The Fantasy Of (Eye) "I" Dentity: A Lacanian Reading Of The Bluest Eye

As the first black female winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Toni Morrison sets up a monument of the American Black Literature by addressing and examining the history, destiny, and spiritual world of the American blacks in her works. The Bluest Eye, her maiden work published in 1970, presents and probes from a quite unique perspective the deformation and distortion of the blacks under the white-dominated culture and values. This book not only sets the keynote for her later works, but also has great significance for the contemporary society in which all of us suffer from a kind of "Identity Crisis."This thesis adopts Lacan's Postconstruction Cultural Psychology Theory, focusing on the issue of "identity" to interpret this text. It is divided into five chapters. Chapter One introduces Toni Morrison and her The Bluest Eye. Chapter Two offers a brief account of Lacan's Postconstruction Cultural Psychology Theory. Chapter Three interprets the main characters under different stages of the formation of the "I," i.e., the Real, the Imaginary and the Symbolic, for the purpose of providing the psychological basis for analyzing their tragedies. Chapter Four explores the fantasy of "identity" in the following three aspects: 1) the subject's Unconscious is the discourse of the Other; 2) The Desire of the subject is the Desire of the Other; 3) the subject is always in the time of the Other. Finally, Chapter Five summarizes the consequences of the "identity" of the main characters in this text, and then concludes that there does not exist an Ideal-I. Instead, the so-called "identity" is merely a fantasy, which is to identify ironically and predestinedly with "the Other."...