Abstract
Sigmund Freud’s ideas regarding the process of writing in his “The Relation of the Poet to Day-dreaming” imply that writing compensates for a psychic lack which the wish-fulfillment fantasy provides the writer’s psyche. Suzette Henke coined the phrase “scriptotherapy” in Shattered Subjects: Trauma and Testimony in Women’s Life Writing, positing that the person who writes of trauma must address another, and writing magnifies the benefit of disclosure. This paper focuses on an autobiography, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, and a supposed fictional work, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, as examples of scriptotherapy. These two books present similar themes, and certainly show the possibility of women healing. They were also published the same year, 1970, and explore individuals of color coming of age in a traumatic era at the end of the great Depression in the U.S. and on the eve of World War II.
Henke remarks that “The twentieth century may well be remembered as a century of historical trauma” (xi). Trauma studies really began with World War I and the horrific experiences of soldiers and civilians recovering from a brutal war in which they suffered, often, both physical and psychological wounds. “Shell shock” was one term for this. Henke implies that although Freud and his colleague Joseph Breuer studied cases of hysteria when they began formulating the theories of what would become psychoanalysis in the 1880s, because hysterics tended to be female their mental sufferings were dismissed.
Henke reports on the particular usefulness of the process of writing in healing trauma: “The subject of enunciation theoretically restores a sense of agency to the hitherto fragmented self, now recast as the protaganist in his or her life drama. Through the artistic replication of a coherent subject-postion, the life-writing project generates a healing narrative that temporarily restores the fragmented self to an empowered position of psychological agency” (xvi). Scriptotherapy can re-member the body, or psyche, left in fragments after the experience of trauma.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye will be having its 40th birthday in 2010. Morrison’s novel is both powerful and extremely disturbing to read. The out of control children’s primary school reader (Morrison calls it “the barren white-family primer” in her Afterword (215)) which opens almost each chapter, traces Pecola Breedlove’s psychic degeneration. Yet, it is not just Pecola’s story that is told in the novel: we have her father, Cholly’s life story, her mother, Pauline, characters like “Soaphead Church” and in an afterword to the novel written in 1993, Morrison herself critiques the fragmented form of the novel.
The narrator, Claudia, renounces the baby dolls she gets for Christmas. Essentially, Claudia styles herself in a way diametrically opposed to Pecola. She is in a way no less pathological than Pecola, but her reaction is one born of anger, not acceptance. The white families for whom Pauline Breedlove works have the idealized suburban American lifestyle described in the children’s primer with which the novel starts. Beginning with this primer Morrison implicitly but profoundly explores the violation of a child’s innocence, not just at the hands of her abusive family, but as the product of a culture which is not as it presents itself in its idealized narratives. Morrison literally deconstructs this passage, repeating it 3 times: first as it goes on, the formal aspects of its language begin to fall apart, and there is no capitalization or punctuation, then the spaces between the words dissolve the third time it is repeated. The breakdown of language reflects Pecola’s later breakdown into madness.
Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings tells the story of Marguerite, who lives with her grandmother and brother in Stamps, Arkansas. After Marguerite is raped by Mr. Freeman, her mother’s boyfriend, she stops talking because she feels betrayed by language. Both Pecola and Marguerite seem to regress to an infantile stage, in fact what the Freudian revisionist psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called the Mirror Stage. Ironically, helped by her own mother, Marguerite gains confidence in herself as a teenage mother. However, it would not be until she was in her 40s that Angelou would publish this book. And perhaps one reason that Angelou published largely memoirs is precisely the drive toward scriptotherapy.
In conclusion, the writings and lives of these two, and many other women, demonstrate that Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is something many of them suffer from, perhaps without their knowing it. These works, both of 1970, were among the first to bring attention to sexual abuse of girls, and pivotal in exploring how lack of self-worth may affect black girls. Life-writing, whether fact or fiction, combined with psychotherapy or other treatments or not, may rescue the writer from psychic fragmentation and provide absolution.
Works Cited
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