Bluest Eye Research Articles

Place Names in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, recounts the story of Pecola Breedlove, an eleven-year-old Black girl in Lorain, Ohio, where her wish for blue eyes represents desire for what she is denied, the privileges of her white classmates and the comforts of a safe home. Amid this novel set in 1941 during the Great Migration, a place name-based analysis reveals a literary landscape of racism in the mid-20th-century US, from the Jim Crow South to the industrial North. A toponymic study reveals how Morrison uses place names as stylistic devices in two ways. In the narrative present, she deploys them as opening frames for immediate lessons in racial behaviors for the children who are her main characters; in the narrative past, he uses them to recall distant locations from adult characters' histories to suggest ways in which racism persists across space and time. In combination, Morrison's application of toponymy and setting casts Lorain as microcosm of the nation and implicates all its citizens in the racist ideology that destroys Pecola and her family.

Consciousness in Toni Morrison's Novel the Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison is the most well-known sophisticated novelist in the history of African American literature. She has been recognised as a strident voice for exploited black people as well as master craftsman of the dominant artistic form. The Bluest Eye is a tragic tale about a young, black girl Pecola and her desire for the bluest eyes, the symbol for her of what it means to be beautiful and therefore worthy in society. It clarifies the damaging impacts of white standards and the importance on the lives of black people. It represents very sad feeling in terms of tragic conditions of blacks in racist America. She investigates the devastating effects of the beauty standards of the dominant culture of the self-image of the African female adolescent. Exploring the complexity of black female experience in white America, Toni Morrison attempts to resolve the contradiction inherent in her African American identity as a black women writer. In the novel The Bluest Eye it shows the terrible consequences for black internalising the values of a white culture that both directly & indirectly rejects them. A close study of the interrelationship of race, gender, and class in the novels of Toni Morrison reveals the emergence of a revolutionary pattern. This paper attempts to find out the trial of the blacks women in search of self-identity in the novel of Toni Morrison.

Agentic Things and Traumatized People in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, when seen from the perspective of “thing theory” and other new materialist discourses, challenges the dominant anthropocentric mode of relationship between humans and things. In the novel, ostensibly inanimate things exert their agencies over the survival, less physical than spiritual, of socially oppressed African Americans. Morrison complicates “thing theory” and extremist new materialist thinking by initiating the development of an eclectic new materialism, which foregrounds the vibrancy of quotidian objects while also integrating it into human agency through the co-habitation of space, thus creating a harmonious and balanced network of hybrid agencies that can be both troubling and stabilizing.

(De) Constructing Patriarchal and Sexist Discourses: Re-Reading Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Sula

Patriarchal and sexist discourses have come under scorching attacks from most feminist writers since the advent of modern feminism. This work analyses Toni Morrison’s attempt at deconstructing patriarchal and sexist discourses in The Bluest Eye and Sula. It adds its voice to the ever vibrant conversation on the issue of patriarchy and sexism especially as portrayed in the works of African American female writers who see their stories as twice-told tales - victims of both racism and patriarchal dominance. Tony Morrison challenges patriarchal and sexist values which she sees as monolithic discourses that hold no ground. She portrays female characters whose never-say-die attitudes go a long way towards deconstructing this monolithic system. By showing her male characters as weak, irresponsible, and social misfits, and her female characters as dynamic, strong, and hardworking individuals on whom their different families rely for security and sustenance, Morrison is not only rejecting the prevailing patriarchal values of our society, she is as well on a crusade towards its deconstruction. In so doing, she does not try to paint spotless alabaster heroines, but rather she shows ordinary women in their struggle for survival in an indifferent and often times cruel environment.

(De) Constructing Patriarchal and Sexist Discourses: Re-Reading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula

(De) Constructing Patriarchal and Sexist Discourses: Re-Reading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Sula

Beauty, Blackness and Humanity: The Hyperreal Operation of Beauty Standards in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

It remains impossible to produce an analysis of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye that ignores her treatment of beauty. Morrison conceives physical beauty as a form of racial reification which drastically informs the social and personal development of the novel’s Black characters. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison likens the standards of physical beauty to whiteness and in turn, virtue: “beauty” becomes an objective term, one entirely defined in relation to whiteness despite its projection onto African American characters. This paper thus explores the effects of the pernicious application of White beauty standards onto Morrison’s African American characters. As a character encounters a representation of such standards, they either mold themselves through actions to approach this ideal, or harshly realize the impossibility of succeeding to the standard of physical beauty. In their rigid adoption of traits, virtues, or actions to approach themselves to Whiteness and in turn beauty, these characters neglect their own identity in favor of this ideal. The result is a stripping of one’s individual identity, culture, and personal value; the very traits which make them human. This approach is fundamental, as it examines the effects that social beauty standards have on the self. Morrison’s work remains a powerful artefact of the cultural and social treatment of African Americans which still exist today: Black Americans are denied their cultural status and humanity. Instead, Morrison’s work showcases how they are instead perceived as something to be molded and altered into something that may attempt to absorb into whiteness yet remain entirely different and ultimately subaltern.

The Racialization of the Oedipal Process

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a heartbreaking depiction of the racialization of the oedipal process, which encapsulates the development of the psyche and self-concepts. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison aspires to an honest exploration (rather than sensationalization) of blackness and black girlhood. My paper analyzes: the limitation of power afforded to black persons in white-dominated societies; the balancing of gendered and racialized norms; and, the impact of these disadvantages on personal and social development. My paper conducts this analysis through the comparison of: the protagonist’s father, Cholly Breedlove’s sexual trauma; the symbolism of white baby dolls; the protagonist’s mother, Pauline Breedlove’s rejection of her own blackness and family; and, finally, Cholly Breedlove’s rape of his daughter, Pecola Breedlove, to Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan’s theories of childhood psychological development. 
 My favourite literature always challenges me. I was moved by The Bluest Eye because of how it challenges and expands the boundaries of my empathy and my understanding of circumstances other than my own. My goal in writing this paper was to attain a greater understanding of its characters, their behaviour, and the real-life circumstances they parallel. Thus, rather than limiting myself to making a claim, then seeking support for it, I begin with the passages that most sparked my academic and human curiosity, then methodically explore the literary nuances and social implications of each of them. In diverging from traditional essay structure, I am able to reach beyond superficial compassion and engage deeply with the text’s characters and themes.

Whiteness and Blackness in The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison has long proposed that the concept of physical beauty is one of the most destructive ideologies of human thought. This essay aims to deal with how Morrison’s 1970 novel The Bluest Eye exposes the dogma that physical beauty and pureness itself are straightforwardly associated with whiteness; allowing whiteness to provide a cloak of invisibility to those who possess it. This then subjects blackness to be the placeholder of what is ugly, bad and dangerous in the world; forcing the trait of blackness to be a conviction of visibility. This essay will follow myself, a white individual, grappling with the fact that I have been given the privilege to go through life unnoticed only because I happened to be born white. Further, the repercussions of this fact are confronted, those who are black are stripped from the privilege of going unnoticed. The Bluest Eye and my mediation of the novel present that even a raised consciousness about the privileges of whiteness fails to prevent racial self-loathing and violence against Blacks due to whiteness taking over the measure of humanness. Despite this, there is still hope in the future of blackness which can only be accomplished by displacing the authority of whiteness and questioning the structures that allow the authority of whiteness to prevail.

Transforming the Bildungsroman to Develop Consciousness About Race

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is unique in its position within the ​genre of the Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman typically ​examines factors that dictate its protagonist’s psychosocial growth on their journey toward self-realization and acceptance of their place in the world. Morrison, on the contrary, demonstrates how the idealization of whiteness and the racial self-loathing it engenders makes it impossible for a young, Black, female protagonist, like Pecola, to exercise narrative authority or progress toward self-realization and social acceptance. My paper contrasts a "classic" Bildungsroman featuring a young, white, male protagonist, such as James Joyce's "Araby", with the split narrative voice and reversed narrative progression in ​The Bluest Eye. Morrison recounts Pecola's story from the perspective of her friend, Claudia, rather than as Pecola's stream of consciousness. She also challenges key plot-related elements, such as the moment of resolution. My aim is to show how Morrison does not merely substitute a young, white, male protagonist with a young, Black, female protagonist to produce a realistic account of Black female experience. Instead, she manipulates the generic conventions of the Bildungsroman to show how both the world and the narratives that tell stories about the world fail Pecola, and, by extension, Claudia. How we tell stories matters as much as whose stories we tell. The world Morrison presents through her alteration of the Bildungsroman forces the reader to question the static ideals in the world around them and reflect on the role of race in the development of agency over one’s own story.

Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye

For many Black girls, the realization that the world was not designed for them to flourish mars their childhood. 
 My presentation discusses how society fails Black girls, and how Morrison’s fictional writing mirrors how unforgiving life is to real Black children. Throughout the novel, the narrator Claudia uses “magical thinking” to explain the world’s cruelty. This manifests when she plants marigolds, childishly hoping their flourishing will simultaneously save Pecola and her baby (Morrison). Claudia believes in magic because the reality is incomprehensible for a child: that ​the idealization of whiteness ingrained in society created ​a soil in which neither marigolds nor Pecola could thrive. Similarly, she naively ​dismembers ​her "Shirley Temple" doll ​to discover the source of the “magic” that whiteness casts over her world (Morrison). Her belief in magic is easier than accepting the world values white plastic faces over living blackness. 
 ​I hope to demonstrate that Morrison’s novel goes beyond fiction: it encapsulates children’s perspectives and how they mature. Children live in fiction, an imaginary world of their creation, and childhood is the moment before they realize the weight of society. For Claudia​, Pecola, and many Black girls, the heaviness of realizing their world will ostracize and hurt them is growing up, there is nothing magical about adulthood. For a novel from 1970, The Bluest Eye is ​still relevant ​because we continuously rob Black girls’ innocence. Morrison presents an unconventional depiction of childhood, and my presentation reaches above to discuss how fiction reflects the real ways society disrupts Black girlhood.

Dismantling Ethnic Notions Through Bildungsromane: An Examination of The Bluest Eye

The Bildungsroman, or “coming-of-age” narrative, has long been a staple of Western literature; however, as a genre whose protagonists are usually young white men or privileged white women, authors who want to tackle a protagonist that does not fit this narrow description are faced with a challenge: how do they navigate the arc of growing up in a genre that is built for white men, and therefore excludes them and their characters by definition? My paper explores one such author’s efforts to reclaim the genre, not by forcing her characters to follow the traditional arc, but by exploring the reasons they are unable to conform to it.
 In her novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison reinvents the genre by turning the individual arc of the Bildungsroman into the story of an African American community, interweaving multiple Bildungsromane to subvert dominant stereotypes of African-American people. In this paper, I juxtapose her novel with Marlon Riggs’ documentary, Ethnic Notions (1987) to reveal Morrison’s combative reinvention of the stereotypes Riggs investigates such as the “Black Mammy,” the “violent brute,” and the “pickaninny.” In doing so, she restores humanity and complexity to the one-dimensional caricatures of Blackness that have dominated Western thought and harmed Black people. By exploring Morrison’s novel, this paper hopes to reach beyond stereotypical depictions of Blackness and encourage the continued interrogation of its portrayals in our everyday lives as a mode of rehumanization and resistance to dominant racist ideologies.

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”.

Call Her Beloved: A Lexicon for Abjection in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Beloved

What does it mean to mourn for the loss of lives that are rendered ungrievable by history? More importantly, with what language does one grieve the loss or despoliation of lives that are rendered ungrievable through disremembrance? This study reads such concerns as represented in two novels by Toni Morrison: The Bluest Eye and Beloved. Drawing on theorizations of the Other and the Abject in the philosophies of Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, respectively, the readings of Morrison’s novels presented here seek to conceptualize the impacts of racial and racist oppression as the fallout from experiences of othering in the extreme. Confronting the desecration of human life and dignity engendered through racism, the study argues, is a descent into abjection. Through exploring Morrison’s narrative project, as explained in her non-fiction, this study seeks to conceptualize a possible lexicon for grieving the Abject without appropriating it or in any way diminishing its specific and radical alterity as a despoiled being.

A Psychological Study Of Traumatic Effects Of White Beauty On Female Characters In Morrison’s Novels

The study is based on the psychoanalytical exploration of the female characters in Morrison’s two celebrated novels Jazz and The Bluest Eye. The study focuses on exploring how the myth of white beauty is a traumatic experience for the black women and how do the issues of white beauty and gender discrimination contribute to the wretchedness of black women and cast depreciating effects on their psyche. The conceptual framework employed in the study is Freud’s psychoanalytical theory of repressed unconscious which resultantly cultivates psychological problems in individuals. The theory has been applied on the texts to throw light on the effects of unconsciously suppressed memories and emotions on the psyche of Pecola and Dorcas. This study concludes by highlighting the anxious existence of the black women in the white community.

"We Knew We Were Being Watched": Adultification and Coming of Age in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn

"We Knew We Were Being Watched": Adultification and Coming of Age in Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn Adam Dawson (bio) Grown women bore signs of ruined girlhood – the cold, hard eyes of having been ripened too soon. Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments August, the protagonist of Jacqueline Woodson’s autobiographical novel Another Brooklyn (2016), is an anthropologist studying death rites and rituals around the world. When her father dies, she returns to Brooklyn, where she had spent part of her youth, to attend his funeral. While she is there, a chance encounter with an old friend on the subway causes August to recall her childhood spent with her friends Angela, Gigi, and Sylvia. In this essay, I examine Woodson’s use of stock tropes of Black girls’ coming of age in August’s chronicle. Comparing Woodson’s coming-of-age story to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970), I contend that whereas Morrison depicts the dangers the white gaze poses to young Black girls as they are growing up, Woodson shows the perils of the adultifying gaze, which reads Black girls as always already adults and therefore sexually available. In doing so, I borrow from Nazeera Sadiq Wright’s model of the “prematurely knowing Black girl” in nineteenth-century writing, which posits that “extreme hardship and danger hasten the maturation of youthful girls, and the move from youthful to prematurely knowing girlhood.”1 I build on these observations to show that these narrative patterns continue in twenty-first century writing. [End Page 99] Moreover, Woodson’s novel represents an important break from much of the history of African American autobiographical writing, including both autobiographical fiction and autobiography itself, owing to its insistence on deploying the genre to narrate individual character development. Woodson reframes all autobiography as highly fictionalized in order to underscore the idea that the teleological narrative of coming into a self, a feature seemingly shared by both coming-of-age stories and autobiography, is a generic imposition rather than an accurate reflection of one’s life journey. In what follows, I argue that through the use of a nonchronological structure, Woodson employs a model of coming of age that queer theorist Kathryn Bond Stockton terms “growing sideways.” As Stockton argues, “‘growing up’ may be a short-sighted, limited, rendering of human growth, one that oddly would imply an end to growth when full stature (or reproduction) is achieved. By contrast, ‘growing sideways’ suggests that the width of a person’s experience or ideas, their motives or their motions, may pertain at any age.”2 By using this model of adolescent development, Woodson renounces the straightforward teleological linearity of standard coming-of-age narratives, positioning August’s coming of age instead as that which can only be understood through retrospective encounters with her life. That is to say, it is the narrativization of her youth that creates links between the events of the past and August’s contemporary sense of self. The seemingly coherent subject position at the time of writing, then, is a product of this retrospective narrativization. Autobiography in Reverse While Another Brooklyn functions as the autobiography of its protagonist, August, the novel does not start at the beginning of August’s life, nor is the narrative told in chronological order. By structuring the text this way, Woodson rejects the linear, teleological narrative of self-development apparent in both the autobiography and the coming-of-age genre. Such an understanding of the narration of the human life narrative can be seen in Philippe Lejeune’s definition of autobiography. Lejeune writes that autobiography is “a retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is on his individual life, in particular the story of his personality.”3 There are clearly many problems with this definition of autobiographical writing. The use of prose excludes poetry. Lejeune refers to self in the singular, as if it is unchanging. And the exclusive use of male pronouns excludes writing by women.4 Lejeune’s definition also implies that the story of a personality is inherent in the story of a life, which is to say that one’s personality exists prior to the...

Black Identity Formation in Frederick Douglass’s Autobiography and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Frederick Douglass and Toni Morrison both dealt extensively with problems of black identity within their works. In Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, we find that black identity is strongly affected and by outside forces that seek to limit the ways in which black identity can develop in order for powerful forces such as institutional slavery to maintain their control over black people. This essay reads Frederick Douglass’s self-fashioning in his Narrative in comparison with characters from Morrison’s novel, particularly Pecola, and explores the ways in which black identity may be constructed against prevailing norms (as in Douglass’s case), or may end up being lost through extreme conformity with norms (as in Pecola’s case). An exploration of black identity in these works is important not only for an understanding of historically significant literature, but for present day problems around black identity.

On Opacity: Toni Morrison’s and Paule Marshall’s Narrative Vision Therapy

Abstract Acknowledging an ongoing atmosphere of Black death, assault, and pain, and its relationship to a kind of ocular and imaginative distress, this article highlights the urgency of revisiting the lessons embedded in the writing of Toni Morrison (The Bluest Eye [1970]), Beloved [1987]) and Paule Marshall (“Reena” [1962], and Praisesong for the Widow [1983]). I join robust conversations in Black and literary studies in examining Marshall’s and Morrison’s crucial lessons on healing Black vision—work necessary for full command of the imagination. These lessons become more pronounced when viewed through the lens of Marshall’s and Morrison’s literary “dark sousveillance,” which Simone Browne defines as the charting of possibilities and coordination of “modes of responding to, challenging, and confronting a surveillance that [is] all encompassing.” I argue that through the use of narrative vision therapy, or the use of narrative as a healing device that realigns readers with their power to imagine and craft narratives that decenter anti-Blackness, Morrison and Marshall demonstrate that imagining otherwise futures requires intentional returns to and ongoing vigilance from opaque spaces—wherein the embrace of Black flesh, sounds, movement, and memory can help reverse distortions that our hyper-seeing of various violent forms of anti-Blackness have wrought.

Identity Crisis in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye

Identity Crisis in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye

Studying the Poetics of Violence: A Critical Take on the Selected Works of Dalit and Tribal Women Poets

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye helped me to understand what it meant to be born black, poor woman in the USA. Her work gave me an ideal platform to explore what it means to be born a poor Dalit woman in contemporary India. In order to understand the layered connotation of the lives of Dalit women, I deliberated upon the selected poetry by Dalit and tribal women poets and came to the conclusion that apparent similarity between the two contexts comes under scanner and ends abruptly with the following comment by Bell Hook in her book Feminist Theory: From Margin to Centre. She writes, ‘when the child of two black parents is coming out of the womb the factor that is considered first is skin colour, then gender, because race and gender will determine that child’s fate’. On the contrary, a child of two parents from a lower caste will remain a low caste because caste is infallible and independent of the truce of fate-determining the skin colour that may redefine the gender experience. As a Telugu Dalit poet, Chillappa Swaroopa Rani laments, ‘Stamped with a low caste, I was born/that day it-self branded slut.’ Thus, the thrust of this article is not to bring forth the comparative study between the two contexts but to crystallize the issues of Dalit women as enunciated in their poetry and to engage with the nuances of gender and caste that punctuate their day-to-day lives. This article encompasses the post-colonial feminism theoretical framework that resists the universalization of feminist issues seen and perceived only from the ‘Euro-American feminists’ point of view and ignores the differences in race, ethnicity, regional diversity, etc., through which a woman experiences her gender biases. The selected Dalit poets are Rajni Tilak, Poonam Tushamed, Rajni Anuragi, Sushila Takbhure, Kunti and Nirmal Putul. The main issues expressed in a tribal poet’s works remain Jal-Jungle-Zameen, human trafficking, a lack of legal documentation, witch hunting, etc., while Dalit poets stress on police atrocities, a lack of basic amenities, a lack of quality schools for their children, a lack of access to health care, the domineering influence of patriarchy that punctures their private and public domain, etc.

Getting to the Root of US Healthcare Injustices through Morrison’s Root Workers

Although a number of scholars have tackled the figure of the Black folk-healer in Toni Morrison’s novels, the character deserves greater attention in the present moment for the insights she provides into two contemporary catastrophes: the coronavirus pandemic and the structural racism that precipitates rampant violence against brown-skinned people in the United States. Beginning with M’Dear, the elderly woman who is brought in to treat Cholly’s Aunt Jimmy in The Bluest Eye (1970), I survey descriptions of several root workers, hoodoo practitioners, and midwives in Morrison’s fiction, including Ajax’s mother in Sula (1973) and Milkman’s aunt Pilate in Song of Solomon (1977). Morrison’s portraits of these women and their communities capture the endurance of African folk customs, the undervalued knowledge of aged members of society, and a sense of Black women’s strength beyond that of the physical, laboring, or hypersexual body. The fictional experiences of Morrison’s healers also alert readers to the very real injustices that have historically impeded the successes of African Americans—and continue to hamper them, as has been exposed during the COVID-19 crisis and public outrages over police brutality. These injustices include inequities in lifelong earning potential, education, housing, and access to healthcare. Paying closer attention to the Nobel Laureate’s root-working women makes her novels more than simply “transformative” and “empowering” for individual readers; analyzing these figures allows one to unearth important critiques of medical bias and other forms of discrimination against marginalized members of society—disparities that must be dismantled in the push for social change.