ABSTRACT




African-American Women’s Trauma and Healing in Gloria
Naylor’s Novels



Yeon-Suk Lee




Department of English, Graduate School
Chungnam National University
Daejeon, Korea


(Supervised by Professor Myung-Joo Kim)




This dissertation aims to examine African-American women’s trauma and their unique ways of healing by looking closely at three major novels by Gloria Naylor: The Women of Brewster Place, Linden Hills, and Mama Day. African-American women in America, who have suffered from racial and sexual discrimination, have developed special ways to cure their wounds. Gloria Naylor is one of the African-American women who have attempted to deal with African-American women’s suffering, searching for solutions to their problems.
In the first chapter, individuation and participation are discussed as a method of healing. According to Jungian psychology, individuation is the process of transforming one’s psyche by bringing the personal and collective unconscious into the conscious. It helps African-American women recognize shadows repressed in their unconsciousness and heal them. Along with the process of individuation, African-American women also participate in collective healing, actively improving their community as well as themselves.
The second chapter explores the female symbols and rituals that Naylor promotes in her novels. Symbols and rituals are part of the oldest forms of human activities, helping us lead a harmonious, integrated, and healthy life. However, they often reflect and reinforce certain values and pre-existing power structures. It is difficult for the old symbols to be used as a way of healing, and thus new ones are required. Naylor adopts new symbols and rituals based on African-American people’s unique views on the universe, life, and time: Black Goddess, hand, egg, dream, nature, Candle Walk, and Standing Forth.
The final chapter discusses humor and satire as ways of healing. Under multi-layered suppression, African-American women were unable to politicize their pain directly; therefore, they have utilized humor to secure distance from their pain and express it indirectly, and to satirize the immorality of the ruling class. Their humor and satire have provided a balm for suffering and functioned as an outlet of fury and frustration.