Author(s)

Mengying Liang ¹

Affiliation(s)

¹ School of Lawand Humanities, China University of Mining and Technology (Beijing), Beijing, 100124, China

Corresponding Author

Mengying Liang

ABSTRACT

The term 'trauma' was originally used only to describe physical trauma, later to describe human sufferings at the mental and psychological levels for medical, psychological, literary and other studies. Toni Morrison as an African-American writer focused on the blood and tears history of African Americans. Her beloved book Sula described a story of Sula who grew up in the "bottom" of the African-American community, being attacked by racial and gender discrimination, but still bravely pursued herself. Based on the trauma theory, this paper takes a series of African-American female characters in Sula as the research objects, and explores the three kinds of trauma that African-American women suffer in the gap between white mainstream culture and patriarchal society, namely, the loss of subjectivity, sexual discrimination and mental assimilation caused by patriarchal culture, and the alternation of generational trauma. This study hopes to enrich the research on African-American women's trauma, and helps African-American women to heal trauma and pursue freedom and equality.

KEYWORDS

Trauma analysis; African-American women; Sula

CITE THIS PAPER

Mengying Liang, An Analysis of African-American Women's Trauma: A Case Study on Sula. Journal of Sociology and Ethnology (2023) Vol. 5: 50-54. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.23977/jsoce.2023.050509.

REFERENCES

[1] Gurleen G. Circles of Sorrow, Lines of Struggle: The Novels of Toni Morrison [M]. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1998: 154.
[2] Karen F. Toni Morrison's Sula: A Black Woman's Epic [J]. Black American Literature Forum, 1984(04):146-150.
[3] Merriam-Webster [EB/OL].https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trauma, 2023.5.23.
[4] Caruth C. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. [M]. Baltimore and London: The Joins Hopkins University Press, 1996: 3.
[5] Freud S. Studies on Hysteria [M]. London: Penguin U. K, 2004.

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