Quiet as It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison

Focuses on the role of shame and trauma as it looks at issues of race, class, color, and caste in the novels of Toni Morrison.

Quiet As It's Kept draws on and extends recent psychoanalytic and psychiatric work of shame and trauma theorists to offer an in-depth analysis of Toni Morrison's representation of painful and shameful race matters in her fiction. Providing a frank and sustained look at the troubling, if not distressing, aspects of Morrison's fiction that other critics have studiously avoided or minimized in their commentaries, this book challenges established views of Morrison, showing her to be an author who forces readers into uncomfortable confrontations with matters of race. In Quiet As It's Kept, J. Brooks Bouson explores these issues in Morrison's works The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Beloved, Jazz, and Paradise.

Morrison, Nobel prize-winning author, has viewed part of her cultural and literary task as a writer to bear witness to the plight of black Americans. "Quiet as it's kept, much of our business, our existence here, has been grotesque. It really has," she has commented. As she exposes to public view sensitive race matters in her fiction, Morrison presents jarring depictions of the trauma of slavery and the horrors of racist oppression and black-on-black violence.