Trauma and Self-splitting in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye:

Abstract

Trauma and self-splitting are among the most important themes discussed in the African American literature. They gain importance as they reflect the misery and the suffering of the black people in America and because they are related to the main issue of the black race which is identity. Toni Morrison is regarded as one of the best authors who intensively and deeply dealt with the issue of trauma and the dissociation of the African American personality, particularly in her novel The Bluest Eye (1970) This thesis aims at investigating the issue of trauma, that is primarily related to racism, from a psychological perspective and depicting its devastating impacts on the blacks’ sense of self; where it leads to the dissociation of their personalities. This work accordingly, attempts to describe how Morrison seeks to raise the blacks’ awareness about the danger of internalizing the ideal whites’ stereotypes about love and beauty which are the source of their traumas, by showing the destructive effects of these stereotypes on their identities. Morrison chooses the events, the characters, the language and each aspect of her novel in a very careful way, in order to make her novel as strong and effective as possible. Its story goes around the black characters whose sense of self is totally damaged, because they cannot reconcile between their reality and a utopian vision white culture. Thus, their personalities are split up due to this contradiction, they can neither accept their blackness nor fake themselves and embrace the whites’ standards.