Feelings on the big secret

In contrast to what appears to be the general feeling of the rest of the class, I don’t, and didn’t feel utterly disgusted with Sethe when it was revealed that she was a murderer. This is not the first time I have found myself at odds with the general feeling of my peers, but this time it feels a little different. It’s not that I find murder appealing or that Sethe was necessarily right in killing her child. I could simply understand the reason behind the act, which I kind of felt the rest of the class didn’t. Or rather, they did understand that she killed them out of a misguided sense of love, but didn’t understand the feeling in and of itself. I have a theory that my creative writing background may help me in this respect, to see into the nuances of Sethe’s decision, that others may not be able to. Or I’m simply more comfortable with the idea of death, it’s a toss-up. But I wanted to post my thoughts on Sethe’s decision to kill her children now that I have things more settled in my mind.
I’m not particularly interested in the notion that Sethe only killed the children because she didn’t know how else to handle the situation. It could very possible be true but I don’t picture it that way. I see Sethe’s decision as being valid in a desperate kind of way. And I have no doubt that at the time, she fully believed in the justice of what she was doing. She is almost like a soldier, who has seen the worst the world has to offer, and the terrors that await her children. The only way to spare them from the inevitable is to kill them. The dead don’t suffer, that sort of mindset. I know I’ve read somewhere else of this sort of act being done before, and in a surprising frequency. Off the top of my head I want to say that mothers would throw their children off a cliff or tower when Roman troops were approaching, instead of having them taken into slavery, but I can’t be certain that I’ve got the facts right.
Regardless, I don’t hate Sethe for her decision. I’m sure if I met someone who had really done something like that I would be as freaked out as Paul D, but there’s something in the way that Morrison wrote the passage that didn’t instill feelings of deep disgust in me. Perhaps it’s because as the reader I’ve seen not only some of the horrors of her past but gotten an in-depth perspective of how those events affected Sethe.