God Help the Child

by

Toni Morrison

Themes and Colors
Inherited Trauma Theme Icon
Racism and Colorism Theme Icon
Child Abuse and Healing Theme Icon
Arrested Development and Unconditional Love Theme Icon
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

God Help the Child depicts a world where abuse and trauma are passed from person to person across generations. In a way, the novel presents a view of trauma similar to the law of conservation of energy, a concept in physics and chemistry that states that energy cannot be created or destroyed. In the novel, trauma, like energy, is neither created nor destroyed; instead, it is continually passed from one person to another. Bride’s…

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Racism and Colorism

Sweetness uses colorism to defend her poor treatment of her daughter, Bride, who was born with inexplicably dark skin. She explains that she is “high yellow” and that many of her relatives passed for white. Sweetness thinks of Bride’s skin color as “terrible,” and it drives her “mad” to the point that she considers killing Bride when she is a baby. With that in mind, the novel shows how Sweetness has internalized racism that…

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Child Abuse and Healing

Several characters in God Help the Child witness or endure abuse as children. Bride’s mother, Sweetness, neglects Bride when she is growing up. And when Bride is a young girl, she witnesses her mother’s landlord molesting a child. Bride’s own mother, meanwhile, emotionally abuses Bride. When Booker is young,  a pedophile sexually abuses and then murders Booker’s brother, Adam. Rain, a young girl whom Bride meets after she crashes her car, is…

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Arrested Development and Unconditional Love

As Bride travels to find Booker, she notices that she is losing her hair, her earlobes have closed, and her breasts have vanished. Her body is reverting to a younger form—specifically to when she was eight years old and falsely testified against Sofia Huxley. Bride’s physical transformations symbolize her inability to forgive herself for harming Sofia Huxley—in other words, the physical transformations Bride experiences as an adult mirror the psychological burden of guilt…

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