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solid foundation for the future researchers toexplore Morrison’s consciousness of reconstructing Black community. With theincreasing publication of Morrison’s novels, the 1990s and afterwards have witnessed abooming studies about Morrison and her works in various aspects, in which the study about the relationship among gender, race and community becomes the focus.

Chapter TwoBeing Lost in Fantasy: Alienated Black Community in TheBluest Eye

The Traumatic Black Subjectivity

Carrying the unspeakable traumatic memories and suffering from the mentaldistortion caused by the alienated identification with the dominant ideology, the Black people in The Bluest Eye are traumatic to some extent. Being “torn from the world oftheir families, communities, their own spiritual connections and language to a world ofsuffering, death and alienation” (Li 97), the Black people are forced to have theirphysical and spiritual connection with the motherland cut off. The oppressed memoriesabout the tyrannical slavery have left them nothing but a traumatic unconsciousnessabout the oppression, while the alienated Exodus further estranges their self-awarenessand forces them identifying with the hostile dominant ideology. To use Lacanian terms,the African American people can be regarded as the infant who is forced to cut off theimaginary relationship with his mother and to enter into the alienated Symbolic.However, the child’s entrance into the Symbolic is necessary and inevitable, whileBlack people’s entrance in to America is tinged with oppression and force. It isdescribed by Rucker as “one of the most tragic chapters in human societies” (48).

Traumatic Unconsciousness about Slavery

Along with the May Flower, the African people were assumed to arrive in Virginiain 1620, with a new identity known as “indentured servants”. It indicates that thesubordinate status of Black people is shaped as soon as they arrive in this hostile land.Later on, the legislation condemned blacks to lives of permanent servitude” (Rucker 91).Consequently, the history of America can be regarded as a history of oppression andtorture, the one inscribed with the blood and wailing of the enslaved Black people.Being conscious of the traumatic past of Black people, Morrison, in the voice of BabySuggs in Beloved laments that every house in America is “packed to its rafters withsome dead Negro’s grief” (5). In a word, the American history is built upon theoppression of Black people whose wailing serves as a foil to the angelic image ofAmerican society.

The slave trade is marked with inhumanity and atrocity. Being transported and soldlike commodities, the captured Africans, once on board, are deprived of their dignitiesand descended to the level of animals. According to Victor Frankl, the imprisonment onthe slave ship transforms the enslaved Black people into a stage of “relative apathy inwhich he achieved a kind of emotional death” (39). The slave ship therefore can beviewed as a turning point on which the human dignity of African people and theirself-awareness are destroyed. These enslaved African people are forced to “repress theirself-awareness as free people and to adopt the slave identity [that the dominant ideology]imposed upon them” (Frankl 39). In a word, the experience of the slave ship marks thebeginning of Black people’s alie本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。