Revisiting Trauma Through The Bluest Eye

ABSTRACT

Using racially contextualized models of trauma studies and psychoanalysis, this article explores the trauma of racially inflected language in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970). The American Symbolic ties racial Blackness to abjection in contradistinction to the master signifier of whiteness and systematically perpetuates the Black subject’s encounter with the traumatic lack of subjectivity. This signifying chain of trauma implicates not just the Breedlove family but also the entire Black community, including even a seemingly adaptive subject like Claudia MacTeer, whom critics have designated as the “arch-survivor” over and against Pecola Breedlove the “victim.” Morrison engages in a narrative therapy of sorts that loosens the reader’s fixation with the racial Symbolic and presents an alternative idiom that can empower the disenfranchised. The novel’s rendition of the structural, mundane aspects of language-based trauma thus invites us to revisit the traditional conceptions of trauma as a cataclysmic event.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Sarah Ropp does seem to find it problematic that “[w]hile critical responses to the novel have engaged extensively with Pecola’s victimization and scapegoating, they tend to celebrate Claudia’s survival as evidence that resistance is possible while failing to probe the significant losses that survivorism (or the need to define oneself by triumph) entails for Claudia” (132). She follows the critical tendency she criticizes, however, by designating Claudia as the “antithesis” of Pecola (132), arguing that the novel “invite[s] the reader to identify with Claudia-the-survivor rather than Pecola-the-victim” (134).

2. J. Brooks Bouson characterizes the novel as a “complicated shame drama [and a] trauma narrative” that “depicts the progressive traumatization of Pecola, who is rejected and physically abused by her mother, sexually abused by her alcoholic and unpredictably violent father, and ultimately scapegoated by members of the community” (25). Sheldon George asserts that the novel shows how African Americans are perpetually alienated from “a fantasy of wholeness that can protect them from a confrontation with lack,” an alienation exemplified in the novel by Pecola’s psychic split (“The Body” 134). This affective disorientation is, in Evelyn Jaffe Schreiber’s words, akin to a state of “homelessness” that makes Black Americans liable to transmit racial self-hatred in family dynamics, as instanced by the Breedloves (74). Christine Battista and Melissa R. Sande argue that the Breedlove family exemplifies a development of transgenerational trauma by which “the exclusionary cartographies of the dominant ideology” (62) that casts nature, people, and women of color as disposable is absorbed from outside society and reproduced and inherited in a family. Their inquiries are focused on Pecola and the Breedlove family.

3. In Trauma: A Genealogy (2000), Ruth Leys points out the conceptual and empirical fallacies of the two central tenets (latency and literality) of Caruth’s trauma model, i.e., that there is a temporal gap of amnesia between the victim’s experience of the traumatic event and their mute, physical reiteration of the memory, which is imprinted and perceived literally.

4. Arline T. Geronimus’s weathering hypothesis posits that the health of African Americans may deteriorate in young adulthood as a consequence of structural barriers that divest them of access to health resources. Davis R. Williams and Ruth Williams-Morris underscore the psychological as well as material dimensions of racism, reviewing the existing research on the adverse effects of institutional discrimination and cultural stereotypes on the mental health of Black Americans.

5. An example of this is the studies on the trauma of the Vietnam War, which have been focused significantly more upon the psychic distress suffered by the American veterans who have fought the battles than on the social, cultural, and racial conditions that traumatized non-Americans and non-veterans (and even nonwhite American veterans) who were otherwise implicated in the trauma. Allan Young and Richard McNally point out the direct causal link between the “invention” of PTSD through DSM-III and the advocacy of Vietnam veterans’ pressure groups (cited in Gibbs 3–4).

6. This challenge has galvanized the attempt to “decolonize” the discipline, which is exemplified by a special issue of the journal Studies in the Novel dedicated to the subject. For Michael Rothberg, the essays contained in the volume necessarily respond to “contradictory demands,” which I believe indexes the ideological crisis internal to the discipline: “on the one hand, to force trauma studies to fulfill its aspirations for cross-cultural understanding; on the other hand, to question whether trauma provides the best framework for thinking about the legacies of violence in the colonized/postcolonial world” (225).

7. There are exceptions to this default celebration of Claudia as the arch-survivor. Susmita Roye does touch upon the “slips” I refer to in this article, although she tends to focus only on the phrase “adjustment without improvement” to conclude that “Claudia “accepts without internalizing … [adjusting] from open hatred to the desire to preserve her sense of self.” (220). Yet I question if “accepting” and “internalizing” can be so finely distinguished, not to mention that the word “worship” is too strong a word to be used to indicate mere acceptance. Bouson is less equivocal about it: “over time Claudia, too, partially internalizes this white standard” (31). Also note her emphasis on the race-based indoctrination that besets both Claudia and Pecola: “as The Bluest Eye reveals, because the standard of beauty – that is, the idealized version of the black self – is based on whiteness, the Pecolas and Claudias of the world cannot help but feel ashamed” (Bouson 32, emphasis added).

8. I concur with the critics who view Claudia as “the text’s storyteller, the narrator, the writer of this tale” (Griffin 673) and argue that she uses a discursive (re)construction to narrate the bits of life to which she had not had direct access. “[A] single narrator, Claudia MacTeer, has composed the texts and created the voices” (Malmgram 253). See Malmgram 253–56 for the intersections between the languages used by Claudia in the first person and the omniscient narrator (as well as biographical evidence).

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Jumi Kim

Jumi Kim is a doctoral student of English at The University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include 20th-century African American literature, trauma studies, and critical race theory. She is currently working with Dr. Helena Woodard and would like to thank her for her support, academic and otherwise.