Trauma And Identity Construction In Toni Morrison’s Beloved And A Mercy

Toni Morrison(1931-)is an outstanding contemporary Afro-American woman writer.In 1993,she won the Nobel Prize for literature,and is the sole African American female writer who has won the Nobel Prize so far.Morrison portrayed the traumatic history of the blacks for centuries with her delicate and penetrating writing style in her literary works,and pays particular attention to the living conditions of the black women.Especially,Morrison expressed her deep concern for the traumatic experiences and sufferings of the black women in her numerous works.Beloved and A Mercy are the two cases in point.Based on the close reading of the novels in the light of trauma theory,this thesis attempts to analyze the causes,experiences,representation and the healing of trauma of the black women and their endeavors to construct themselves.The thesis is composed of five parts.The introduction part makes a brief summary of Morrison’s literary achievements and her two novels Beloved and A Mercy,the research status of Beloved and A Mercy both at home and abroad,and a brief introduction to trauma theory.The main body of the thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter One discusses the collective trauma of the black women from the perspective of cultural trauma,involving the trauma from enslavement and the trauma from white-dominated culture.The accusation of the black women against the crime of history,their own suffering,and the pain of the collective embodies the cultural trauma that they have gone through when enslaved.Under the influence of white-dominated culture,the black people gradually internalize the ideology of the whites and generate self-disgust,which results in the loss of their self-identity and ultimately leads to their trauma.Chapter Two delves into the psychological trauma of the black women and analyzes the personal trauma of both mothers and daughters in the two works.The traumatic relationship between the black mothers and their daughters is shown first in the distorted maternal love of Sethe who kills her kid for love and a minha mae who abandons her kid for love,followed by the daughters’ misunderstanding and hate of their mothers,the ghost of Beloved tormenting Sethe and Florence’s extreme possessiveness,resulting ultimately in a broken mother-daughter relationship.Chapter Three explores the means of trauma healing and the black women’s construction of self-identity.Confronting trauma is the important way to get out of it.In the two novels,the black women strive to get rid of the trauma by telling and writing their trauma,which helps them reconstruct themselves and reintegrate into life.The last part is the conclusion.This part points out that the cultural trauma and psychological trauma,individual trauma and collective trauma suffered by the black women leads to the loss of their selfhood.The black women need to construct self-identity while healing from trauma,stepping out of the bondage of self-loss and spiritual enslavement,to gain spiritual independence,and integrate into real life,which triggers further thinking on the identity construction of the black women.