Seeds of Trauma: Images of Sexual Trauma in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye
E. Frantz
Final Essay (Finalrst Draft)
4.2918.2
Seeds of Trauma: Images of Sexual Trauma in Toni Morrison 's The Bluest Eye
Throughout her novels Toni Morrison conveys to her readers the idea of a community 's responsibility to act out against violence, rape, sexual abuse, and racism. Her writing, at times, bears witness to a community 's tragic abandoning of its youth, of identity, of history. Morrison explores tThe theme of sexual abuse, the implications of which often tragically affect children, most occurs throughoutextensively in Morrison 's novel The Bluest Eye.s. Morrison 's objective seems not so much to have readers choose sides with regard to characters, but rather to open her readers ' minds enough to consider the implications of the abuse, real, alleged, imagined or otherwise. Morrison wants her readers involved, empathetic, and concerned not with the fictional aspects of plot or character detail, but with the reality of the situations she embellishes. Morrison comments on this tactic in a 1983 interview with Claudia Tate: […] I tell you at the beginning of The Bluest Eye on the very first page what happened, but now I want you to go with me and look at this, so when you get to the scene where the father rapes the daughter, which is as awful a thing, I suppose, as can be imagined, by the time you get there, it’s almost irrelevant because I want you to look at him and see his love for his daughter and his powerlessness to help her pain. By that time, his embrace, the rape, is all the gift he has left. (Tate 164).
In The Bluest Eye, the most tragic of the real, alleged, or imagined instances of abuse occurs when Pecola is raped by her father. Morrison insists upon reader participation and calls upon her readers to witness the damage incurred when witness isn 't borne, when children are not listened to, when history goes unchallenged and petrifies the goodness in people until the goodness can no longer be found. At the very
Final Essay (Finalrst Draft)
4.2918.2
Seeds of Trauma: Images of Sexual Trauma in Toni Morrison 's The Bluest Eye
Throughout her novels Toni Morrison conveys to her readers the idea of a community 's responsibility to act out against violence, rape, sexual abuse, and racism. Her writing, at times, bears witness to a community 's tragic abandoning of its youth, of identity, of history. Morrison explores tThe theme of sexual abuse, the implications of which often tragically affect children, most occurs throughoutextensively in Morrison 's novel The Bluest Eye.s. Morrison 's objective seems not so much to have readers choose sides with regard to characters, but rather to open her readers ' minds enough to consider the implications of the abuse, real, alleged, imagined or otherwise. Morrison wants her readers involved, empathetic, and concerned not with the fictional aspects of plot or character detail, but with the reality of the situations she embellishes. Morrison comments on this tactic in a 1983 interview with Claudia Tate: […] I tell you at the beginning of The Bluest Eye on the very first page what happened, but now I want you to go with me and look at this, so when you get to the scene where the father rapes the daughter, which is as awful a thing, I suppose, as can be imagined, by the time you get there, it’s almost irrelevant because I want you to look at him and see his love for his daughter and his powerlessness to help her pain. By that time, his embrace, the rape, is all the gift he has left. (Tate 164).
In The Bluest Eye, the most tragic of the real, alleged, or imagined instances of abuse occurs when Pecola is raped by her father. Morrison insists upon reader participation and calls upon her readers to witness the damage incurred when witness isn 't borne, when children are not listened to, when history goes unchallenged and petrifies the goodness in people until the goodness can no longer be found. At the very
Cited: Baker, Moira, ed. Readings for ENGL. 470. Radford: Radford Course Pack, 2002. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Plume, 1994. Taylor-Guthrie, Danille, ed. Conversations with Toni Morrison. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1994.