Slavery, Racism and Women's Voice of Freedom in Sula and Wide Sargasso Sea:A Study of Trauma

Abstract

This research paper seeks to analyze the trauma of racial discrimination and marginalization and oppression of Afro-American as depicted in Morrison’s Sula and oppressive, colonialist society of Jamaica through the voices of women in Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea. Moreover Sulais the story of good and evildepicted through the friendship of two women who grew up together. Toni Morrison in the novel represents the traumatic events in the life of its black female protagonist, Sula. Her trauma is compounded by the deaths of her blood relations, loss of friendship and heartbreak in love.Morrison shows Sula as haunted by sorrow and pain. She describes experimental Sula as a New World black woman who speaks the voice of freedom, for not only black women but all the blacks of the society and nation. Likewise,Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea is the story of the female protagonist, Antoinette who loses the protection of family; her father dies, her mother remarries, their house is burned by angry ex-slaves, the mother goes mad and rejects her daughter. Liberation is grounded in the novel in Antoinette's' nostalgia for the culture of slavery. The novel depicts the trauma of nostalgic mental picture of life under slavery and racial discrimination.That’s why, to depict relationships damaged by racial and gender position and stories of painful lives regarding relationship within patriarchal oppression and racial and class domination, the researcher analyzes both novels through cultural dimension of trauma.