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This study has sought to look at the work of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye from the point of view of violence and the types of violence she uses to narrate the story. It interprets the severe consequences of violence inflicted upon the victim. Moreover, neither the perpetrator nor society is untouched by the violence inflicted. This takes the shapes of racial attitude. The study also shows that development of hatred is the root cause of violence in this novel and Morrison has not only created wonderful incidents of violence but also studied the deep psyche of her characters.
Abstract The woman represents the symbol of nature. She contributes to make progress in the family, society as well as country through her active participation same as the male counterpart. But woman is suppressed into lower status compared to the male power and position in the society intentionally, even after her great contribution in reality. The evidence can be found in the portrayal of woman in the literatures from the different
2018
Racism is basically a belief in the superiority of one race to another which results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. The life of African-American cloured people have been affected by racism. These so-called systems of social and psychological restrictions make coloured people to feel inferiors. Toni Morrison has gained reputation internationally with the publication of her first novel The Bluest Eye. This novel mirroring us the terrible consequences for blacks personalizing the values of a white culture that rejects them both directly and indirectly. Even though slavery is abolished legally through the tough efforts of eminent leaders but still the African-Americans are not considered equal to the whites. The Black people are trying to identify themselves with the white and their cultural ways. Toni Morrison insists on Black cultural heritage and solicits the African-Americans to be proud of their Black identity. This paper presents t...
Sujana Suvin., Sch J Arts Humanit Soc Sci, Nov, 2020; 8(11): 553-559, 2020
Racism is a belief in the superiority of one race to another which results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. The life of African-American colored people has been affected by racism. For this purpose, the paper tries to focus on a system where chauvinism, malevolence, and domestically sexual harassments against Pecola Breedlove whose only target is to achieve beauty, which means happiness and survival. The novel portrays the effect of discrimination on a budding teenager's sexual being that put her in a gloomy and scary atmosphere from where the character was unable to leap out. The novel shows the prejudices that create a crater in the black man's psyche and his unexposed aggression on the white world led to his psychological repression. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye presents black cultural heritage and solicits the African-American to be proud of female black identity. Thus, this paper would like to examine the nature of the black people's struggle for their race and endurance in a multicultural postcolonial white America.
Toni Morison, a prolific American writer has written on the pathetic condition of the suppressed and downtrodden with zest and zeal to highlight the western ideological apparatuses through which the African and other colonized countries are represented. The Bluest Eye is Morrison's first novel published in 1970. In this novel, she questions the western standard of beauty, revealed through the postmodern perspective that it's socially constructed and how this strategic subversion has created a 'myth of white is right'. Morrison wants to persuade the African-Americans from recognizing themselves through the western camera obscura. Instead, she wants to subvert that tendency and boosts them to value and celebrate the blackness. Blackness is pride not a curse, as she demonstrates how the black women characters suffer through the biased representation. Morrison manifests that the white voice is inappropriate to dictate the contours of African-American life. In this novel, the novelist not only focuses on the pride of blackness but also reveals that how the white ideology impacts the black community. This paper seeks to trace how a good piece of work in literature like Morrison's The Bluest Eye has dispelled the ideological fogs and how she attacks and problematizes the concept of 'beauty'. This paper will also explore the main characters' response to the western standard of beauty. The Bluest Eye is a novel of revelation through which Morrison wants to revivify the African-American identity and tried to dismantle the draconian parameters of western ideological apparatuses. Morrison like other black writers has portrayed a world in which the blacks have been shown as accepting and rejecting the western dominating culture. This identification and rejection has an impact on the psychology of the black Americans. She formulates her concept by revealing the inner turmoil of the black selves and distinct features of the Breedlove family which make it unfit in the white aesthetics and finally led the family to destruction. Morrison as a black writer has aptly represented the ambivalent attitude of the black American, being inculcated by rhetorical discourse of the white authorities:
2013
The narrator in The Bluest Eye states that "A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment" (162). The little black girl is Pecola Breedlove who is dissatisfied with the world around her. She is born into a society that is confused as it shuns its own cultural values and craves for self-gratification in the culture of the whites. In the novel this tendency of the society finds its symbolic and subversive expression in Pecola's quest for blue eyes which represent the western/racist ideals of beauty. The quest results in the suffering and anguish of the blacks which is presented by Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye. This article proposes to analyse how the subversive politics of racism is operative in the narrative in the novel.
Crossings A Journal of English Studies, 2015
To deconstruct the cultural perversion of the African-American ethnicity, Toni Morrison deploys "madness" as grand metaphor in The Bluest Eye. The "mad-self" metaphorically liberates the hidden oppressed self to be expressed which can be explained as a resistance. In comparison to black male characters in The Bluest Eye, the ideologically problematic stereotyping of female characters 'triple nonentities-that is, "being black,""being woman," and "being mad" will be criticized in this study. Toni Morrison's strategy in using madness to argue if and how female madness questions or strengthens patriarchal and racial representational politics is also examined. In The Madwoman in the Attic, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar imply that a woman writer must examine, assimilate, and transcend the images of male authors generated for her. Women must deconstruct the aesthetic ideal that patriarchy has trapped them in art. From this perspective, despite the use of madness as a liberating agent,"madness" in The Bluest Eye appears to be an extension of the female characters' marginality, patriarchal domination, intra-racial status, and being the "other" among the others.
2010
In this study we examine how the society, the family and one‟s own psyche are antithetical to the Afro-American woman in Toni Morrison‟s The Bluest Eye. Societal, familial and psychic factors are the triple forces that put the blacks of America in jeopardy. The article traces out the obstruction constructed against the blacks by the white community. Blacks are dehumanized and minimized from subject-hood to object-hood. The paper also discovers how an unhealthy family life alienates one from the other resulting in little sense of belonging. Family, which ought to nourish and develop the individual, degrades into a destructive factor. The study examines the psychological trauma and the danger lurking within the African-American woman. Unable to meet the needs of one‟s environment the individual is on the quest to quench the expectation of others. In the process the individual becomes a prey to depression and frustration which ultimately leads to self-mutilation. In order to have a tru...
2022
Racial trauma is associated with the detrimental psychological impact of race-based discrimination having symptoms like those of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). With accounts of systemic racism across the globe, it is quite pertinent to discuss the distressing impact of living within a society of structural racism. Racial trauma involves exposure and re-exposure to race-based stress, which can be of different forms, microaggression being one of them. Microaggression shows how instances at a micro-level like insults and slights against black people, can have a detrimental effect on the mental health of those who experience it. The Bluest Eye (1970), the debut novel of Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison, is a tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl, longing for the socially constructed idea of beauty. A study of her character will highlight the effects of internalised racism based on the tragic events of discrimination and marginalisation in Pecola's life and her psychological response to it. This paper will focus on racial trauma and Chester E. Pierce's concept of microaggression to foreground the psychological distress that Pecola is grappling with, in the narrative and how apart from acts of violence, offensive and derogatory statements against the people of colour damages their psyche.
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