Misshapen Love And Distorted Mind—a Horneyan Interpretation Of The Traumatic Personalities Of Pecola, Cholly And Pauline In The Bluest Eye

The Bluest Eye, which tells the tragic life of a black girl named Pecola and her pathetic family, is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, a very famous black woman writer in contemporary America. In this novel, Morrison depicts a distorted family where the girl Pecola is emotionally rejected and physically beaten by her indifferent and cool mother, sexually abused by her alcoholic and violent father, thus ultimately becomes a scapegoat of the whole community. It is clearly seen that the family members all suffer from psychological problems in one way or another.Equipped with Karen Horney’s neurotic personality, this thesis aims to make a journey into the inner world of the main characters, namely, Pecola and her parents Cholly and Pauline to explore the different facets manifested there. According to Horney, psychology is closely related to the social-cultural environment and interpersonal relationship of one’s family. And she stresses that one’s neurotic mind is caused by the environmental reasons as well as basic anxiety arising from childhood insecurities and a lack of parental love and affection. This thesis explores the different neurotic personalities of the Breedloves by way of a textual analysis under the light of Horney’s definition of three personality types, and finds that Pecola, Cholly and Pauline each belongs to a neurotic type, namely, compliance, aggression and withdrawal. This is a very important reason why a should-be normal family breaks into pieces, a young girl named Pecola goes into madness and the Negros suffer from great emotional pains at that period of time.A Horneyan interpretation of this novel offers a comparatively new angle for the analysis of the main characters in The Bluest Eye. This thesis consists of six parts among which the first and the last part are introduction and conclusion. Chapter2gives a brief introduction to Karen Horney and her theory. Chapter3is an analysis of Pecola, the compliant type, who takes her extreme way against her anxiety. Chapter4explains why Cholly belongs to the aggressive type and his repressed compliant tendency. Chapter5analyzes Pauline’s inner conflicts resulting from childhood and life experiences and its disastrous result.By analyzing their neurotic minds, the thesis unfolds the reasons beneath their weird psychologies and abnormal behaviors, the decisive factors of their tragic fate and furthers the discussion of the origin of Black Americans’inner conflicts. Moreover, the paper also attempts to confirm the social-cultural factors’influential role in the shaping of one’s neurotic structure, and the crucial role of parents in the shaping of a sound character of children so as to guide the blacks as well as the common people to cultivate healthy and wholesome personality and build harmonious family relationship. Thus, this thesis is not only of certain values in interpreting Morrison’s texts, but has some practical significance in neurotic analysis.