Toni Morrison's novel, Beloved, reveals the effects of human emotion and its power to cast an individual into a struggle against him or herself. In the beginning of the novel, the reader sees the main character, Sethe, as a woman who is resigned to her desolate life and who isolates herself from all those around her. Yet, she was once a woman full of feeling: she had loved her husband Halle, her mother-in-law Baby Suggs, her four young children, and loved the parties and feasts thrown by Baby Suggs. And thus, Sethe was a little jaded when the people and things she loved so much began to disappear. Halle never made it to 124 Bluestone, her two sons ran away, and Baby Suggs died. After failing to 'save' her children from the schoolteacher, Sethe suffered forever with guilt and regret. Guilt for having killed her "crawling already?" baby daughter, and then regret for not having succeeded in her task to save them all. It later becomes apparent that Sethe's tragic past, her chokecherry tree, was the reason why she lived a life of isolation. Since Sethe and Denver were by themselves now, they had to look after each other and they felt that there was no room for anyone else in their lives. When Beloved appeared on the stump, she changed their lives forever. Sethe and Beloved shared the fatal moment in the shed and they ended up with a very different take on the mother/daughter relationship. Morrison shows how Sethe's love for Beloved, Beloved's love/hate for Sethe, and their desperate need for each other drove them both over the edge in this tragedy of human condition.
             Sethe was a woman who knew how to love, and ultimately fell to ruin because of her "too-thick love" (Morrison 164). Within Sethe was the power of unconditional love for her children - she had enough milk for all of them (Morrison 200). Morrison uses breast milk to symbolize how strong Sethe's maternal desires were. She could never forget the terror of the schoolt...