A Traumatic Study Of The Sustained Struggle For Recovery In Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby

Toni Morrison is an outstanding black woman writer in the history of American Literature in the Twentieth Century.In 1993,Toni Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature and thus became the first black American woman writer to win the prize.Tar Baby is Toni Morrison’s fourth novel.Since this book came out in 1981,it has been ranked first on the ranking list of best sellers in the New York Times for four months.Tar Baby revolves around the life of the white capitalist Valerian’s families,which reveals a complicated relationship between men and nature,black and white,men and women.Jadine,the main character of the novel,a young black girl,has totally accepted the mainstream white social values and cultural standards,but her life was disturbed by the appearance of a black man called Son.Son was an adherent of the black traditional culture.They attempted to change and “save” each other.Capitalists Valerian was the “God” on the island.He treated his wife Margret as his accessory,which led to Margaret’s distortion.She stabbed her child to vent her inner depression.Morrison has been describing the black,who suffered a variety of trauma,in the white culture.Tar Baby is no exception,which describes the protagonist’s various trauma,including cultural trauma,patriarchal oppression of women,white people’s physical and spiritual slavery to the black people.Trauma theory,put forward by the critics such as Freud,can be a reasonable perspective to interpret the dilemma of the literary figures.Therefore,this thesis attempts to use trauma theory to analyze Morrison’s novel Tar Baby,aiming at exploring the characters’ trauma symptoms and causes,as well as their sustained efforts to defend cruel reality and recover from the trauma.