ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Toni Morrison's novels, God Help the Child and The Bluest Eye. Together, both trace a focus upon shame and the body that not only extends back into Morrison's own childhood but also shapes her production of her writing as a tool of psychological self-analysis for racialized audiences. The chapter explores a recursiveness in Morrison's focus upon African Americans' psychological relation to the racialized body. It discusses the core of this return a literary understanding of race that allows one to imbed shame within a broader psychoanalytic conception of a psychic lack that repeatedly afflicts all subjects but which often impacts African Americans in distinctly pronounced ways. The chapter further discusses a theory of shame and trauma by conjoining the work of traditional shame theorists with that of psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan to link trauma and shame to the psychic lack that Lacan famously positions at the center of subjectivity.
