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The secret of Bride’s body in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child

ABSTRACT Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) is built as a narrative quest in which the protagonist, Bride, is led to question her self-constructed adult identity and to address her past. In the course of the story, Bride’s body is textually foregrounded as the privileged site for the construction of her identity, where the signs of an identity crisis will appear as symptoms of a childhood trauma. This essay aims at analyzing how the novel’s revelatory structure links the apparently unrelated transformations undergone by Bride’s body into a single narrative of secrecy and trauma. My approach to the novel draws on black feminism, gender studies, trauma studies, and narratology in an attempt to bridge the gap between two apparently distant aspects: the thematic prominence of the main character’s body and the peculiarities of the narrative structure used to tell the story.