An Exploration Of The Bluest Eye From The Perspective Of The Scapegoat Mechanism

As the first black woman writer of the Nobel Prize for literature in America, ToniMorrison is one of the brightest pearls in the tide of Afro-American literature in the20thcentury. She is deeply concerned about the life and spiritual world of the blackunder the conflicts of the double cultures. The Bluest Eye—her virgin novel waspublished in1970, and the novel depicts the tragic story of a twelve year old blackgirl Pecola, and it exposes the American white’s ideology’s influence on and damagesto the blacks.The “Scapegoat” culture phenomenon was deeply rooted in human civilizationprocess. The famous French literary critic Rene Girard concluded persecutionstereotypes from numerous persecution texts:The crisis state, the special features ofthe victim, the accusation of victim and the violence itself and then established thescapegoat theory. Later Rene Girard put forward the scapegoat mechanism and how itworks in a persecution text. In The Bluest Eye the process of Pecola to be chosen,accused, persecuted and the black community’s self-examination match exactly withRene Girard’s persecution stereotypes and mechanism. This thesis aims at putting theinter-persecution of the black community under Rene Girard’s scapegoat theory, andtry to analyze the tragic fate of Pecola from the perspective of the blacks’values underthe white dominant culture, hoping the black people would have a new way to buildtheir own cultural identity and better develop their own race.