Trauma Of Black Women In Toni Morrison's A Mercy

Toni Morrison(1931-)is a prominent and influential novelist,professor and editor of America.With her wholehearted writing and lifelong literary creation,she has produced many excellent works for the world literature,many of which show great concerns about the traumatic experiences and sufferings of African Americans,especially that of black women,for they have suffered from intersectional and various oppressions of classism,sexism and racism.In her ninth novel,A Mercy,Morrison incorporates profound ideas into her splendid writing and shows us the traumatic sufferings of black women.Based on detailed reading of the novel in the light of trauma theory,this paper attempts to analyze the reasons,representation and features of the trauma of black women.The racial trauma,cultural trauma,social trauma and great psychological trauma suffered by black women are depicted in the novel from four perspectives.Different ways,such as narrating,re-memorizing and writing are also explored to alleviate the trauma of black women and to reconstruct themselves.The author finds that black women's traumas are repetitive,continuous,complicated and multi-dimensional.This paper is divided into five chapters.Chapter one is a general introduction,including a brief depiction of Toni Morrison's literary achievements and that of her ninth novel A Mercy,literature review of A Mercy at home and abroad,a brief introduction about trauma theory and the structure of the paper.Chapter two explains the causes of black women's trauma,indicating that slavery,racism and sexism are the historical roots of the pain that these black women suffered.Besides,the loss of home and absence of love also trigger enormous agony for them.However,spiritual enslavement and loss of selfhood are the most important causes of the great pain of these black women.Chapter three makes a thorough analysis of representation of traumas from four aspects and then examines the features of trauma.First,the racial trauma caused by slavery is described in the novel by depicting the traumatic relationship between a black mother and her beloved daughter.Under the slavery system,helpless black mother would take extreme measures to protect her daughter from being hurt,and this not only brings tremendous pain to the mother for deserting her daughter but also causes the daughter to misinterpret and even hate the mother for being abandoned.Second,by exploring the injured relationship between black women and man,exposing us the dilemmatic situation of black women both in white culture and in black community.Third,the cultural trauma of black women caused by white-dominated culture is analyzed in the paper.Fourth,the spiritual chains and enslavement of black women caused by slavery are displayed.Last,the features of trauma of black women are concluded.Chapter four discusses the various strategies of construction of identity and self-recovery of black women such as narrating,rememorizing and writing and so on.Chapter five is a conclusion of whole paper.This paper breaks the limitations of researches in the past about A Mercy which only interprets tauma from the racial perspective by exploring the reasons,representation,the featues and the strategies of self-recovery from various aspects.It is hoped that it not only provides a broad view to interpret Morrison's A Mercy but also offers a new perspective for the development of trauma study.