CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND STUDY

1.0.      Conceptual Premise

This study shows the relationship between literary creativity and psychology especially

with focus on the unconscious and trauma in Toni Morrison‘s A Mercy and Gloria Naylor‘s

The Women of Brewster Place and Mama Day. The selected novels present characters

whose behaviours, actions and inactions are ‗absurd‘ or illogical because they are threats to

either themselves or others around them. In most cases such personality traits are indications

of some unaddressed psychological conflicts in the unconscious minds of those characters.

A psychoanalytical reading therefore examine the characters in selected novels in order to

determine how the unconscious has given rise or contributed in shaping the characters‘

behaviours, taking into considerations the situations and circumstances these characters find

themselves. These characters are significantly ‗types‘ as they represent individuals or

collectives in the Africa American society and their portrayal in this study is ultimately

aimed at revealing individual/collective personality of the African America women and their

experiences.

In this study, Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung psychoanalytical critical models are

employed in the analyses of the selected texts. Each of them has addressed human

personality from different directions. While for Freud, most human behaviour traits are

motivated by factors which the individuals are not even aware which he calls ‗the

unconscious‘, such as the childhood experience; For Jung, human personality and identity

can be revealed when we pay significant attention to myths and other similar symbols that

reoccur in our history which he calls archetypes. Using these psychoanalytical postulations,

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this study establishes that though socio-political, historical and cultural factors influence

personality traits (motives and actions) of characters in the selected texts, the unconscious

which is not easily discernable equally plays significant roles to establish a more complete

and fuller process of human behaviour.

1.1. Historical and Literary Background of African American

Slavery and freedom have been the predominant points of reference in the history of

African America. This historical background has provided the thematic concerns of African

American literature, as it forms the raw material for their creation. Morgenstern (1996:70), a

literary scholar, rightly argues the inseparable link of African American history and

literature with trauma narratives; she opines that ―it would be difficult to teach a course on

contemporary (African) American fiction without also teaching about the relationship

between trauma and narrative‖. Trauma as an inevitable feature in African American history

and writings therefore, makes the study of psychoanalysis which itself is majorly aimed at

resolving trauma involving human personality traits relevant to African American literature.

During the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, which lasted for nearly four hundred years

(Carson, Warner and Nash, 2007:43 cited in Miederi M. 2011:1), millions of Africans were

transported across the Atlantic in chains to labour in coffee, cotton and sugar plantations in

the Americas. Hundreds of thousands of slaves died in the process and Hundreds of

thousands more died in the horrors of the ―middle passages‖ and under the whips of slavery

in the plantations. For example, Williams (1964: 32-33 cited in Medieri M. 2011