Violence and Intergenerational Conflict in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy, Paradise, and God Help the Child[Latin Thesis]

Aliakbar Pormouzeh

Toni Morrison intertwines various themes in her novels including slavery, racial segregation, and racial identity with social dilemmas of rape, murder, and intergenerational conflict as expression of different forms of violence. In the present thesis, out of Morison’s latest novels, A Mercy, Paradise, and God Help the Child are studied in the light of Žižek’s theory of violence and the concept of intergenerational conflict. The selected novels are discussed to specify types of violence namely subjective and objective (symbolic and systemic) violence, to explain gender relations, and to clarify interracial and intergenerational conflicts formed by racial discrimination and colorism. A Mercy reveals colonial America and violence in slave trade, rape, and failing communication. Meantime, ontological violence is contested in the novel in line with Žižek’s reaction to definition of one’s nature by merely culture. Paradise introduces violence inside an all-black community who are segregated from white racists to establish their own community, but conflict with their nearby inclusive Convent women and their own children leads to massacre of Convent women. God Help the Child represents violence inside a colored family and maltreatment of their uneven black girl. The results of the study show that all types of violence emanated from systemic violence. Morison aimed at deconstructing racial concepts and history in A Mercy and Paradise to reveal the role of hegemony and Christianity as instruments of violence. In addition, in God Help the Child, she repeats postcolonial exploitation and violence themes associated with color and race to deconstruct the idea of post-race. Findings of the study imply that violence is changed from racial opposition to interracial and intergenerational conflict in systematic and epidemic forms. Key Terms: colorism, intergenerational conflict, interracial, objective violence, racism, subjective violence, symbolic violence, systemic violence, post-racial