uch allusions are to cases of sexual violence or sexual exploitation rather than references to romantic intimacy. Sethe and Paul D.'s first sexual encounter is "over before they could get their clothes off" (Morrison, 25). Other sexual allusions are the community's suspicion that Beloved is the black girl rumored to have been imprisoned and sexually enslaved by a local white man who has recently died, Sethe's prostitution for Beloved's headstone and the Saturday girls' work at the slaughterhouse (Barnett, 422).
Still, the first assault retold in the novel is that of the two boys who cruelly mock Sethe's maternal associations of nursing by treating her as an animal to be milked (Barnett, 420; Morrison, 86). The novel refers several times to the incident in which the two "mossy-toothed" boys (Morrison, 89) hold Sethe down and suck her breast milk. In so doing, the boys have sexualized and debased Sethe's maternity, degrading the intimacy usually associated with maternal nursing. Thus, Morrison is demonstrating the innumerable ways in which sex can be used as violence in relationships that lack any balance of power. And, as a violent act, sex claims a victim, Sethe, who feels herself powerless to avoid or defend against the continued and repeated assaults. The purpose and result of such assaults is the eventual erosion of the victim's view of him- or herself as a human being with the power to control her body and hence her sexuality. Thus, Sethe's decision to murder her child was actually an act of empowerment, an attempt to save her child from a similar fate.
All of the incidents of rape in Beloved frame Sethe's explanation for killing her baby daughter. Sethe tries to tell Beloved that her murder was actually protection from the deep hopelessness that comes from repeated sexual violation and the memory of such violations. Whites do "[n]ot just work, kill, or maim you, but dirty you," Sethe tells Beloved (Morrison, 308). T...