Whiteness and Trauma: The Mother-Daughter Knot in the Fiction of Jean Rhys, Jamaica Kincaid and Toni Morrison

by V. Burrows

Overview

Whiteness and Trauma, now in paperback for the first time and with a new preface, focuses thematically on the 'mother-daughter knot' that structures the fiction of Morrison, Rhys and Kincaid. This study transforms the literary critical enterprise into one of relevance to contemporary cultural and feminist studies. Engaging both close reading practices and dense contextualisation, Burrows examines literary texts with a combination of broad scholarship and clarity. She employs theoretical resources principally from the fields of whiteness and trauma studies, and argues for the centrality of racial oppression and resistance in the shaping of narrative form and style. Her arguments for the metaphorical dimensions of racial trauma are original and contribute to a more general concern of renovating feminist literary criticism through a conscientious attentiveness to matters of race.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781137440853
Publisher:	Palgrave Macmillan UK
Publication date:	01/29/2004
Edition description:	2004
Pages:	228
Product dimensions:	5.40(w) x 8.30(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

VICTORIA BURROWS is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at The University of Western Australia. She is currently working on a monograph on whiteness and shame in colonial and postcolonial literature of the family.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements
Preface
1. Introduction: Unravelling the Knot
2. 'The White Hush Between Two Sentences': The Traumatic Ambivalence of Whiteness in Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea
3. Keeping History Safe
4. 'Caught Between Ghosts of Whiteness': The Other Side of the Story
5. Lucy: Jamaica Kincaid's Postcolonial Echo
6. The Search for a Voice
7. 'The Sea Is History'
8. 'Knots of Death': Toni Morrison's Sula
9. Ambivalent Maternal Inheritances
10. The 'Gift for Metaphor'
11. A Meditation on Silence
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

'[This] is a first rate literary study. By using metaphor as the instrument through which it seeks to come to terms with the vexed social and cultural issues it considers, it gives primacy to the distinctive work that literature performs...original and incisive.' - Professor Cheryl A. Wall, Department of English, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey

'This study presents a critical argument of the highest importance and offers a timely and intelligently argued intervention into feminist and trauma theory.' - Professor Linda Anderson, Department of English, Literature and Linguistic Studies, University of Newcastle Upon Tyne

Winner of the Toni Morrison Society's Award for Excellence

'Victoria Burrows offers a refreshing feminist reading of the complex mother daughter relationship as traumatised by racism and gender in three important novels: Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1966), Lucy by Jamaica Kincaid (1990) and Toni Morrison's Sula (1973)...In herintroduction, Victoria Burrows had asked the readers to participate in the study by creating an image of 'a densely threaded knot, one loosely entangled so that three dimensional spaces are visible between the looped strands' (p. 1), as visual representation of the mother daughter relationship. Such an active reader role makes the reading of Whiteness and Trauma captivating.' - Claudia Capancioni, Journal of Gender Studies

'Illustrating "racialized silencing" and "belated recognition", Burrows provides close readings of three narratives that demonstrate how a repressed memory becomes the source of recurring psychic pain...Readers of these specific works and those researching literary treatments of whiteness and trauma will especially want this title. Summing up: Recommended' - CHOICE

Burrows concludes by discussing Morrison's only short story, 'Recitatif' (1983), whose ending opens the 'interracial lines of dialogue' between the two characters. Burrows successfully frames her text as an attempt to the do the same in the realms of feminist and trauma studies. Burrows's attempt to illuminate the 'masked whiteness of theory' is a worthwhile task...[a] fine study,

which will be of interest to literary scholars of a variety of backgrounds.' - Aili McConnon, Women:A Cultural Review

'She [Burrows] deftly weaves together the myth of Echo with the African American pattern of call and response in a wonderfully evocative reading of Kincaid's Lucy...Burrows's reading of Morrison's Sula is similarly effective' - Patricia Moran, Tulsa Studies in Women's Literature

From the Publisher