The Erasable Shadow,the Recoverable Trauma

In 2015,Nobel Literature Prize winner Toni Morrison published a new novel called God Help the Child.In this novel,Toni Morison turns her sharp stroke to the discrimination of skin color again.However,this time,she creatively sets the novel’s background in contemporary America.While she uncovers the black’s suffering in the white dominated mainstream society,she argues that black people’s self-discrimination brings themselves numerous wounds.Moreover,she breaks the racial boundaries wisely,showing her humanistic concern about sexual violence issues in contemporary society,especially the cross-racial concern towards the children who suffer from sexual violence.The novel also presents to readers a profound theme:when children are involved in sexual violence,no matter whether they are the victims or witnesses,they will be haunted by traumas and even negatively impacted during growth process.Macroscopically,the thesis interprets the novel from three different aspects of the trauma theory:trauma’s formation,trauma’s recurrence,and trauma’s recovery.Microscopically,the thesis analyzes the main characters’ various traumas in the novel by close reading.The thesis includes seven chapters,which can be divided into five parts:introduction,literature review,theoretical framework,body part,and conclusion.Chapter Ⅰ is a brief introduction about Toni Morrison and her novel God Help the Child.The significance and originality of the thesis are also presented.Chapter Ⅱ is literature review,which includes the studies of God Help the Child abroad,as well as the studies at home.It presents the research status of the novel.Chapter Ⅲ mentions the theoretical framework,including the definition and classification of trauma,and the two important terms:trans-generational phantom,and self-discrimination.The body part consists of Chapter Ⅳ,Chapter Ⅴ and Chapter Ⅵ.Those three chapters illustrate trauma’s formation,recurrence,and recovery respectively.Chapter Ⅳ analyzes individual and collective trauma separately.The formation of individual trauma is mainly about the formation of Bride’s trauma.It covers three aspects:trans-generational phantom,a prejudiced family,and the cruelty of the society.The collective trauma explains the formation of children’s trauma.As long as they experience sexual violence,the shadow will linger in their hearts for a long time.Chapter Ⅴ illustrates the recurrence of trauma,which includes memories,dreams,sounds,and the reappearance of scenes.They are all studied by typical examples from the novel.The main characters avoid mentioning their trauma at beginning.Trauma’s recurrence makes them ponder their pains in the past,reconsider realistic situations,and express their repressed emotions.Gradually,the characters face their trauma objectively and rationally.This is a premise for their recovery.Chapter Ⅵ is the recovery of trauma.Main characters’ varied ways to heal their traumas are illustrated,such as the relationship repair method,the body witness,the writing trauma therapy,and the music trauma therapy.For the relationship repair method,the characters explore the path of recovery by friendship,sisterhood,love,and "mother-daughter"relationship.Next,body witness method mentions the body’s trauma and recovery of Bride.Body is a carrier to utter her trauma,thus Bride’s scars on her body indicate her psychological trauma.Her scars’cure is a witness of her trauma’s recovery.Then,it also mentions the music therapy.When Booker plays the trumpet,he releases his repressed emotion—his grief towards his dead brother.The last is the writing therapy.The therapy has dual functions:trauma survivors write down their feelings to record their traumatic experiences;readers who have the same experience will have a sympathetic response.Booker keeps dairies to express his feelings,and Bride as a reader has a sympathetic response.After their reunion,they face their traumas and heal the traumas together.Chapter Ⅶ draws the conclusion that race prejudice is the origin of black people’s trauma,and self-discrimination deepens their agonies.Individual trauma is the miniature of the social trauma.Suffering from sexual violence is not only a collective trauma of children,but also the malice of American society as a whole.Although the main characters in this novel are tortured by trauma,they find their own ways to relieve and recover from the trauma in the end.They finally free themselves from the haze,and embrace the promising future.Thus,for those characters,the shadow is erasable,and the trauma is recoverable.