English Honors Theses

Date of Creation

5-2024

Document Type

Departmental Honors Thesis

Department

English

First Advisor

Nadine Knight

Abstract

This thesis examines the traumatic experiences that consume characters’ lives and, in the absence of psychological healing efforts, manifest into violent actions in Toni Morrison’s three novels The Bluest Eye, Sula, and Beloved. I focus on the gendered experience of the female characters Pecola, Sula, Eva, and Sethe, except for the male character, Cholly in The Bluest Eye. Focusing on Morrison’s humanization of violent characters and her sharing of their full life stories, I establish the characters’ internal justifications for their violence to challenge the accepted depiction of all criminals as evil. The three chapters follow the manifestation of trauma into violence and then end with an examination of the consequences of violence for the character who commits the act and their community. Throughout the thesis, I struggle with the question: “How do we react to traumatized victims who traumatize other innocent people?” While I have concluded that there is no appropriate answer to this question, it remains throughout my three chapters as a reminder of the need to work against the institutions that perpetuate intergenerational trauma against people of color. In demonstrating how structures of violence influence characters to act with violence, I argue the necessity to teach and read these texts in American schools. The act of teaching and reading the silenced history of people of color throughout the United States serves as an effort towards communal healing needed by the characters who commit violence throughout the three texts.

Comments

Reader: Paige Reynolds

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