Describe the character Sethe in Beloved.
Sethe is a former slave and a mother, and each of these facts fuels the pain of her life.
While pregnant, Sethe's breast milk is stolen by her owners' nephews during a brutal rape. She is later beaten for exposing the assault, resulting in Sethe's most significant physical characteristic: a...
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scar on her back which resembles "a chokecherry tree. Trunk, branches, and even leaves." Paul D, a fellow slave whom Sethe has a relationship with, "rub[s] his cheek on her back, and learned that way to her sorrow, the roots of it; its wide trunk and intricate branches."
Sethe is most defined by being a mother. Sethe and her children manage to escape from slavery only to be recaptured. Rather than see them return to slavery, she attempts to murder all four, succeeding in killing only one by slitting its throat. In Sethe's mind, murder is more compassionate than allowing her children to suffer in slavery as she has.
Sethe is called an "iron-eyed girl," a phrase which denotes both strength and darkness. Her physical and emotional scars have made her resolute, almost fearless, and when Paul D suggests that they leave 124—now haunted with the spirit of her murdered child—she vows,
I will never run from another thing on this earth.