Title: Heterotopia Writing in God Help the Child

Abstract: Contemporary African-American female writer Toni Morrison, in her final novel God Help the Child, applies the spatial narrative strategy to profoundly depict the marginal situation of many victims of childhood trauma in heterogeneous space. With the help of three different types of Foucauldian heterotopias, namely crisis, deviation and illusion, the novel systematically characterizes the main hidden dangers in American society, resists the discipline of power mechanisms, and subverts a series of artificially constructed binary oppositions in mainstream space. Accompanied by the unfolding and progression of the themes of sin, salvation and love, the protagonist Bride experiences the fictionalization, deconstruction and reconstruction of her subject identity in the process of moving through space, providing a specific path for the traumatized on the margins to transform from the other into the subject, and demonstrating Morrison’s optimistic prophecy about the future of African-American women in the new century.

Keywords: Toni Morrison, God Help the Child, heterotopia, construction of subjectivity

Author: Qianlu Zhang, College of Foreign Languages, Fujian Normal University, Fuzhou, Fujian, China.