| This study explores the various methods that black women writers use to depict the black female body in pain. Elaine Scarry's The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World theorizes that pain has a language-destroying power and that it often defies expression. Thus, I will argue that in endeavoring to express pain, the writers examined in this study utilize the creative process to work around the barriers presented in the effort to express pain. I discuss various creative approaches that the writers under discussion take up and what results from those approaches. Works examined in this study include: Suzan-Lori Parks' Venus, Robbie McCauley's Sally's Rape, Octavia Butler's Kindred, Toni Morrison's Beloved, Gayl Jones' Corregidora, Edwige Danticat's Breath, Eyes, Memory, Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother and Jamaica Kincaid's The Autobiography of My Mother. The collection of writers that I have assembled for this analysis write the black female body into visibility, narrativize the history of black women's bodies in the West, and illustrate the difficulty in expressing black women's pain.;This project will take on a multi-genre approach which includes drama, novels, and non-fiction prose by black women writers. I not only intend to analyze the function of the written word in these works, but with respect to drama, I will analyze how the black female body is presented on stage. Also, I will explore how non-fiction deepens our understanding of fictive works. A multi-genre approach allows for an understanding of how black women's bodies are depicted from several vantage points. In addition to analyzing various approaches to expressing pain, I will consider how these works prompt deeper thought on various theoretical notions such as: the difficulty inherent in rendering experiences of pain into language and the implications of doing so, and whether or not there is potential for healing the historical wounds by grappling with these experiences of pain. |
