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