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Moving Ever Forward: Reading the Significance of Motion and Space

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Moving Ever Forward: Reading the Significance of Motion and Space MOVING EVER FORWARD: READING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MOTION AND SPACE AS A REPRESENTATION OF TRAUMA IN TONI MORRISON’S SONG OF SOLOMON AND COLSON WHITEHEAD’S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD by Samantha Richmond A Thesis Submitted to the Faculty of The Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, FL May 2017 Copyright by Samantha Richmond 2017 ii i ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The author wishes to express deepest gratitude to my thesis chair, Dr. Andrew Furman, for his guidance throughout this process. I would like to thank Dr. Sika Dagbovie-Mullins for insightful suggestions and guidance towards critical texts that really deepened my understanding of these theoretical fields. Thank you to Dr. Adam Spry for advice and helpful suggestions in the editing stage of this manuscript. Thank you to my wonderful and supportive family: Sandra Jae, Donald, and Tony for their constant love and support during the writing of this thesis (and every other part of my life). A huge thank you to my friends in the English department who were my support, my solace, and my guides, especially: Advitiya, Rachel, Jenn, Jess, and Ashely. iv ABSTRACT Author: Samantha Richmond Title: Moving Ever Forward: Reading the Significance of Motion and Space as a Representation of Trauma in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad Institution: Florida Atlantic University Thesis Advisor: Dr. Andrew Furman Degree: Master of Arts Year: 2017 This thesis argues that three models of trauma theory, which include traditional trauma theory, postcolonial trauma theory, and cultural trauma theory, must be joined to fully understand the trauma experienced by African Americans within the novels Song of Solomon by Toni Morrison and The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead. By implementing these three theories, we can see how each novel’s main character is exploring and learning about African American trauma and better understand how an adjustment of space and time creates the possibility for the implementation of trauma theory. Each novel presents a journey, and it is through this movement through space that each character can serve as a witness to African American trauma. This is done in Morrison’s text by condensing the geographical space of the American north and south v into one town, which serves to pluralize African American culture. In Whitehead’s text, American history is removed from its chronological place, which creates a duality that instills Freud’s theory of the uncanny within both the character and the reader. vi MOVING EVER FORWARD: READING THE SIGNIFICANCE OF MOTION AND SPACE AS A REPRESENTATION OF TRAUMA IN TONI MORRISON’S SONG OF SOLOMON AND COLSON WHITEHEAD’S THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 I: THE DUALITY OF SPACE IN SONG OF SOLOMON .............................................. 12 II: CONDENSED TIME AND LITERALIZED SPACE IN THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD ........................................................................................................... 29 III: CONCLUSION ........................................................................................................... 41 REFERENCES..................................................................................................................44 vii INTRODUCTION Movement, the act of taking a physical body and shifting it into another position or space, is a vital action in any novel. There is the movement of a character’s physical body from one space to another; there is the movement of a character’s mentality, or way of thinking, from the start of the novel to the end; there is the movement of an entire group of people’s mentalities from one space to the next. Some novels must take greater care to consider movement as they write about the historical realities they depict, such as Europe’s colonization of Africa, the era of European countries’ movement into the continent of Africa, uprooting its people and enslaving them in the name of racial authority and Europe’s financial benefit. The United States quickly became a part of this upheaval, becoming a part of the transatlantic slave trade, violently uprooting people from all over Africa and forcing them to come to the States and work in horrific, abusive, dehumanizing conditions without pay, an action that was rationalized by aggressive dehumanization. This forced movement of millions of African peoples was not a movement to be soon forgotten by its descendants. In the book, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African American Identity by Ron Eyerman, he asserts that “…Africa is more than a spiritual home, and much more than a cultural resource, it is a site of redemption. Whether or not one actually returned there in a physical sense was probably less important than its symbolic meaning as homeland, beyond slavery and 1 outside history” (167). This movement back to the place their ancestors were forcibly uprooted from was, for many African Americans, a figurative move. It was a move back to their identity as it existed prior to the traumatic memory of American slavery. In this context, movement comes in the form of escape, relocation, and the idea of social mobility, which is a part of the American mythology (Eyerman 154). This theme of motion and movement is in large part due to the trauma experienced by Africans and their African American descendants in the United States. Movement is therefore presented as a solution to this trauma, as seen in the form of the escaped slave narrative depicted in Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, or in the form of the escaped flight back to Africa, a major theme of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon; in The Underground Railroad, the main character must witness and experience two hundred years of consolidated traumas as she moves physically from the slave plantation to her freedom in the north; in Song of Solomon, the main character exists in a town that represents the consolidated figurative spaces of the north and south that provides the impetus for him to learn and understand of his trauma. Through their own movement in the texts, these characters witness the pluralized African American experiences, the condensation of time, and reconcile their own history of forced relocation. Both authors take the journey that they have placed upon their character and provided them with a fantastical element: for Whitehead’s Cora, this is the consolidation of time and experience; for Morrison’s Milkman, this is the shifting of spaces to consolidate the US’s divided geography into a single town. By moving the physical space and time itself, I can assert that they have created a doubled space, which 2 allows for a direct contrast between the horrors of slavery and segregation with the shared human desire for interpersonal connection and identity formation. To better understand the need for a theme of movement, there needs to be an incorporation of the fields of trauma studies that exist and relate to the African American experience. The recent field of postcolonial trauma theory has spent much time and effort in analyzing the issues with traditional trauma theory; scholars have asserted over the past few decades that traditional trauma theory is Eurocentric. However, with the work in cultural trauma as done by Eyerman, there is a disconnect between traditional trauma studies and postcolonial trauma studies. Cultural trauma has been analyzed and has defined the significance of African American trauma, which needs to be considered when contextualizing the field of postcolonial trauma theory. Often, there is a fixation on what does not work within the traditional trauma theory rather than working to apply the theory to the pluralized societies many postcolonial trauma theorists are attempting to define. In the novels by Morrison and Whitehead, there is a fantastical element that creates a no-place for the characters, known in science fiction as the absent paradigm. Both texts include many elements of magical realism that develop original paradigms to regulate the novels’ messages the same way that science fiction literature does. In American history, African Americans have been other-ed and excluded from the United States historical narrative. Therefore, this no-place can be applied to African American experiences, in which there is a conspicuous disregard for their specific cultural history and suffering throughout American history. In the critical postcolonial text, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Gayatri Spivak defines the oppression of the Other by showing how “great care was taken to obliterate 3 the textual ingredients with which a subject could cathect, could occupy (invest?) its itinerary—not only by ideological and scientific production, but also by the institution of the law” (75). To effectively “other” a group of people, typically the minority group, Spivak argues that the government had to take time to diminish or erase any mode of text through which subjects could develop empathy or understanding for the oppressed group. The government did this by infiltrating the ideology of its people, developing scientific explanations for the oppression, and instituting laws that would make the government legally obligated to oppress. This is exactly how the United States other-ed and oppressed African Americans; first there was legal slavery, then legal
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