Fairy Tale and Trauma in Toni Morrison's Home

Toni Morrison’s tenth novel Home (2013), set in the 1950s, presents a disturbing and dark narrative of childhood abuse, war trauma, and racial discrimination. While poignantly dramatizing the traumatic experiences of war veteran Frank Money and his sister Ycidra (Cee), the novel also explores avenues leading to resilience, resolution, and recovery. A major question that Home addressesis how traumatized characters may come “home” to a sense of belonging, to self-esteem, and to a renewed love of life. Woven into the novel’s narrative fabric are direct and indirect references to the tale of Hansel and Gretel that draw into play the expectations specific to the genre of fairy tales and folktales, in particular, and, remarkably, the expectations of a positive and reassuring ending. This essay explores the interplay between trauma and fairy-tale motifs in Home, which informs its central themes of gender, race, family, and community. Morrison envisages ways toward the resolution of trauma that contribute to developments in literary trauma theory. The fairy-tale intertext accentuates the upward movement of the novel, which presents in its final pages a new and stronger sense of a positive closure to trauma than has so far been the case in Morrison’s fiction