Longing for Symbolic Capital in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye: A Bourdieun Estimation (original) (raw)
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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.
Black empowerment and Afro-American values in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
IIUC Studies
The Bluest Eye of Toni Morrison is extraordinarily significant, as it addresses the different sides of American literature, and the lives of the Afro-American people. Although the conventional theological aspects of white culture can negatively influence other characters of Morrison, it is Pecola whose life appears to be increasingly defenseless against the impulses of the individuals who have accepted the Western custom. In a democratic country, people generally have the same value, but there are still prejudices in the concepts of beauty and worthiness. The search for freedom, black identity, the nature of evil and the robust voices of African-Americans have become themes for African-American literature. Folklore covers the history of black and white interaction in the United States and also summarizes the feelings expressed in protest literature1. Morrison argues that the survival of the dark ladies in a white dominated society depends on loving their own way of life and dark rac...
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:
Analysis of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye from Black Feminist Perspective
Ars Artium, 2014
The Bluest Eye addresses the issue of self disapproval but in the broader black feminist perspective. More than any other human being, pain, disapproval and humiliation are an inseparable part of a black woman's life. Toni Morrison is a black woman and these are not foreign to her. She writes with a personal knowledge of the pain of the black women. In this novel she has depicted their isolation and hurdles in leading a fulfilling human life. Morrison chooses an eleven year old black girl-Pecola Breedlove-as the central character of her novel because she wants to bring forward the most neglected of human species. This novel addresses what can unquestionably be called a 'disease' in black women's psyche and analyses its root causes. This story of an ugly black girl also raises several sociological and psychological questions. The novel calls into question the contemporaneous slogan, "Black is Beautiful" and challenges readers to consider, the seeds of black hatred, the demons within black psyche, and the culprit or with the broader culture that contributes to black low self esteem.
Racial Conflicts in Tony Morrison's The Bluest Eye: A Literary Analysis
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.
Racism and Representation of Racialized Beauty in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH
The American novelist Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye portrays black society and deals with the themes of black victimization and racial oppression. It presents a prolonged representation of the means in which the standards of internalized white beauty contort the life and existence of black women. This paper explores and elucidates the impact of race, racial oppression and representation in The Bluest Eye. And how racism also edifices the hatredness between Blackand White communities. This paper will discuss various issues and concepts such as Race, Race in the Colonial Period, Racializing the Other and Stereotyping. The paper also deals with understanding Representation through the ideas of Saussure, Barthes, Levi-Strauss, Foucault, Geertz, and Said. Racism is primarily a belief in the supremacy and dominance of one race upon another that consequences in the differences, discrimination and prejudice of people towards one another rooted and established on their race or ethnici...
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.
Journal of Arts & Humanities , 2019
The black characters' degenerative behaviours in Toni Morrison's first two novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) can be attributed either to their collective unconscious or to their perceptions of the socioeconomic reality characterized by white supremacy, racial discrimination, abusive parenting and several other human depravities. Following previous research on these issues, this paper examines whether the characters of the two novels as victims and/or victimizers should be subjected to archetypal interpretation or to the black Americans' negating reality that instilled in them notions of inferiority, ugliness and self-loathing and that put their existence in a binary contrast with their white counterparts. In order to determine the main factor for black degeneracy in the two novels, this paper firstly postulates that the characters are driven by a self-imposed belief system that spurs certain behavioral traits singular to or rarely reactive to the community's conventions. However, the findings of this research do not support the prevailing ontological or psychoanalytic approaches to the black characters in the novels. Finally, this paper calls for a phenomenological analysis of the black characters and establishes that the ubiquitous perceptional influence that leaves deep negative impressions on their self-image and collective identity significantly accounts for the root of black degeneracy in the novels.
Racism: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye a Mouthpiece of Cloured People
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...
The Lack of Beauty and Identity in the Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
2012
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is a novel that contains many rhetorical arguments and logical fallacies. However, before going into detail about what they are, here is a brief synopsis of what The Bluest Eye is about. The Bluest Eye depicts the tragic life of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wants nothing more than to be loved by her family and her schoolmates. She surmises that the reason she is despised and ridiculed is that she is black and (actually, her skin is a lot darker than most other black people, which is the main reason that she gets ridiculed), therefore, ugly. Consequently, Pecola sublimates her desire to be loved into a desire to have blue eyes and blond hair; in other words, to basically look like Shirley Temple, who Pecola thinks is adored by all (Tate, C., Black Women Writers at Work, 1985). Pecola, soon after entering young womanhood, is raped and impregnated by her father, Cholly. Her mother, Pauline, finds haven, hope, life and meaning as a servant...