God Help the Child Study Guide

To justify her poor treatment of her daughter, Bride, Sweetness recalls instances of racism and discrimination that her mother experienced during the Jim Crow era. Jim Crow laws originated in the late 1800s, in the aftermath of the Confederacy’s loss of the Civil War in 1865 and the abolition of chattel slavery in the U.S., to enforce segregation based on race. Jim Crow laws came about as a racist and white supremacist response to gains made by African American people during the Reconstruction era, which lasted from 1865 until around 1877. During this period, the government implemented a series of policies aimed at rebuilding the south in the aftermath of the Civil War. In part, these laws were meant to redress systemic inequities that remained in place after the abolishment of slavery. Jim Crow laws were upheld as legal by the United States Supreme Court in the 1896 case of Plessy v. Ferguson, a landmark U.S. Supreme Court case about the constitutionality of racial segregation in schools. The case resulted in a 7-1 decision, and the majority opinion established the doctrine that came to be known as “separate but equal, ” which held that racial segregation laws did not violate the U.S. constitution, a decision that legitimized many of the other racist Jim Crow laws aimed at enforcing segregation in the American South. Jim Crow laws continued to be challenged in court, and the remaining laws weren’t overturned until the 1960s, with the passage of the 1964  Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act. 

God Help the Child delves into themes that recur in much of Morrison's work, including the ramifications of racism, the experiences of being Black in the United States, the impacts of slavery and Jim Crow laws, and the harmful effects of sexism and misogyny. Novels by Morrison that touch on similar themes include Beloved (1987), The Bluest Eye (1970), and Song of Solomon (1977). God Help the Child also showcases Morrison's trademark lyricism and her penchant for implementing magical realist elements in her fiction. Modernist works by William Faulkner and Virginia Woolf, including The Sound and the Fury by Faulkner and Mrs. Dalloway by Woolf, particularly influenced Morrison’s prose style. In “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, a man ages backward from old age to childhood, similar to Bride's transformation in God Help the Child. The elements of magical realism at play in Gold Help the Child also resonate with One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a notable work of magical realism. As one of the most important novelists of her time, Morrison’s influence is  perceptible across a wide range of more recent works by contemporary authors, including Jesmyn Ward’s novels Salvage the Bones and Sing, Unburied, Sing, as well as Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, and Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West.