A Study Of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye From Fromm’s Sociopsychological Perspective

Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in1993, is indisputably the most prominent contemporary African-American writer. Morrison focuses on the African-American enslaved history and its effects on the African American identity construction and black community bonding. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye, characterizes a black girl named Pecola who finds no love but contempt and insults within her black community. Critics have noted within this novel the erosion of the white mainstream culture and its disastrous impact on the psyche of the black community; however, few of them have taken the sociopsychological approach to explore the social causes for the distorted personality.Drawing from the insights of Fromm’s Theory of Love and Social Character Formation, this thesis focuses first on alienation and loss of love in The Bluest Eye, analyzing the blacks’ distorted love towards the whites and the God and the loss of love within the black community. It then delves into the myriad facets of black’s social character formation and its repercussion on the individual and the whole black community. The thesis argues that alienation and loss of love results in the predominance of non-productive orientation in blacks’character structures; that the black’s marginalized; inferior, dependent and insignificant socioeconomic life has repercussion on their psyches and forms the sado-masochistic social character which results in their internalization of the white supremacist ideologies. The ideologies they adopt in turn intensify and stabilize the social character. The sad-masochistic social character ultimately leads to their psychological trauma and damages their community bonding.