Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child and Sue Monk Kidd’s the Secret Life of Bees: A Critical Study of Subalternity

The present paper is an attempt to shed more light on the different paradigms of subalternity, the postcolonial impact of marginalizing and shaping the subalterns’ identity, and the theme of child abuse in Toni Morrison’s God Help the Child (2015) and Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees (2001). The theoretical framework of the study depends on Gayatri Spivak’s famous article entitled “Can the Subaltern Speak” in order to expose the dynamics of the subaltern subjectivity. A careful critical study of the main characters in both novels shows how they foreground subalternity in their narrative and structure. Both novels have common denominators that can be viewed as postcolonial settings, language, absence of motherhood, tone, atmosphere, narrative shifting, racial discrimination, and self-discovery. Finally, the paper applies all these theoretical ideas on the selected novels to better understand children's serious suffering within the context of subalternity.