God Help the Child

by

Toni Morrison

Inherited Trauma 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.
Inherited Trauma Theme Icon

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 relationship with her mother, Sweetness, exemplifies this idea of trauma. Sweetness explains how her own mother was discriminated against because of her skin color, even though her skin was light enough to pass for white. Sweetness then uses the trauma of racism that her mother experienced to justify her treatment of Bride, which traumatizes Bride. These relationships create a lineage of trauma in which Sweetness passes the trauma her mother experienced down to her daughter. Bride’s trauma then impacts others, including Sofia Huxley—wanting to please her emotionally abusive mother, Bride falsely testifies against Sofia, sending her to prison for 15 years for crimes Sofia very possibly didn’t commit. The guilt that Bride feels because of that testimony then compounds her already significant trauma, and she enters adulthood without having processed her fraught, painful past. 

The closing scene of the novel reinforces the inescapability of inherited trauma, especially trauma which stems from broader, systemic racism. After Bride announces to her boyfriend, Booker, that she is pregnant, they optimistically believe their child will be entirely new, free of the harms of “evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, rape, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus the wrath. So they believe.” But by adding “so they believe” to the end of that statement, the novel implies that Booker and Bride are naïve to think their child will enter the world as a blank slate, free from the trauma that has affected its ancestors. Instead, the novel contends that Booker and Bride’s child will inherit the traumas and abuses they have suffered along with the trauma and abuses that run rampant through the world. The book argues, then, that the laws of trauma are as indelible as the laws of physics. Trauma, like energy, can neither be escaped nor destroyed. As a result, humans fated to experience trauma are fated to pass on that trauma to their descendants and those close to them.

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Inherited Trauma Quotes in God Help the Child

Below you will find the important quotes in God Help the Child related to the theme of Inherited Trauma.
Part 1, Chapter 1: Sweetness Quotes

It’s not my fault. So you can’t blame me. I didn’t do it and have no idea how it happened.

Related Characters: Sweetness (speaker), Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:
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 3: Brooklyn Quotes

How can she persuade women to improve their looks with products that can’t improve her own? There isn’t enough YOU, GIRL foundation in the world to hide eye scars, a broken nose and facial skin scraped down to pink hypodermis. Assuming much of the damage fades, she will still need plastic surgery, which means weeks and weeks of idleness, hiding behind glasses and floppy hats. I might be asked to take over. Temporarily, of course.

Related Characters: Brooklyn (speaker), Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Sofia Huxley
Page Number: 26
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 5: Sweetness Quotes

Oh, yeah, I feel bad sometimes about how I treated Lula Ann when she was little. But you have to understand: I had to protect her. She didn’t know the world. There was no point in being tough or sassy even when you were right. Not in a world where you could be sent to a juvenile lockup for talking back or fighting in school, a world where you’d be the last one hired and the first one fired. She could know any of that or how her black skin would scare people or make them laugh or trick her.

Related Characters: Sweetness (speaker), Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell
Page Number: 41
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 3 Quotes

He suspected most of the real answers concerning slavery, lynching, forced labor, sharecropping, racism, Reconstruction, Jim Crow, prison labor, migration, civil rights and black revolution movements were all about money. Money withheld, money stolen, money as power, as war. Where was the lecture on how slavery alone catapulted the whole country from agriculture into the industrial age in two decades? White folks’ hatred, their violence, was the gasoline that kept the profit motors running.

Related Characters: Booker Starbern
Page Number: 110-111
Explanation and Analysis:

When the police responded to their plea for help in searching for Adam, they immediately searched the Starberns’ house—as though the anxious parents might be at fault. They checked to see if the father had a police record. He didn’t. “We’ll get back to you,” they said. Then they dropped it. Another little black boy gone. So?

Related Characters: Booker Starbern, Adam
Page Number: 114
Explanation and Analysis:
Part 4, Chapter 2 Quotes

Complaining about her mother, she told him that Sweetness hated her for her black skin.

“It’s just a color,” Booker had said. “A genetic trait—not a flaw, not a curse, not a blessing nor a sin.”

“But,” she countered,” other people think racial—”

Booker cut her off. “Scientifically there’s no such thing as race, Bride, so racism without race is a choice. Taught, of course, by those who need it, but still a choice. Folks who practice it would be nothing without it.”

His words were rational and, at the time, soothing but had little to do with day-to-day experience—like sitting in a car under the stunned gaze of little white children who couldn’t be more fascinated if they were at a museum of dinosaurs.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Booker Starbern
Page Number: 143
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:

A child. New life. Immune to evil or illness, protected from kidnap, beatings, race, racism, insult, hurt, self-loathing, abandonment. Error-free. All goodness. Minus wrath.

So they believe.

Related Characters: Lula Ann “Bride” Bridewell, Booker Starbern
Related Symbols: Jaguar, Trumpet
Page Number: 175
Explanation and Analysis: