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Mr. and Miss Bodwin are an abolitionist brother-and-sister pair of Scottish origin who live together in Cincinnati and help emancipated and runaway slaves find a foothold in the community there. Mr. Bodwin’s staunch abolitionist tendencies are rooted in Christianity, as he believes that all human life is holy. Throughout his life, he was considered a race traitor by many white men, and despite pushback from his white peers, he continued to help make great strides in the abolitionist movement. Miss Bodwin supports her brother’s political career and assists in running their homestead, on which they house and care for many former slaves.
Despite their general good and giving nature, some of the Bodwins’ characterization suggests that they aren’t without flaws. They are described as hating slavery “worse than they hated slaves,” a statement that implies that, while the siblings wanted to abolish the overarching system of chattel slavery, they did not see individual Black people as equal human beings or true peers. This mindset was not uncommon among abolitionists of the Civil War era. While they staunchly opposed the practice of slavery, which they considered anti-Christian and immoral, white abolitionists still generally held racist beliefs surrounding the innate superiority of the white race. Still, the Bodwins are considered good and helpful people by the larger Black community in Beloved. Along with providing food, clothes, lodging, and work to many of the former slaves in the area, Mr. Bodwin exerts his influence in politics and government to keep Sethe from being executed after she kills her infant daughter.
At the novel’s climax, Sethe, drained of her sanity by Beloved, mistakes Mr. Bodwin for schoolteacher and attempts to attack him. Her mistake not only symbolizes that Sethe is no longer mentally able to tell the difference between her enslaved past and emancipated present, but also that, despite Mr. Bodwin’s moral goodness as an individual, he is inextricably linked to the greater legacy of brutality that has been carried out by his white male peers. However, the novel’s treatment of Mr. Bodwin is a hopeful one – he is saved by his own kindness, as Denver and the other women stop Sethe from killing him partly due to his good reputation in the community. Through saving him, the cycle of violence ends, and there is hope that white men like schoolteacher can be left in the past, while white men like Mr. Bodwin mark the coming of a better, kinder future.
