Struggle and Reconciliation: Alice Walker's Trauma Narrative in The Temple of My Familiar

Abstract

Alice Walker, a renowned African American female writer, has long focused on the living conditions and subject construction of Black women, and in her works, she presents the psychological trauma suffered by women, a vulnerable group, under the dual oppression of race and gender from the perspectives of multiple characters. Her novel The Temple of My Familiar portrays major characters such as Lissie, Hal, Fanny, Suwelo, Carlotta, Arveyda and Zedé through fragmented forms including dialogues, diaries, oral narratives, letters and monologues, telling the stories of trauma and healing experienced by female characters through interwoven narrative threads. For instance, by interpreting the diaries and oral history left by her ancestors, Fanny reveals the struggles and pains of several generations of women in her family under sexual violence, racial discrimination and cultural rupture. Meanwhile, through the transmission of past-life memories, the female characters in the novel gradually establish a unique dialogical relationship with others, achieve healing after trauma and the mending of wounds, and ultimately transform the dilapidated "temple" into a spiritual community "homeland" that integrates Black culture, female spirituality and a harmonious ecology. Therefore, based on Judith Herman's trauma theory, this paper conducts an in-depth analysis of the forms of individual and collective trauma in the novel, and explores how memory and dialogue serve as the source of healing to provide spiritual comfort and strength for women. In addition, the author hopes to enrich the current academic research on trauma literature and provide valuable theoretical references for it by analyzing the multiple relationships among trauma, memory inheritance and dialogical healing.