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"I,I have Caused a Miracle": The Textual Politics of the Fantastic in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
International Journal of Linguistics, Literature and Translation, 2019
This research examines critically Toni Morrison's use of the fantastic in her first novel The Bluest Eye (1970). This aspect of Morrison's text did not receive due attention in the critical reception of the novel. In fact, the term 'fantastic' appears nowhere in the ever-expanding bibliography of Morrison's oeuvre in general and The Bluest Eye in Particular. This aspect, instead, is treated under other headings like characterization or dialogue and epistolary elements. This research, therefore, addresses Morrison's fantastic in The Bluest Eye through the critical methodologies of the leading contemporary theorists of the fantastic, notably; Tzvetan Todorov and Rosemary Jackson. Because these theorists align the fantastic with the act of reading, this research invokes a wide range of reader's response, deconstructive, and phenomenological approaches in its reading of the inherent, and subversive, ambivalence of Morrison's fantastic. Morrison uses the fantastic in The Bluest Eye as a textual space where reader's response and expectation are negotiated to break the passive pattern of the process of reading and pushes her reader to actively engage in the production of meaning.
Nodhar Hammami Ben Fradj, 2022
In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison reacts against the American white racist and sexist society which used to exclude the black race and marginalise the female sex, mainly in the decades that preceded the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. She attempts to voice the black female 'other' through the inclusion of a new linguistic mode, an innovative feminine style which subverts the social and linguistic rules of the past. She questions the bases of beauty as well as the standards of writing, revealing that they are by the same token grounded in a subjective standardisation. She shows a break with the traditional literary canon and uses a challenging form of writing where language becomes a tool to fight racism and sexism and a political weapon that leads to the attainment of freedom and independence. This article is chiefly concerned with the use of feminine writing as a political discourse that denounces a history of oppression, while attempting to closely examine the engagingly excessive and eccentric employment of colours, sounds and shapes as a discourse of resistance. Morrison uses linguistic irregularities in her new code of writing to deconstruct the traditional regular male linguistic code.
Longing for Symbolic Capital in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye: A Bourdieun Estimation
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye portrays, among other both white and black lives in a less significant mark, the life of a young black girl named Pecola Breedlove whose desperate longing for owning the bluest eyes so as to free herself from the shame and disgrace of her birthed identity has inspired the author to name the novel so. Morrison inserted into the protagonist her (Morrison's) depraved experience of injustice, inequality, racial discrimination, social stigmatization and, above all, inborn physical outlook, wielded upon the black communities in America during her (Morrison's) time. While brooding over the question why a black girl would hanker after the bluest eyes, I find the hints, specified descriptions and clarified answers provided by Morrison in the novel logically matched with "Symbolic Capital", the last of the four capitals delineated by the French philosopher and public intellectual Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). Accordingly, this article seeks to appraise Pecola's yearning for the bluest eyes in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye through Bourdieu's theory of "Symbolic Capital".
TONI MORRISON'S THE BLUEST EYE: A POSTMODERN RENDERING
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:
Typography as a regime of reading/looking in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970)
Cogent Arts & Humanities
This paper aims to investigate the significance of typography in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. With this view, the research deployed multimodal theory and multimodal stylistics theorized and developed by Kress & Van Leeuwen, Van Leeuwen's social semiotics, and Norgaard's multimodal stylistics. The key features of typography and layout such as typeface, type styles, punctuation, salience, information value, discursive import and visual negation were put into practice in reading the novel. Typography was viewed as a semiotic resource along with genre as another semiotic resource. The findings of the research indicate the opposition between the verbal and visual modes in the novel. More specifically, Morrison helps the reader visually experience the dominance of eye and vision in America through activating his or her visual imagination. The paper also suggests that the blank space of the page is a suitable opportunity for battles of cultures, visual and verbal supremacy. Finally, the paper concludes that the act of reading The Bluest Eye is simultaneously an act of seeing and looking at, too.
While Racism traces its roots back to the subjugation of the non-white communities by white 'masters', Colorism emerges as an offshoot of Racism. Colorism, or the discrimination amongst individuals, solely on the basis of skin colour is practiced not only by the members of a different race, but also by the members of the same race towards each other. Toni Morrison, in her novel, The Bluest Eye, reveals how colorism is embedded in the psyche of African-American people. She demonstrates how " Black People " are not also subjected to Racism, but also Colorism by their own people. Morrison portrays a nuanced version of Racism, where the characters have internalized the set notions of Superiority and inferiority viz a viz race. This internalization creates a cycle of victimization and oppression which in turn strengthens the dominant cultures' oppressive standard of beauty. Though Colorism stems from Racism, it acquires a life of its own. This paper seeks to show how Morrison's novel, besides addressing the issue of racism, also tackles the issue of Colorism in the novel and shows the twin forces of racism and colorism are used by and against the members of the same community.
This paper is an attempt to analyze the compare perspectives of race, class, ethnicity and gender in two novels—Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Alice Walker's The Colour Purple. The paper assesses the treatment of sex, alienation, rape, lust, incest and gendered identity in both novels. My attempt is explore how internal racism overcomes two major protagonists, Pecola and Celie in both the novels. Pecola finds her ugly and unlucky in the world so Celie grapples with her own problems. This is an attempt how gendered identity is explored and constructed in both the novels and how concept of beauty is socially constructed. It has been analyzed how race determines the fate in Afro-American girls and ladies and how they have to live a worse life even than animals. The inhuman treatment drives them to stride outside violating the social and patriarchal rules.
Subversive Politics of Racism in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye
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.