Recovery From The Trauma

Toni Morrison is the only African-American female writer who won Nobel Prize for Literature. Her works reflect African-Americans’trauma history in one century with excellent description and nice depiction, which displays her splendid writing art and profound ideas. The historical trauma, cultural trauma and social trauma suffered by African-American women are interpreted in her six novels. The reasons, symptoms and ways to recover from trauma are explored in the dissertation.The literary creation of Toni Morrison reveals the historical development of African-American women’s trauma. The racial trauma caused by slavery is depicted in Beloved and A Mercy In the slavery, black mother takes extreme ways to protect her daughter from the cruelty of slavery, so it not only causes mother to be obsessed with self-accusation for abandoning her daughter but also causes the daughter to misunderstand and even hate her mother. The relationship between mother and daughter can not be restored, but the psychological trauma of daughter and mother can be healed with the help of a supportive listener and the black community. The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby reflects the spiritual chains caused by white-dominated culture after the abolition of slavery. The white-dominated culture propogate the aesthetic standard of "white is beautiful" with religion, education and the mass media. Under the influence of white culture, the children become fearful, self-abased and self-loathing and the adults have alienated values and sense of racial confusion. By retreating from the traumatic scene or enclosing themselves in the illusion, the women can relieve the pain. Sula and Love depict African-American psychological pain from the desertion of husband and the isolation of black community. In the patriarchal society, women’s family and social relationship are broken by the monopoly of black men. Mourning and testimony are effective ways to heal women’s emotional trauma. Morrison not only expresses her concern about African-American women’s trauma but also helps women to recover from trauma. The dissertation applies the basic idea of trauma to explore African-American women’s trauma from the racial, cultural and social perspectives in Toni Morrison’s novels. The definition of trauma and cultural trauma is used to analyze the reasons for women’s trauma in the slavery and the white-dominated culture. The theory of trauma and recovery is also applied to illustrate different ways to reduce the traumatic symptoms. Based on the analysis, the writer finds that African-American women’s traumas are belated, repetitive, continuous, multi-dimensional and complicated.The dissertation breaks the limit of previous study which only interprets trauma in Morrison’s novels from the racial perspective. It focuses on African-American women’s trauma and analyses the represention of trauma systematically in six of Morrison’s novels from multi-perspective. The study not only expands the study of Toni Morrison’s novels but also makes great contributions to the development of trauma research.