“An open wound that cannot heal”: Reproductive Trauma and Maternal Madness in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

Abstract: Drawing on racialized frameworks of hysteria, this article examines reproductive trauma and maternal “madness” in Toni Morrison’s 2008 novel, A Mercy , set in seventeenth-century colonial America, and argues that the text cultivates a “psychopoetics of hysteria” (Kahane) to mimic the psychological disintegration of female characters who suffer from reproductive trauma. By reproductive trauma , I mean experiences connected to female reproduction, such as rape, childbirth, miscarriage, and the loss of children, whether through death or forced separation. A Mercy uses “hysterical” fragmentation as the main principle of narrative organization to represent the unspeakable, enact the effects of traumatized subjectivity on the ability to produce a coherent narrative, and disorient the reader, who is confronted with narrative gaps and shifts, multiple subject positions, textual paralyses, loops, and abrupt transitions, and who, like the characters themselves, is compelled to grapple with confusion, loss, and emotional volatility.