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Article

Open Access

A Dissolution of Borderlines in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

Author(s)

Grażyna Maria Teresa Branny

Full-Text PDF Download XML 1250 Views

DOI:10.17265/2159-5526/2017.07.002

Affiliation(s)

Pedagogical University in Kraków, Poland

ABSTRACT

The paper focuses on Toni Morrison’s latest novel God Help the Child (2015). By presenting a skillful though somewhat perverse merger of binary oppositions at different levels (racial, social, moral, and psychological), the writer makes borderlines of all sorts appear artificial and therefore invalidates them. Thus, childhood merges with adulthood through sexual traumas that live on; touch with no touch as the evil touch of a parent equals an abhorrence of touching the child Other; truth with a lie as it proves as destructive as lying in good faith; passing blackness with blue blackness as the former conceives the latter; and appearances with reality in the ironic title of the book, where it is both the mother and the child that in fact need God’s help. Thus, as Toni Morrison demonstrates, a thoroughly surreptitious, because natural, process of dissolution of all barriers makes them appear to be arbitrary constructs responsible for the equally arbitrary notion of the Other. Taking an utterly holistic view of the nature of things, Morrison seems to suggest that borderlines are a consequence and a manifestation of a lack of balance, which therefore needs to be redressed through love, mutual understanding, and maturation.

KEYWORDS

Toni Morrison, God Help the Child, sexual traumas, dissolution of borderlines, the Other

Cite this paper

Sociology Study, July 2017, Vol. 7, No. 7, 364-370

References

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