Trauma, Silence, and Voice: Intergenerational Healing in walker’s The Color Purple and Morrison’s Beloved
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.65310/wpb79406Keywords:
Black feminist criticism, intergenerational trauma, healing, women's literature.Abstract
Black American women's literature constitutes one of the most theoretically rich engagements with historical trauma in the Western literary tradition. Yet little attention has been paid to comparative studies examining how individual works within this tradition disagree about trauma's nature and remedies. The main purpose of this study is to question Walker’s (1982) The Color Purple and Morrison’s (1987) Beloved whether they propose complementary and fundamentally opposite models of intergenerational trauma and healing. It uses three fundamental theoretical frameworks, notably Judith Herman’s (1992)stage-model of trauma recovery, then Bessel van der Kolk’s (2014) somatic theory of embodied trauma and healing, and the Black feminist historical criticism of Hortense Spillers (1987). This study employs a qualitative methodology grounded in close reading informed by comparative literary analysis. It is articulated around four core axes: language and silence, maternal rupture, spiritual transcendence, and community witness. The findings reveal that Walker (1982) and Morrison (1987) process trauma differently. For Walker (1987), healing comes though voice and narrative whereas for Morrison (1987), some trauma is too painful for words, because the live in the body. Therefore, healing this kind of trauma requires the community’s support.
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