Destroying the basic organizing principles by which we construct meaningful narratives about ourselves, others, and the external world, traumatic events cause a serious upheaval and render helpless the narrative-building function of the self. This paper aims to explore the impact of psychological trauma on selfhood, particularly on its ability of assimilation and symbolization, by focusing on the issues of social oppression and power dynamics portrayed in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Morrison bears witness to the unclaimed and suppressed history of African-Americans, by breaking the silence and confronting the evasion and elision that have dominated the American literary scene in race matters. Thus, Pecola’s incestuous rape by her father Cholly Breedlove, the major tragic incident of the novel, should be read against the backdrop of the debilitating trauma which both her parents and she have to face in a racist society. In conjunction with other social factors such as gender, class, and age, racism in The Bluest Eye determines the form of intergenerationally transmitted trauma, producing synergistic effects of multiple marginalization. For the Breedloves who have internalized racially inflected feelings of inferiority and developed highly deformed object relations with each other, their denigrated race fails to provide them with what Heinz Kohut might call “mirroring” and “idealizing selfobject” functions necessary for developing a healthy, cohesive sense of self. Due to a sustained and persistent exposure to various forms of traumatogenic socio-political oppression, each of the Pecola’s family constructs fragmented and dissociated narratives of self-loathing. As the pivotal scene of Pecola’s rape and her subsequent schizophrenic dissociation illustrate, traumatic events and memories, as the unsymbolized real, remain unassimilated and disrupts the narrative of the self. In depicting the lack of empathic witnessing for Pecola and the black community’s scapegoating of her, Morrison’s novel underscores the important narrative function of testimony and defiance, which is necessary for the traumatized victim to claim and restitute his or her self. Thus, Morrison, on a textual level, creates a space for testimony and empathic listening for the pains and ordeals of African-Americans driven to the status of the disempowered by a white supremacist society.

Destroying the basic organizing principles by which we construct meaningful narratives about ourselves, others, and the external world, traumatic events cause a serious upheaval and render helpless the narrative-building function of the self. This paper aims to explore the impact of psychological trauma on selfhood, particularly on its ability of assimilation and symbolization, by focusing on the issues of social oppression and power dynamics portrayed in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Morrison bears witness to the unclaimed and suppressed history of African-Americans, by breaking the silence and confronting the evasion and elision that have dominated the American literary scene in race matters. Thus, Pecola’s incestuous rape by her father Cholly Breedlove, the major tragic incident of the novel, should be read against the backdrop of the debilitating trauma which both her parents and she have to face in a racist society. In conjunction with other social factors such as gender, class, and age, racism in The Bluest Eye determines the form of intergenerationally transmitted trauma, producing synergistic effects of multiple marginalization. For the Breedloves who have internalized racially inflected feelings of inferiority and developed highly deformed object relations with each other, their denigrated race fails to provide them with what Heinz Kohut might call “mirroring” and “idealizing selfobject” functions necessary for developing a healthy, cohesive sense of self. Due to a sustained and persistent exposure to various forms of traumatogenic socio-political oppression, each of the Pecola’s family constructs fragmented and dissociated narratives of self-loathing. As the pivotal scene of Pecola’s rape and her subsequent schizophrenic dissociation illustrate, traumatic events and memories, as the unsymbolized real, remain unassimilated and disrupts the narrative of the self. In depicting the lack of empathic witnessing for Pecola and the black community’s scapegoating of her, Morrison’s novel underscores the important narrative function of testimony and defiance, which is necessary for the traumatized victim to claim and restitute his or her self. Thus, Morrison, on a textual level, creates a space for testimony and empathic listening for the pains and ordeals of African-Americans driven to the status of the disempowered by a white supremacist society.

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