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 ofToni Morrison. Albany: State U of NewYork P, 2000. x + 277 pp.

J. Brooks Bouson's study of Toni Morrison's novels displays both the strengths and the limitations of thematic criticism grounded in a single theoretical approach. On the one hand, Bouson's application of psychoanalytic theories of shaming and trauma - particularly as they have been developed in the work of LéonWurmser, Donald Nathanson,and Judith Lewis Herman - to racial issues in Morrison's work yields many fresh insights, especially for those novels that are primarily engaged in analyzing racial shame (The Bluest Eye and Tar Baby, for example). On the other hand, Bouson's belief that painful "race matters remain largely unspoken in the critical conversation that surrounds Morrison's works" seems to have led her to the over-compensatory claim that all of Morrison's fictional work, from The Bluest Eye to Paradise, is "driven" by racial shame and trauma, a claim that serves her poorly in those novels in which problems of shame are interleaved, and complicated, by additional concerns.

Bouson has chosen...