earticle

영어

Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child investigates the destructive power of color fetishism and racism which continued to affect the black women’s lives in America even in the 1990s. In the historical period of America’s first black president during which critics began to talk about post-blackness, Morrison brings to the fore the issue of racism related with different shades of color and illuminates its destructive effects on the construction of a black woman’s subjectivity. The novel delineates the traumatic life of a black woman, Bride, who was denied love from her mother due to her blue black skin color and abandoned by her father after her birth. In addition, she suffers from the feelings of guilt when she accuses an innocent woman of partaking in sexual abuse of a child in order to obtain love from her mother. As she reconstructs the fragmentary memory of the past, she mourns the loss of her childhood and feels responsibility for her false accusation of an innocent woman. She needs to confront the truth before she can reconstruct a relationship with her lover, Booker. Bride and Booker realize what it means to love someone as they tend to Booker’s dying aunt together, and by breaking the hold of the traumatic past, they can rewrite the stories of their lives and reconstruct their own subjectivities.