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Part 4, Chapter 2
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in God Help the Child, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Inherited Trauma
Racism and Colorism
Child Abuse and Healing
Arrested Development and Unconditional Love
Summary
Analysis
Sweetness likes the nursing home she’s in. The nurses are “lovely.” One kisses Sweetness on the cheek when she says she’s going to be a grandmother. Sweetness thinks that even if Bride’s child is “as black as [Bride] is,” Bride won’t have to worry like she did. Things have changed, Sweetness thinks. Since there is no return address, Sweetness assumes Bride is still punishing her for being a bad parent. But she had to be tough, Sweetness thinks, and Bride has turned out to be a wealthy career woman, so how bad of a parent could she have been? Sweetness also thinks that Bride will now see how hard it is to be a parent; she’ll see what the world is like and how it changes when you’re a parent. “Good luck and God help the child,” Sweetness thinks.
Sweetness’s final words in the novel show that she lacks the insight to take responsibility for her actions that have continued to harm Bride into adulthood. Sweetness also argues that parenting isn’t just hard—it’s essentially impossible if the goal is to protect one’s children. That kind of protection isn’t feasible, Sweetness argues, because the world is full of things that will damage children, and each parent can become a conduit to pass their own trauma on to their children. In that view, no child can ever really be safe. In this regard, Sweetness lets herself off the hook for damaging Bride by saying that Bride would have been traumatized regardless; there was nothing Sweetness could have done about it. The novel does not explicitly endorse this view. The book seems to suggest that there is a possibility for genuine human goodness and that people can understand and overcome their trauma so they won’t pass it on to others. However, even if they do, the novel suggests that there are plenty of other malicious forces in the world lying in wait for each child.
Themes
