Different Responses To The White Cultural Dominance Of Two Black Families And Their Different Destinies In The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison, the Nobel Prize winner in literature in1993and the Pulitzerwinner for Beloved in1988, is one of the most widely read and studied contemporaryAfrican American authors. Morrison is an outstanding novelist who is renowned forher keen perception and intense emotion. Her works are mainly concerned about theblack people’s life under the white cultural dominance.The Bluest Eye was her first novel after which she published nine other novelssuccessively: Sula (1973), Song of Solomon (1977), Tar Baby (1981), Beloved (1987),Jazz (1992), Paradise (1998), Love (2003), A Mercy (2008) and Home (2012). ToniMorrison pays close attention to the predicaments and destinies of the black women.The Bluest Eye is no exception. In this work, she applied stream of consciousness,multiple perspectives and fragmentation to give a full and comprehensive descriptionof the unpleasant experience of the blacks, Pecola in particular. It was a tragicexperience of a black girl. In this novel, Pecola is an eleven-year-old black girl born inthe Breedlove family but ironically the family does not breed any love for her: hermother Pauline does not pay any attention to her since Pecola reminds her of herugliness but pours her maternal love onto the white little girl in her employer’s house.Her father Cholly, abandoned by his parents again and again, has no idea how to lovehis daughter and rapes her to show his love which is devastating to her. Discriminatedby the whites and despised by the mulattos and made fun of by other blacks andmaltreated by her parents, Pecola retreats to her little world to pray for a pair of blueeyes in the hope of being loved by both the whites and the blacks. Finally, she goesinsane. By stark contrast, in the MacTeer family, confronted with the same plight, themother Mrs. MacTeer, displays her maternal love for her daughters, though seeminglyharsh and the father Mr. MacTeer, a man of few words, protects his daughter frombeing hurt by shooting Mr. Henry Washington. At last, Claudia and Frieda survive.This thesis investigates that different responses to the white cultural dominanceof the two similar black families result in quite opposite outcomes. The first chapterof this thesis is to analyze the distortion of the Breedlove family while the second chapter is to give a corresponding family of the same root but with utterly differentattitude of life, and the third chapter is to make a comparison of the different destiniesof the two families. Finally, this thesis comes to a conclusion that in such a whitedominant world, the blacks need to get a clear understanding of their situation andstick to their own black culture and never yield to the white culture, and what theyshould do is to fight against the racial discrimination, find their self-identificationsand carry forward with their own culture.