The Loss And Reconstruction Of The Black Subjectivity In The Bluest Eye

As the most prominent African American woman writer of the20th century, Toni Morrison received the Nobel Prize for literature in1993for her excellent achievements in literary creation, and becomes the first Afro-American woman who has won this award. Her works always present black people, black culture, and black tradition and explore the spiritual world of Afro-Americans, especially the spiritual world of Afro-American women. A typical example of this is The Bluest Eye, which is a touching story about a group of black people who are misled by white aesthetical standard and tend to lose their black subjectivity.By applying Frantz Fanon’s post-colonial criticism based on psychoanalysis to The Bluest Eye, the thesis reveals the psychological effect the white dominant culture brings on the black people. It shows that some black people living in a white value pervaded society are unable to be themselves and act out for themselves, and thus the loss of black subjectivity is inevitable.Besides introduction and conclusion, this thesis is divided into three chapters. Chapter One analyzes the loss of black subjectivity of the Breedloves’ through the depiction of their tragic life in The Bluest Eye. Cholly Breedlove is abnormal in the way he shows his love to family, Mrs. Breedlove is a mother who breeds no love on her own children for the her blackness, Pecola Breedlove is a black little girl who aspires to be accepted in this white society, so she prays for a pair of blues eye. Chapter Two goes on to discover the roots of the loss of the Breedloves’ black subjectivity respectively, to Cholly Breedlove it is the indifference of both the white and the black, to Mrs. Breedlove, it is the erosive influence of the white beauty standard, and to Pecola Breedlove, her yearning for blue eyes blindly and desperately causes her tragedy. Chapter Three presents the ways to reconstruct the black subjectivity, which includes subverting the white dominant culture and rememorizing the black traditional culture.From the above analysis, this thesis aims to demonstrate that only by the preservation of the black subjectivity can one resist the erosive influence of the white dominant culture, and the way to re-establish black subjectivity is through the inheritance of black traditional culture. Even though The Bluest Eye is a tragedy, it still transmits a refreshing hope as the narrator Claudia Macteer survives to warn the Afro-Americans that only by inheriting the black traditional culture and revaluing the social relations between the black and the white can the Afro-Americans survive in the end.