The Crypted Self and Melancholia in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

Abstract

This paper analyzes the disquieting sense of sorrow in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) with the psychoanalytical concepts of melancholia and incorporation. Although Bride, the female protagonist, leads a seemingly successful and satisfactory life in contemporary America even with her “blue-black” skin, she cannot help feeling empty and sad. Taking this sense of sorrow as a point of departure, this paper analyzes melancholia as a symptom of the pain of loss—as a pathology viscerally suffered by an individual, precisely to examine, ultimately, the vulnerability of specific groups of people to social oppression: that of African Americans and children. I adopt Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok’s conceptualization of introjection and incorporation to diagnose the melancholia of Bride. By closely following the reasons and symptoms of melancholia in Bride, this paper argues that while melancholia issues from the loss of a beloved object that cannot be mourned and leaves the subject psychically wounded, Bride’s melancholia issues from the loss of her childhood self that had been left unmourned due to oppressive forces—racism and child abuse—that keep the process of mourning impossible. Central to the notion of melancholia in God Help the Child is its association with secrecy. According to Abraham and Torok, the prohibition on communicating one’s loss hinders one’s process of mourning and causes one to incorporate the lost love-object, leading the person to melancholia. Racial shaming, internalization of shame, and traumatization play a central role in leading Bride to melancholia as she incorporates her own childhood self that she finds is “unlovable.”