A Study Of African-american’s Racial Trauma In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison is one of the most celebrated modern novelists in the history of American literature. As a mainstream black female author, Morrison powerfully evokes the legacies of slavery that have been bequeathed to the African-American community in her fiction. Therefore, her works are always regarded as an excellent description of the trauma history of African Americans within the past one century.The Bluest Eye is her first novel which is set in the town where Morrison grew up.The protagonist is a nine-year-old black girl who desired to have a pair of bluest eyes.As we know that, the book was published in 1970, when the African-American Civil Rights Moment was at its high tide. In response to that, the concept of “Black is Beautiful” inspired a lot of writers and was absorbed into their writing. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison just depicted various and very different characters who internalized white beauty standards and lived a miserable life. Because of its deep connotations and artistic values, both domestic and foreign scholars do a lot of researches on The Bluest Eye from different perspectives. However, Fanon’s racial trauma theory provides a new perspective to analyze the characters and their traumatized experiences in the novel.Racial trauma is an important branch of trauma theory. In Black Skin, WhiteMasks published in the middle of last century, Fanon started to construct his cross-cultural theory of racial trauma. In this book, Fanon applied psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic theory to explain the inferiority complex of the black under the impact of the white’s cultural imposition. What’s more, the theme of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye happened to coincide with Fanon on this point. Based on racial trauma theory, the thesis provides a comprehensive interpretation and analysis of the black’s inferiority complex and the white’s cultural imposition in the novel and explores how racial trauma theory help deepen the themes and evoke readers’ resonance.There are five parts in the thesis. The first chapter begins with an introduction to Toni Morrison and her The Bluest Eye and Frantz Fanon’s racial trauma theory.Chapter two and three focuses on the reflections of racial trauma appearing in the novel. Chapter four is about the resistance and survival after suffering racial trauma by loving their own culture and cultivating love in the black family and community.Finally, it comes to a conclusion that only by adhering to their own traditions of culture, can be the black achieve ultimate felicity in a real sense.