Quiet as it's kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison.

J. Brooks Bouson. Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison. Albany: SUNY P, 2000. 276 pp. $21.95.

In Quiet As It's Kept: Shame, Trauma, and Race in the Novels of Toni Morrison, J. Brooks Bouson employs psychological and psychoanalytic theories of trauma and shame to understand how Toni Morrison's novels stage scenes of racial violence and shaming in order to "aestheticize--and thus to gain narrative mastery over and artistically repair--the racial shame and trauma she describes." The above sentence may seem somewhat circular in its logic (theories of shame and trauma are employed to understand shame and trauma), and this is one problem with the book. Critics such as Claudia Tate and Jean Wyatt have successfully employed psychoanalytic and psychological approaches to African American texts in ways that open up new avenues of inquiry. But Bouson's methodology seems to allow her to repeat--with some degree of elaboration but little innovation--what many other critics have said previously. Furthermore, there is little reflection on why this particular approach was chosen or on what it allows us to fathom that could not be understood without this methodology. So the book's potential contribution to new scholarship on Toni Morrison remains limited.

Nonetheless, individual readings of texts and of characters' dilemmas are sometimes strong and compelling. For example, Bouson usefully illustrates that, in The Bluest Eye, Geraldine "externalizes her own status anxiety by projecting her fear of being seen as the stigmatized racial Other--the 'dirty' black--onto Pecola." But Susan Willis covers similar territory in "Eruptions of Funk: Historicizing Toni Morrison," an essay Bouson does not cite. Similarly, Bouson's reading of Sethe's dilemma in Beloved is insightful, but here, too, there are problems. Quoting Don Laub's statement that at the center of the trauma survivor there is "a danger, a nightmare, a fragility, a woundedness that defies all healing," Bouson convincingly argues that this plight is dramatized in Sethe's discussion of her "rememory," yet Amy Denver is referred to as "a shamed white girl" with no explanation of why she is shamed or what, specifically, shames her. Still, the chapter on Beloved is the strongest in the book, and here the trauma and shame theory does enable some interesting readings. Bouson's overall argument that Beloved explores "the painful--and intergenerationally transmitted and internalized--wounds caused by racist oppression" and counteracts shame by shaming the white shamer is valuable. Indeed, Bouson's most interesting points concern how Morrison's novels move toward healing through counter-shaming techniques. If Bouson had focused more on the process of recovery in these novels, rather than repeating examples of shame and trauma and insisting that virtually all of Morrison's characters are shamed--including Sula and Eva in Sula, and Joe Trace in Jazz--the book as a whole would have been more original.

Bouson's research is exhaustive, and her inclusion of extensive excerpts from Morrison's interviews is very useful. There are some omissions, however. Unmentioned is Jill Matus's 1998 book Toni Morrison, which concerns trauma and shame and even has similar chapter titles, such as "Shame and Anger in The Bluest Eye" and "History, Trauma, and Replay in Jazz." Of course, Bouson's book does not have the same audience in mind as Matus's (which seems to be intended for undergraduates), but the failure to cite this work on trauma and cultural memory is problematic. And when Bouson does attempt to stake out the originality of her claims, she overstates her case. Is it really true, for example, that "critics have tended to minimize--or even ignore--the sensitive, and at times painful, race matters that pervade and drive Morrison's novelistic narratives"? Bouson's copious citation of critics who have discussed exactly these themes proves otherwise.

Bouson's claims are more convincing when she focuses on discussing the strange, unsettling, and even perverse aspects of Morrison's texts. Repeatedly, my students report that Morrison's novels unsettle and perhaps even traumatize them as readers. Bouson's focus on shame and trauma brings out how this unique effect is achieved and offers some explanation of why Morrison's texts are often so disturbing to students and critics alike. Bouson also does a fine job placing these novels in their historical and cultural context. Her footnotes, in particular, provide a wealth of useful background information about subjects such as the historical origins of the Seven Days society in Song of Solomon and the female-directed Brazilian religion known as Candomble, which Morrison appears to use in her description of the convent women's spiritual practices in Paradise. Perhaps this book would be useful in an undergraduate seminar on Morrison, if Matus's book had not already covered these subjects in a book more geared to that specific audience.

Overall, I did not find that this book provides a new understanding of Morrison's fiction. But perhaps I am not the right audience for this book. As someone familiar both with Morrison's writing and with trauma theory, I do not see the necessity of bringing these discourses together unless they illuminate each other. For the most part, Bouson does not show this happening. Her book does identify something strange and unsettling in Morrison's works, but it does little to open up new lines of scholarly inquiry about trauma, about Morrison's writing, or about the possible and productive intersections of these two discourses.