God Help the Child

by

Toni Morrison

Arrested Development and Unconditional Love Theme Analysis

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.
Arrested Development and Unconditional Love Theme Icon

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 she feels over a wrong she committed as a child. In other words, Bride’s guilt traps her in the past and leaves her unable to develop into a healthy, well-adjusted adult.

But the novel does not suggest that Bride is doomed to feel guilty forever. Instead, it suggests that she may overcome her guilt and reach self-acceptance through unconditional love. To make this connection, it is essential to understand why Bride falsely testified against Sofia: to appease her emotionally withholding, abusive mother, Sweetness, who asked her to make the accusation. From Sweetness, Bride learned from a young age that love was something a person must earn—and something that could easy be taken away. In this way, Sweetness’s conditional love emotionally stunts Bride, leaving her incapable of believing that she is worthy of love in light of what she did to Sofia. But when Bride, as an adult, finally confesses to Booker the full story of what she did to Sofia—how her mother manipulated her into making the false accusation—he responds with acceptance, compassion, and understanding. In other words, Booker shows Bride that she is deserving of love, regardless—and perhaps even because of—her past. Booker’s unconditional love instills in Bride a sense of self-acceptance and self-worth that her mother’s conditional love attempted to destroy. This, in turn, allows Bride to forgive herself for her past wrongs and love others in the same unconditional, merciful way, even in the face of past mistakes and faults, a revelation the novel emphasizes in the return of Bride’s body to its physical adult form. God Help the Child thus suggests that while growing up in an unloving environment can cause children to deny themselves love and trap them in a state of arrested development, learning to accept unconditional love from oneself and from others can help them to shed the burden of internalized guilt and develop into well-adjusted, healthy adults

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Arrested Development and Unconditional Love ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Arrested Development and Unconditional Love appears in each chapter of God Help the Child. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Arrested Development and Unconditional Love Quotes in God Help the Child

Below you will find the important quotes in God Help the Child related to the theme of Arrested Development and Unconditional Love.
Part 1, Chapter 2: Bride Quotes

I’m scared. Something bad is happening to me. I feel like I’m melting away. I can’t explain it to you but I do know when it started. It began after he said, “You not the woman I want.”

“Neither am I.”

I don’t know why I said that. It just popped out of my mouth.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell (speaker), Booker Starbern
Page Number: 9
Explanation and Analysis:

Decagon Women’s Correctional Center, right outside Norristown, owned by a private company, is worshipped by the locals for the work it provides: serving visitors, guards, clerical staff, cafeteria workers, health care folks and most of all construction laborers repairing the road and fences and adding wing after wing to house the increasing flood of violent, sinful women committing bloody female crimes. Lucky for the state, crime does pay.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Sofia Huxley
Page Number: 13
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 4: Bride Quotes

Nothing announced her attack on me. I’ll never forget it, and even if I tried to, the scars, let alone the shame, wouldn’t let me.

Memory is the worst thing about healing.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell (speaker), Sofia Huxley
Page Number: 29
Explanation and Analysis:

As we walked down the courthouse steps she held my hand, my hand. She never did that before and it surprised me as much as it pleased me because I always knew she didn’t like touching me. I could tell. Distaste was all over her face when I was little and she had to bathe me. Rinse me, actually, after a halfhearted rub with a soapy washcloth. I used to pray she would slap my face or spank me just to feel her touch.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell (speaker), Sweetness, Sofia Huxley
Page Number: 31
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 6: Bride Quotes

“Come on, baby, you’re not responsible for other folks’ evil.”

Related Characters: Booker Starbern (speaker), Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Sweetness, Mr. Leigh
Page Number: 55
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1, Chapter 9: Sofia Quotes

In the taxicab on the first day of my parole I felt like a little kid seeing the world for the first time—houses surrounded by grass so green it hurt my eyes. The flowers seemed to be painted because I didn’t remember roses that shade of lavender or sunflowers so blindingly bright. Everything seemed not just remodeled but brand-new. When I rolled down the window to smell the fresh air, the wind caught my hair—whipping it backward and sideways. That’s when I knew I was free.

Related Characters: Sofia Huxley (speaker)
Page Number: 68-69
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 2, Chapter 1 Quotes

He was part of the pain—not a savior at all, and now her life was in shambles because of him. The pieces of it that she had stitched together: personal glamour, control in an exciting even creative profession, sexual freedom and most of all a shield that protected her from any overly intense feeling, be it rage, embarrassment or love.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Booker Starbern
Page Number: 79
Explanation and Analysis:

Finally in Mexico they agreed to stop meeting that way […] so they got married and “moved to California to live a real life.”

Bride’s envy watching them was infantile but she couldn’t stop herself. “By ‘real’ you mean poor?” She smiled to hide the sneer.

“What does ‘poor’ mean? No television?” Steve raised his eyebrows.

“It means no money,” said Bride.

“Same thing,” he answered. “No money, no television.”

“Means no washing machine, no fridge, no bathroom, no money!”

“Money get you out of that Jaguar? Money save your ass?”

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell (speaker), Steve (speaker)
Related Symbols: Jaguar
Page Number: 91
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3 Quotes

Wealth alone explained humanity’s evil, and he was determined to live without deference to it.

Related Characters: Booker Starbern
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:

Once in a while she dropped the hip, thrillingly successful corporate woman façade of complete control and confessed some flaw or painful memory of childhood. And he, knowing all about how childhood cuts festered and never scabbed over, comforted her while hiding the rage he felt at the idea of anyone hurting her.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Booker Starbern
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:

Six months into the bliss of edible sex, free-style music, challenging books and the company of an easy undemanding Bride, the fairy-tale castle collapsed into the mud and sand on which its vanity was built. And Booker ran away.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Booker Starbern
Page Number: 135
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 2 Quotes

Flat-chested and without underarm or pubic hair, pierced ears and stable weight, she tried and failed to forget what she believed was her crazed transformation back into a scared little black girl.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis:

“I’m not sure I should, now.” Bride shook her head. She had counted on her looks for so long—how well her beauty worked. She had not known its shallowness or her own cowardice—the vital lesson Sweetness taught and nailed to her spine to curve it.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Booker Starbern, Sweetness, Queen
Page Number: 151
Explanation and Analysis:

“I lied! I lied! I lied! She was innocent. I helped convict her but she didn’t do any of that. I wanted to make amends but she beat the crap out of me and I deserved it.”

“You lied? What the hell for?”

“So my mother would hold my hand!”

“What?”

“And look at me with proud eyes, for once.”

“So, did she?”

“Yes. She even liked me.”

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell (speaker), Booker Starbern (speaker)
Page Number: 153-154
Explanation and Analysis:

They will blow it, she thought. Each will cling to a sad little story of hurt and sorrow—some long-ago trouble and pain life dumped on their pure and innocent selves. And each one will rewrite the story forever, knowing the plot, guessing the theme, inventing its meaning and dismissing its origin. What waste.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Booker Starbern, Queen
Page Number: 158
Explanation and Analysis:

Queen’s right, he thought. Except for Adam I don’t know anything about love. Adam had no faults, was innocent, pure, easy to love. Had he lived, grown up to have flaws, human failings like deception, foolishness and ignorance, would he be so easy to adore or be even worthy of adoration? What kind of love is it that requires and only an angel for its commitment?

Related Characters: Booker Starbern (speaker), Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Adam
Page Number: 160
Explanation and Analysis:

Having confessed, Lula Ann’s sins she felt newly born. No longer forced to relive, no, outlive the disdain of her mother and the abandonment of her father.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Sweetness, Sofia Huxley, Louis
Page Number: 162
Explanation and Analysis: