Skin Deep: Identity and Trauma in God Help the Child

In “Skin Deep: Identity and Trauma in God Help the Child,” Shirley A. Stave argues that the novel plays surface off depth, unravelling the dichotomy as false through the lens of racism, which is predicated upon the gaze, the surface, but which profoundly disables the depth, leaving its victims traumatized. Morrison’s two main characters, Bride and Booker, both live fractured lives because of their attempt to avoid depth, choosing image and intellect as mechanisms to insulate themselves from further trauma. Bride’s ruptured skin, which exposes what lies beneath, begins her journey toward wholeness, which results in her leaving the Lacanian Mirror Stage and a misguided sense of her completeness to enter the Symbolic Order. Similarly, Booker embraces intellect as a way to isolate himself from human connection. Bride and Booker, through the agency of Booker’s aunt Queen, learn to open themselves to vulnerability and achieve the completeness they have resisted.

Return of the Repressed: The Politics of Engraving and Erasure and the Quest for Selfhood in God Help the Child

God Help the Child strikingly calls to a re-envisioning of Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, in its emphasis on the superficial nature of beauty as skin-deep, two compelling and interrelated aspects that consistently reveal themselves throughout the text. The first picks up on Beloved’s concern with how much memory is beneficial to the human psyche, and how the politics of “engraving” that memory runs the risk of becoming a form of erasure of the self. The second is the author’s insistence on a sense of self-worth as something to be achieved through generosity, not through self-centeredness. In this novel no matter what trauma has occurred in the lives of the children, whether within or without the family, it is incumbent upon the affected as adults to get beyond that affliction and move toward an affirmation of an “other” in order to gain a personal sense of self.

The Power of Witnessing: Confronting Trauma in God Help the Child

God Help the Child illustrates the possibility of confronting trauma to claim a worthy self through a complex process of testimony. Both Bride and Booker reconstruct past traumas, first by encountering people who activate buried memories and then by telling their stories to each other in the holding space they create. Together, Bride and Booker retrieve their childhood traumas to gain agency and self-esteem by “bearing witness” to their representative African American testimonies. In this way, Morrison’s novel becomes a symbolic holding space for African American trauma. The complicated components of testimony reveal the elements of African American trauma—inherited trauma from generations of racism, colorism, violence, abuse, and discrimination in housing, jobs, and education—that Bride and Booker must examine. This idea of community testimony connects specifically to African American culture through three avenues of shared experience: the church, music, and community suffering.

Introduction

In her eleventh novel, God Help the Child, Toni Morrison returns to several of the signature themes explored in her previous work: pernicious beauty standards for women, particularly African American women; mother-child relationships; racism and colorism; and child sexual abuse. As with Morrison’s other work, the story takes on mythic qualities, and the larger-than-life themes lend themselves to allegorical and symbolic readings that resonate in light of both contemporary and historical issues.

“You Not the Woman I Want”: Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child and the Legend of Galatea

Montgomery's essay interrogates the close, yet ambivalent relationship between Morrison's most recent work of fiction and Greco-Roman myth with dual accounts of the legendary Galatea as both an animated statue that comes to life as a result of the careful sculpting on the part of Pygmalion and an enchanting sea-nymph who inspires the musician, Polyphemus. Through a reliance upon recent works by post-colonial, diaspora, and trans-national scholars Paul Gilroy, Homi Bhabha, Tuire Valkeakari, and others, along with the deconstructionist theory of Jacques Derrida, she pays close attention to Morrison's narrative and rhetorical method in talking back to Ovid as a means of conflating the twofold identities ascribed to Galatea and recycling classical tropes using a strategy invested in a diaspora imaginary involving slavery, the Middle Passage, and colonization -- key events defining a specifically raced, trans-national history.