Tracking and Confessing Childhood Atrocities: Emotional Abuse and Neglect in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

Virginia Woolf once said, “I want to write a novel about silence. The things people don’t say.”1 What people do not say or what they cannot say, what people usually hide and what most writers refrain from dealing with is known as atrocity. Atrocities are usually concealed, kept hidden and rarely voiced either by those who witness them or those who are their targets. Judith Herman declares “[t]he ordinary response to atrocities is to banish them from consciousness. Certain violations of the social compact are too terrible to utter aloud: this is the meaning of the word unspeakable” (1). Atrocities are the taboo of humanity nevertheless in her last novel, God Help the Child (2015) Toni Morrison skillfully tracks the childhood atrocities of her characters in an attempt at healing. Voicing childhood abuse is not Morrison’s first attempt to speak about the “unspeakable”. However, in God Help the Child, Morrison is more intent at warning people from the drastic outcome of childhood abuse. The current study aims to apply Trauma Theory to Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child from Judith Herman’s perspective in an attempt to show the damaging impact of emotional abuse and neglect on adult victim’s psyche. In Trauma and Recovery, Judith Herman not only depicts the devastating impact that childhood trauma can have on people but also gives guidelines to means of recovery. This can clearly be applied to Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child in which the author shows how most of the characters suffer from, what Herman designates as “psychological distress symptoms”(1) due to the “chronic” injury resulting from either witnessing or being a target of one or more forms of child abuse. Though “[e]motional abuse and neglect is an under-recognized, but actually common, form of child abuse”(Glaser 697), Morrison’s focus on depicting the damaging impact of emotional abuse and neglect on her protagonist reveals her recognition of its long-term effects. Morrison uses the device of flashback in tracking unwelcomed childhood atrocities once triggered by new stimulus. While highlighting how her protagonist managed to “stitch” her “chronic” bruises through dissociation, Morrison skillfully leads her protagonist to confess those buried atrocities in a successful attempt at her protagonist’s recovery.