Decoding Possessing The Secret Of Joy From The Perspective Of Trauma Theory

Possessing the Secret of Joy is one of the representative works by Alice Walker, the winner of the Pulitzer Prize. She is a significant voice in the field of African American literature. Since the publication of Possessing the Secret of Joy in 1992, the novel has received high compliments among readers and critics. However most domestic scholars focus on the Color Purple, Meridian, The Third Life of Grange Copeland and other masterpieces. Few of them pay attention to Possessing the Secret of Joy.In the novel, Walker discusses a tabooed cultural practice called female genital mutilation (FGM), camouflaged by gender politics. The authoress reintroduces her reader to the character Tashi, who is first encountered in The Color Purple. Told through vignettes from all of the main characters the novel parses together Tashi’s journey from her childhood to her death. In Tashi’s adolescence, she chooses to undergo the circumcision ritual to fight against colonial invasion, maintain tribal tradition and obtain identity recognition. After this fateful decision, her life is forever altered. Instead of gaining identity integrity, she suffers immeasurable physical sequelae and spiritual torture. As a black woman immigrates into the United States, Tashi is reduced to the position of " the marginalized", loses her own self and sense of belonging and graudually becomes the victim of female genital mutilation and patriarchal society. The novel puts forth the physical as well as mental trauma in detail that Tashi goes through, daringly revealing the torment brought by the circumcision and criticizing the great damage on womens’identity integrity and spirutual independence. Furthermore, the novel employs the narrative of non-linear, repetition and flashback with the aim of highlighting the efforts of pursuing identity integrity, subverting patriarchal cultural tradition as well as reconstructing female identity.By exposing the evil practice of genital mutilation, Walker convincingly shows women as victims of female circumcision and male patriarchy, extends deep concern for the existential plight of African women and pins high expectation on identity integrity as well as female self-esteem. Futhermore, Tashi’s tragic experience forcibly castigates African cultural custom camouflaged by male-domination awareness, aiming at waking up women to understand them own body and desire and getting rid of cultural and sexual hegemony by the way of reconstructing identity integrity.Overseas studies give full attention to Walker’s Possessing the Secret of Joy, while studies on this novel in China are little and lag far behind and this novel has not been translated into Chinese so far. Painstaking investigations and researches reveal that scholars and critics have already studied this novel from different perspectives such as existential crisis, womanist as well as gender politics and so on. However, few scholars have realized that it is trauma that leads to Tashi’s identity crisis and mental breakdown. Thus, trauma theory is a new approach that no scholars have adopted to the interpretation of this novel.The present thesis is intended to adopt the approach of trauma theory to interpret Possessing the Secret of Joy and analyze the entire life journey of the protagonist Tashi Evelyn after she undergoes female circumcision, how she decides to fight against the evil practice of FGM and how she finally seeks her real identity and rescues herself from trauma experience. Through the analysis of Tashi’s traumatic experiences and traumatic symptoms, this thesis reflects Alice Walker’s feminist awareness and humanitarian concern and drives home the point that trauma can be cured through mutual communications and help, hence inner peace can be achieved eventually.