| Toni Morrison is the leading figure in the contemporary Afro-American culture.She is the first Afro-American woman writer and the second American woman writer besides Pearl S.Buck who was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in history.Love is the eighth novel of Morrison which has been widely commended as soon as it was published in October 2003.This novel mainly focuses on the recurrent theme of Morrison and continues to pay close attention to the poor black women and their sufferings in the patriarchal society.Under the oppression of racial discrimination,African Americans are almost deprived of their right to speak,and bear the pain in silence.What’s more serious is that the Afro-American women,who are still at the bottom of society,not only have to face racial discrimination,but also endure the trauma of gender discrimination in a patriarchal society.Trauma is clearly manifested in Afro-American women,but it is hard for them to narrate their traumatic experience with freedom.So,in this novel,Morrison depicts the image of a “Big Man” in the patriarchal society to a nicety,and presents us some helpless women who are governed by patriarchal consciousness.Through analyzing the traumatic experiences,they suffered,the aim of this research is to better expose the traumatic impacts of racial discrimination and gender discrimination on the black community and the Afro-American women.The novel mainly tells a story about the black man Bill Cosey,and traumatic life experiences of several black women around him.Most of scholars have analyzed and studied this novel from the perspectives of ethical literary criticism,feminism,black feminism,and spatial narrative,while the research on the theme of trauma is relatively few.This thesis discourses upon the theme of trauma in Love firmly and takes the black women in the novel as the research objects so as to deeply excavate the physical and psychological trauma suffered by Afro-Americans,especially those black women in the patriarchal society.Based on the trauma theory,this thesis gives a systematical study of main female characters’ causes of trauma,traumatic representations,and their journeys to recovery and self-reconstruction.From these three aspects,this thesis reveals the traumatic complex in love and explores Morrison’s profound thinking about love,trauma and recovery,and understand the significance of sisterhood among the black women.This thesis is divided into five parts,including the introduction,the three chapters in the main body and the conclusion.Chapter One makes an introduction to Toni Morrison,the novel Love,and summarizes the literary review on Morrison’s love at home and abroad,then briefly introduces the theoretical basis,and the development and application of trauma theory.In order to expose the suffering caused by trauma more directly,Chapter Two explores the representation and effect of trauma.By analyzing two main characters,Heed and Christine,we can find their behaviors clearly present some symptoms of PTSD(post-traumatic stress disorder).The traumatic representations of Heed are physical scars and constriction and of Christine are intrusion and hyperarousal.Chapter Three analyzes the causes of trauma,indicating that racism and sexism are the historical roots of the trauma for Afro-American women.Besides,the individual traumatic experiences including family ethical trauma,the misunderstood friendship and the broken love also trigger great pain for them.Chapter Four focuses on the recovery from trauma,which takes Christine and Heed as examples to analyze the three stages of recovery.By applying Judith Herman’s trauma and recovery theory,only when the black women regain the empowerment,review and mourn their traumatic experiences,and restore the connection between black community can they walk out of trauma,find their true value and complete their self-construction.Based on the above research,this study summarizes that Love is a novel related to trauma and female self-construction.This novel is the realistic description of physical and psychological trauma in American society,which emphasizes the importance and necessity of social harmony,sexual equality and racial equality.Moreover,it has practical significance for trauma recovery in modern society. |
