Hard to do right when wrongs so easy

“Come on. Come on. You may as well just come on.”

The sideboard took a step forward but nothing else did.

“Grandma Baby must be stopping it,” said Denver. She was ten and still mad at Baby Suggs for dying.

Sethe opened her eyes. “I doubt that,” she said.

“Then why don’t it come?”

“You forgetting how little it is,” said her mother. “She wasn’t even two years old when she died. Too little too understand. Too little too talk much even.”

“Maybe she don’t want to understand,” said Denver.

“Maybe. But if she’d only come, I could make it clear to her. (5)

In this passage, Sethe and Denver are trying to talk to the baby ghost that they think is haunting their house. Sethe says that the ghost would stop haunting them if she could talk to her and tell her the reason why she took her life. She would understand if she knew the reason behind Sethe’s decision to kill her.

Analyzing this passage through the Psychoanalytic Lens, looking at Sethe’s character, we start to understand the reason for killing her baby. Sethe says that if she could tell the baby ghost her reason for killing her then the baby would understand. Her motive for killing her baby was so that her baby did not have to go through the pain and suffering that she did. When she thinks of her baby’s future, Sethe thinks of her past and knows that the pain and struggles she went through and faced will be the same that her baby will go through. So, she decides to save her baby from that and kill her.

Also looking at Sethe’s character through the Psychoanalytic Lens, we see guilt and desire. The ghost may just be her imagination. When we imagine something, we imagine it because we want it to happen. We also imagine things when we feel guilty or bothered by something that happened in the past. Sethe could be imagining the baby ghost because she knows that what she did (killing her baby) was not right. Deep down she knows that taking her baby’s life was not right because it is murder. Because she committed murder, her sin is back to haunt her. On the other hand, if her imagination is what she wants, what she wants would be her baby girl. She wants her child to be alive and her unconscious mind is creating this thought that her baby is not gone and is here with her.