TRAUMA IN INTIMATE RELATIONS: WORDLESS ANGUISH IN TONI MORRISON’S PARADISE

Abstract

People have raised voice against the sufferings to seek justice for the wrongs done to them. Trauma Studies have emerged as a primary response to traumatic events. Freud is the one who introduced the idea that trauma is a dialectical process, the original event is neither incorporated completely by the consciousness nor by the memory that later generates that experience. In light of Judith Herman’s trauma studies, this study focuses on domestic violence in Toni Morrison’s Paradise. Contemporary African-American fiction has appealed to black man’s failure to live up to his claims of greatness in comparison to white man from whom he has met out degradation at societal level. These critiques center on hypocrisy of the black man who fights against collective racial exclusions but his treatment of woman at home is rather imbalanced which results in emotional trauma of the woman. Morrison has interlocked racial and gender coercion with economic oppression being borne by silent characters of the society. Using Morrison’s artistic piece as a methodological framework, I investigate how domestic violence is subtly registered in Paradise through the character of Mavis who becomes rhetoric to advance the cause of social justice resisting oppression. The findings of the study foreground that silent trauma borne by women may have severe repercussions.