The Marginal Self and Trauma: The Broken Connection of The Self in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple

This article explores the impact of psychological trauma on selfhood by focusing specifically on the issues of social oppression and power dynamics portrayed in Alice Walker’s The Color Purple. In examining the psychological impact of social oppression on minority groups in terms of “insidious trauma”, this paper expands on Root’s “insidious trauma” or Kai Erikson’s “psychic erosion”, but the focus will be more on exploring how trauma affects the narrative- generating function of the self. In this process, the paper will investigate the ways in which the pernicious power of racism determines the form of intergenerationally transmitted trauma, as well as how race, in its relation with other social factors, such as gender, class and age, produces synergistic effects of multiple marginalization.