A Study On Trauma Of Characters In By The Light Of My Father's Smile

Alice Walker(1944-)is a famous female writer in the history of American literature.Many scholars in China have paid close attention to her works since Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for Literature.At present,most of researchers pay attention to her masterpiece The Color Purple,but the study on her novel By the Light of My Father's Smile is slightly insufficient.Due to the identity of Walker as a female writer and the feminist tendencies in her works,the majority of the scholars' research on this work focused on its topics of violence,homosexuality,patriarchy and feminism,while the psychological trauma of the characters is less involved.With the help of trauma theory and some psychological terms,such as discrimination perception,psychological resilience and empathy deficit,this paper explores the traumatic experiences and influence of the traumatic experiences of the characters,including post-traumatic stress response(PTSD)and disordered personality.Besides,this paper also discusses the important role of father-daughter relationship in traumatic experiences for girls.In addition,this thesis analyses the recovery process of the characters.Through the trauma analysis of the characters,the author finds that Walker reveals several profound social problems through the only five characters in the novel.Firstly,through the analysis of the relationship between Magdalena,Pauline,Susannah and their fathers,Walker reveals that the role of father and father-daughter relationships are particularly important to the traumatic experience of the girls in their process of growing up.Secondly,by describing the process of trauma healing among Pauline,Susannah and Irene,it is easy to find women's poor status in the patriarchal society and Walker's appeal to women in patriarchal society for establishing a relationship of unity and mutual help.Compared with the previous study on trauma of the characters in By the Light of My Father's Smile,the innovations of this paper are mainly in the following two aspects: Firstly,at the theoretical level,this paper is not limited to trauma theory,but also applies some psychological concepts,such as the concepts of discrimination perception,psychological resilience and empathy deficiency,to analyze the traumatic experiences of the characters.Secondly,at the traumatic analysis level,this paper also discusses the important role of father-daughter relationship in the traumatic experience in girls' process of growth.What's more,through the analysis of the traumatic experiences and symptoms of the characters,the author finds that some characters,such as Magdalena,Robinson and Pauline,not only have symptoms of post-traumatic stress response(PTSD),but also have some typical symptoms of the borderline personality disorder(BPD)patients.At the same time,there are still some comordity symptoms of PTSD and BPD in the three characters.This paper also explains these symptoms ofcomorbidities of them.In addition,the paper adds the traumatic study on the characters Irene.Through the comparison of Irene's behaviors to the other three heroines in the novel,it can be found that Irene adapts to trauma through her good psychological resilience and courageously makes resistance against her poor life.This thesis analyses the traumatic experiences,disordered personality,PTSD symptoms and recovery process of the characters in By the Light of My Father's Smile with the help of trauma theory and psychological terms,which may provide some new ideas for future research on Walker's works and traumatic analysis of characters in other literary works.