Loss And Resilience:Childhood Trauma In The Bluest Eye And God Help The Child

As the first black woman writer who won the Nobel Prize in literature in American history,Toni Morrison has enjoyed a great reputation in the country and around the world.Mainly describing the traumatic experiences of the African-Americans,her works show their hard living conditions.The Bluest Eye and God Help the Child are respectively Morrison's first novel and the latest one.From the perspective of childhood trauma,the two novels explore the impact of childhood trauma on the growth of children and reveal a series of problems existing in American society.Based on trauma theory,this paper makes a detailed analysis of the childhood trauma that the leading characters in the two works have suffered,and compares the different outcomes caused by the trauma.Finally,the reasons for the failure of trauma recovery of the former and the success of the latter are discussed respectively with the application of trauma and recovery theory.In The Bluest Eye,Pecola has mainly suffered cultural,familial and social trauma.In the end she gets lost and falls into the abyss of misery,because she is unable to establish a new connection with the outside world,and there is no proper listener to give her the right guidance.In God Help the Child,except for the trauma from culture and family,sexual abuse on children has become one of the sources of trauma in the story.After suffering a series of trauma,the hero and heroine rebuild their sense of security and find the appropriate listeners to tell the painful past.In the end,they find themselves,become independent and confident,and smile to embrace the new life.In the two works,Morrison reveals her understanding towards the treatment of trauma of the blacks from different angles: only when the blacks preserve and develop their own culture can they heal trauma and find themselves.Because of the immature mental and physical development,the trauma which children suffered in their childhood can cause great harm to their growth.Through the comparative analysis of Morrison's two works,the author believes that the characters in the two novels have suffered psychological trauma which mainly comes from culture,family and society.In addition to the efforts the characters have made,the success of recovery relies on the care and love from the outside world.It can be seen from the two novels that Morrison's cognition and understanding towards children growth and trauma have become more mature and optimistic.Through the two works,Morrison shows her good wishes for the bright future of human beings without trauma.