Fairy Tale and Trauma in Toni Morrison’s<i>Home</i>

Abstract

The literary work of Toni Morrison is famous for its rich intertexuality, interweaving narrative, contemporary history, and tales and motifs from oral storytelling traditions. Her tenth novel, Home (2013), is no exception. It contains disturbing and dark narratives of childhood abuse, war trauma, and racial discrimination, which are offset by Morrison's use of motifs from the tale of "Hansel and Gretel," one of the best-known fairy tales collected by the Grimm brothers and called "a great and ferocious classic" by Philip Pullman (84). I explore the interplay between trauma and fairy-tale motifs in Home, a novel that engages with central themes of Morrison's previous work, such as gender, race, family, and empowerment. In this novel, Morrison envisages ways toward the resolution of trauma that contribute to developments in literary trauma theory and presents a new and stronger sense of positive closure to the thematics of trauma than has so far been the case in her fiction.