A Thematic Study Of Trauma In Toni Morrison’s Novel Beloved

Toni Morrison is the first African American woman who was granted Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. Her masterpiece Beloved was a great success when it was first published in 1987, and was granted the Pulitzer Prize in the same year. The novel is also critics’"beloved", and the criticism covers various topics such as ethnicity, gender, politics, history and so on. My paper tries to take a different approach, intending to explore its traumatic theme.Originated from the Greek language, trauma is a kind of physical wound. However, in the late 19th century, the definition of trauma changed from the physical wound to the mental disease. The term of trauma was first put forward by Cathy Caruth in the 1990s.In Unclaimed Experience:Trauma, Narrative, and History (1996), she defines trauma as "the response to an unexpected or overwhelming violent event or events that are not fully grasped as they occur, but return later in repeated flashbacks, nightmares, or other repetitive phenomena" (Caruth 91). The traumatized people suffer helplessness and despair, accompanied by the symptom of post-traumatic stress disorder.By applying the theories of Sigmund Freud, Cathy Caruth, and other relevant psychiatrists, this thesis attempts to work out an interpretation of trauma. With a close reading of Toni Morrison’s novel’s Beloved, the thesis analyzes the experiences of the collective trauma and individual trauma, including the collective trauma at Sweet Home, and Sethe, Paul D, Denver, and Baby Suggs’s personal trauma. The possibilities of healing rely on the black people’s recovery of traumatic past. Only when they face the history bravely can they reconstruct their memory and embrace a hopeful future.On the basis of the above analysis, it is concluded that by using the literary creation, Morrison re-writes the history of African-Americans, piecing together the fragmental memory, and rememorizing the past. In this way she helps those black people who have already owned freedom to release suppressed memories, and reconstruct their self-respect. By giving the characters with the power of speech, Morrison helps the black get out of confusion and establish self subjectivity.