A Study Of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye From The Perspective Of The Postcolonial Feminism

Toni Morrison, the first black woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature,pays close attention to the American black women’s living conditions and theirfighting experiences. Her maiden novel The Bluest Eye presents the plight andstruggle of black females who have long been silenced in a white-and-male dominantsociety. Many critics and scholars both abroad and at home have focused on herworks and made detailed analyses from different approaches. However, up till now,only a few periodic papers adopt the postcolonial feminist criticism to analyze herwork The Bluest Eye. As a new theoretical model and text interpreting strategy,postcolonial feminism emerged in the1980s and1990s through the combination ofpost colonialism and feminism. Postcolonial feminism focuses on the multipleoppressions of the Third World women after the end of colonization. By adopting thetheory of postcolonial feminism, this thesis attempts to expose that in The Bluest Eye,the American male-dominated culture has a devastating effect on black women’ssubjectivity in perspectives of gender, race and culture. The black women should lovethemselves, maintain their traditional culture and resist the impingement of whiteculture.This thesis consists of three parts. Introduction is about the general informationof the postcolonial feminist theory and its embodiment in The Bluest Eye as well asMorrison’s achievement. Chapter One analyzes the black women’s oppression fromthe racism and the white cultural hegemony which are promulgated and spreadthrough the school education and the mass media. Chapter Two investigates the blackwomen’s oppression of sexism from the black men and their aphasia as well as theloss of identity under the dual oppression. Chapter Three probes into the ways inwhich the black women reconstruct their identity. Under multiple oppressions, onlyby making tight knits to their families and black community and rejoicing at the traditional black culture can the black females get the strength to resist the whiteculture and return to their authentic existence. The last part draws the conclusion thatthose black women who lose their identity under the dual oppression should respectthemselves and be rooted in their own traditional culture, for only in this way can theymaintain their subjectivity in the white supremacist society. As many ethnics are stilloppressed economically, politically and culturally in the modern world, to do someresearch on Morrison’s works from the postcolonial feminist perspective is of highsignificance.