The Reconstruction Of Black Women's Subjectivity

Toni Morrison, the first black woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, has got more and more attention and recognition throughout the world. In Morrison's works, close attention is paid to the American black women's living conditions and their fighting experiences; in her maiden work The Bluest Eye, from the multiple perspectives of gender, race and culture, Morrison exposes American mainstream culture, the male-dominated culture's devastating effect on black women's subjectivity. She also calls on the black women to love themselves, maintain their traditional culture and to resist the impingement of white culture. By adopting the theory of postcolonial feminism, this thesis attempts to analyze the theme of the text through close reading, hoping to offer a new angle of studying the novel.As a new theoretical model and text interpreting strategy, postcolonial feminism emerged in the 1980s and 1990s through the combination of post colonialism and feminism. Postcolonial feminism focuses on the multiple oppressions of the Third World women after the end of colonization. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison explores the devastating effects of American mainstream culture on the black women's subjectivity; while criticizing the sexual discrimination, she at the same time condemns racism and cultural hegemony and probes into the ways of resisting the white culture, protecting traditional black culture and maintaining the black women's subjectivity, thus reflecting her postcolonial feminist point of view.This thesis consists of four parts: Chapter One is the brief introduction of the postcolonial feminist theory and its embodiment in The Bluest Eye as well as Morrison's achievement. Chapter Two analyzes the loss of black women's subjectivity under multiple oppressions of sexual discrimination, racism and cultural hegemony. Chapter Three probes into the ways of reconstructing black women's subjectivity; under multiple oppressions, the black women who love themselves make tight knits to their families and black community and rejoice at the traditional black culture from which they get the strength to resist the white culture and keep their subjectivity . Chapter Four draws the conclusion: through analyzing the loss of black women's subjectivity under multiple oppressions, Morrison exposes and criticizes the devastating effects of the white male culture on black women's soul; at the same time, Morrison calls on the black women to respect themselves and love their traditional culture, for only in this way can they maintain their subjectivity in the white supremacist society. As many ethnics are still oppressed economically, politically and culturally in the modern world, to do some research on Morrison's works from the postcolonial perspective is of high significance.