her cessation of screaming is also culturally bound. The idea that a woman could kill her own child out of love violates almost every social norm and challenges the very essence of how we expect “good” mothers to behave. Above all, mothers are expected by the culture to be self-sacrificing (Thurer 194). And yet, ample scholarship suggests that the act of maternal filicide is not typically the result of random violence but a by-product of a traumatic personal history (see White and Kowalski; Oberman). In their research exploring the risk factors of maternal filicide, Frederique et al. note, “Although mothers often murder their children as a way to relieve their own stress, suggesting a lack of coping mechanisms, there have also been situations in which the mothers murdered their child as a way to relieve a child’s pain and suffering” (35). For Sethe, both of these factors inform her decision to murder her child. She is both panicked by the appearance of Schoolteacher and the memories of abuse his presence brings back and she is convinced of the pain and suffering that await her children should they return to the plantation. With only her lived experience of continuous violence to guide her, Sethe truly sees murder as her only option to protect her children because, as she says when recounting the murder to Paul D., “Love is or it isn’t. Thin love ain’t love at all…I did stop him. I took and put my babies where they’d be safe…”
Presented as an extension of Sethe’s maternal grief and guilt, Beloved’s screams carry with them her own grief and anger hybrid. In this scene, she screams in fury at no longer having access to the sweet treats she has been consuming in quantity since her arrival.
In the scenes leading up to this outburst, Sethe has discovered that Beloved is the reincarnation of her deceased child. She responds by spending all her savings on the sweet treats and colorful knickknacks Beloved adores while her other daughter, Denver (Kimberly Elise), looks on with jealousy. Sethe’s total focus on Beloved to the exclusion of everyone and everything around her suggests a parasitic relationship between mother and daughter resulting in what Biserka Rashkova calls a “potentially destructive and suffocating experience of the early mother-child dyad when used to compensate for past losses and traumas” (“Between Mother’s Love”). Resonating with Barbara Creed’s description of the abjection of the early mother-child bond in which the mother-child dynamic is “marked by conflict” and an inability to separate from one another, their relationship becomes one of “feeding” off one another to the exclusion of those around them (11). In conjunction with the sweet treats she adores, Beloved is also “nourished” by her mother’s memories (Bishop 125-127). Beloved’s near constant request of her mother to “tell me” memories of Sethe’s past- memories which are often excruciatingly traumatic- chips away slowly at Sethe’s coping mechanisms ultimately leaving only a husk of a person.
Beloved’s screams at no longer having access to the sweets echo a tantrum thrown by a toddler and reminds viewers of the age she was at the time of her murder. But these screams are also an expression of rage against her mother. As the lone child sacrificed, Beloved wants her mother’s love but she also desires access to her mother’s pain, specifically her grief. She consumes the bitterness of her mother’s pain in equal quantities to the delicious treats provided to her in an attempt to find an equilibrium that will enable a reassertion of the maternal bond. Instead, Sethe’s misguided attempts to gain forgiveness from her daughter (and from herself) by giving into every one of Beloved’s whims has the inverse effect of maintaining a distance between the two. Beloved’s screams here are an expression of her frustration of this continued distance and perpetration of generational trauma. Without her sweets, Beloved is left with only her mother’s bitterness and unresolved grief. Despite the fact that both Sethe and Beloved suffer physically and psychologically from their inability to find closure and move on from the past, they are each caught in a cycle of reliving their traumas fueled by the emotional needs of the other.
Our next screams move this overlapping of violent trauma and personal agency outside of the home and into the community. Here, the townswomen arrive to help free Sethe from Beloved’s wrath.
Previous to this moment, Sethe has been ostracized by community. Knowing that she has murdered her child and served jail time, the community responds by whispering as she goes by, shaking their heads in judgment, and generally ignoring the family. But this changes once Denver leaves the family home seeking work. Her revelation to people outside of the family of her mother’s rapidly declining condition triggers the local women’s church auxiliary to meet to discuss Sethe’s situation. This conversation, which vacillates between condemning Sethe for her actions and expressing sympathy for the haunting being endured by the family, ultimately concludes with the women arriving as a community to Sethe’s home to perform an exorcism. Their initial chants are first and foremost designed to expel Beloved from the home and carry with them a long history of tradition. For many African Americans, church and community were inextricably linked with religion representing “the only sure hope for a people whose experiences were extremely destitute” (Smith-Ruiz 9). Here, the women come together en masse to leverage their faith in support of Sethe and Denver. But their chants morph into screams when a haggard Sethe and a nude (and visibly pregnant) Beloved appear on the porch. While these screams carry with them shock and revulsion of the sight before them, they also function as a tacit acknowledgement of how the community has failed Sethe.
Because the act of screaming in this moment is a direct renunciation of the silence that underscores the brutality of enslavement and its reverberations, it imparts an agency and power that is transformative. Violence, particularly sexual violence, historically carries with it a shame and secrecy that isolates survivors (Kousaleos 182). These screams shatter that silence and unite survivors by highlighting that they-including Sethe-are a community who will no longer allow the horrors they endured to remain in the shadows. This group, composed entirely of women who it is implied are largely mothers and formerly enslaved people, understand intimately the difficult choice Sethe had to make when confronted with the possibility of her children being taken back to a plantation where a life of violence and abuse awaited them (Díaz Inglés 16). And yet, they chose to reject her rather than grapple with the difficult moral complexities of Sethe’s actions. When confronted with the implications of their judgement, the group’s screams become a tacit acknowledgement of their failure to provide community care when it was most difficult and most needed. That these screams quickly morph into a splattering of renewed chants that soon grow in force as voices are added function as both an apology and a promise to stand with the family in the future.
Works Cited
Beloved. Directed by Jonathan Demme, performances by Oprah Winfrey, Thandiwe Newton, and Kimberly Elise, Buena Vista Pictures, 1998.
Bishop, Bart. ““The red gums were their own”: Food, Flesh, and the Female in Beloved.” What’s Eating You? Food and Horror on Screen, edited by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper, Bloomsbury, 2017, pp. 123-136.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2015, pp. 8-30.
Díaz Inglés, Manuel. Social Rejection: Challenging the Freed Slave Community in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. 2013, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Final Project.
Frederique, Alyssa, et al. “Maternal Filicide: A Review of Psychological and External Demographic Risk Factors.” Journal of Aggression, Maltreatment & Trauma, vol. 32, No. 1-2, 2023, pp. 34-52.
Kousaleos, Nicole Serena. Screaming the Silence: Experience, Agency and Transformation in the Lives of American Women Childhood Sexual Abuse Survivors. 2010. Indiana University, PhD Dissertation, pp. 180-183.
Oberman, Michelle. “Mothers Who Kill: Cross Cultural Patterns in and Perspectives on Contemporary Maternal Filicide.” International Journal of Law and Psychiatry, vol. 26, 2003, pp. 493-514.
Rashkova, Biserka. “Between Mother’s Love and Impossible Mourning: Overcoming of Intergenerational Trauma in the Film Beloved.” Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis, 2 April 2021, https://bgsp.edu/between-mothers-love-and-impossible-mourning/
Shaw, Margaret. “Conceptualizing Violence by Women.” In R. E. Dobash, R. P. Dobash,& L. Noakes (eds.), Gender and Crime, University of Wales Press, 1995.
Smith-Ruiz, Dorothy. Amazing Grace: African American Grandmothers as Caregivers and Conveyors of Traditional Values. Praeger, 2004
Thurer, Sherry. Myths of Motherhood: How Culture Reinvents the Good Mother. Penguin, 1995.
White, Kowalski Robin. “Deconstructing the Myth of the Non-Aggressive Woman.” Psychology of Women Quarterly, vol. 18, 1994, pp. 477-498.
