Allegorical Home, Trauma, and Abjection in Toni Morrison's Post- Nobel Fiction

This dissertation analyzes Toni Morrison’s final five novels, namely Paradise, Love, A Mercy, Home and God Help the Child and seeks to explore the trope of home in every sense of the word—including the allegorical representation of the United States in the black American experience—as a house haunted by both racialized and sexualized violence to probe the legacies of masculine and political violence as well as the trauma of dispossession that haunts African Americans. Home has been considered as the symbol of psychic imagination and at the core of under scrutiny lies its power to generate healing: transcending the wounds of the past, re-envisioning and transforming the home into self-nurturing and self-validating place rely on the characters’ awareness of their traumas and on their deepening sense of personal responsibility. In other words, the literary texts under study maintain that, despite the characters’ traumatic experiences which have disrupted their notions of home and belonging, it is the characters’ endeavor and personal duty to reconstruct a real sense of home by working through their traumas.
At the intersection of literary studies, cultural studies, and trauma studies, each part of the dissertation is devoted to the study of a novel and focuses on the writing of Otherness and the process of Othering as means by which Morrison explores the nightmarish yet complex relationship African Americans have experienced when it comes to home and belonging and how they endeavor to reconstruct a sense of home in a land of deep racial animus. Through the prism of postcolonial theories, black feminist thought, the theory of abjection, gender studies and gothic theories of race, Morrison’s later novels portray issues of broken families, ruptured communities, and socio-economic marginalization and force the reader to reconsider the different forms of exclusion and gendered violence African Americans continue to endure in the U.S. Because of traumatic displacements, the pervasiveness of intraracial violence and the traumas ensuing from any kind of domination, the texts under scrutiny contend that home is only a vague promise for many black Americans. I shall maintain that rather than a specific geographical or physical location, home must be regarded as an imagined ideal that enables healing and self-validation. Central to Morrison’s literary project is the deconstruction of idealized notions of manhood and race that impede self-awareness and true spiritual growth.
Key Words: Toni Morrison, trauma, home, belonging, race, abjection, heteronormativity and masculinity, Gothic theory, postcolonial theory.