Complex childhood trauma and coping mechanisms in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina

Trauma is the psychological response to an event or experience that breaks through the shield of the mind and overwhelms the functioning of the subject. Traumatization may occur through a single event such as rape but may also occur because of an ongoing chronic condition such as classism, racism and sexual abuse in society. With the advent of PTSD in 1980, the study areas of trauma expanded to rape, child abuse and various other traumatic experiences that especially involved women and non-western people. Thus, trauma has become a concept that transgresses disciplinary boundaries. Considering this, taboo topics such as rape and child sexual abuse started to be discussed in literature. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye (1970) and Dorothy Allison's Bastard Out of Carolina (1992) deal with the protagonists' complex traumas that are caused by child sexual abuse and other social, cultural and political factors. Both Morrison and Allison depict the shaming of their protagonists, Pecola and Bone, their mothers' negligence and their fathers' sexual abuse as the reasons for their traumas. Despite the similarity of their cases, their coping mechanisms and their responses to their traumas differ from each other. Accordingly, the possibility for healing and recovery is not alike. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola, who is a dark skinned African American girl, takes refuge in madness and realizes her ultimate wish of having blue eyes in her imaginary world, in turn, she refuses to become a part of the patriarchal order. She cannot heal; however, madness is not a sign of weakness or failure but an act of resistance and survival. In Bastard Out of Carolina, on the other hand, Bone tries to reconstruct her identity via regaining her control over her body by masturbating to her fantasies and listening to gospels, and revolts against the oppressive norms of patriarchal ideology by attaining a lesbian identity. Both characters present a possibility to reconcile with their traumatic experiences and act against the patriarchal society by using excessive ways of survival.