Remapping The Black Body:An Interpretation Of The Bluest Eye From Bakhtin's Grotesque Body Theory

The Bluest Eye is one of Toni Morrison's representative works,which mainly tells the tragic life of Pecola,an 11-year-old black girl in a black community of America.This novel focuses on people's cognitive experience,and describes the tragic fate of blacks,aiming at exploring the loss and alienation of black individuals under the impact of white mainstream culture.With the widespread of the novel in the world,many scholars have made an in-depth analysis of this novel from different perspectives,such as race,culture,and gender,which has aroused people's attention to the problem of racial discrimination and the living situation of blacks.Contemporary western literary theory and cultural research are gradually turning to the study of history,politics,nationality,and gender.As an important supplement to this trend,the research of body is flourishing.The concept of the body is not only a natural entity but also a cultural concept closely linked with social ideology.In Bakhtin's Grotesque Body Theory,the human body needs to be integrated with the external world and overcome the fear from the outside world.On the basis of Bakhtin's Grotesque Body Theory,the thesis analyses the body violence and grotesqueness in Morrison's The Bluest Eye and draws the conclusion that the black body is incomplete.And through the continual change of the black body under the influence of the external world,this thesis concludes that the construction of the black body cannot be separated from the existence of the “others”.This thesis consists of three parts: introduction,main part,and conclusion.The introduction part includes the author's introduction,literature review,and research purpose and significance.The main part of the thesis is divided into three chapters.Chapter one mainly discusses the characteristics of the lower part of the black body by analyzing Bakhtin's thought of “the lower bodily stratum”,and uses Bakhtin's understanding of “laughter” to analyze the vulnerability of the body organs in the novel,which leads to the grotesqueness of the black body in different backgrounds and perspectives.Chapter two mainly analyses three reasons why the black body has become a grotesque body.The first reason is the influence of white mainstream ideology and the assimilation of aesthetics;the second reason is the loss of the blacks' own roots;the third reason is the depreciation of blacks' body by racial and gender discrimination.Chapter three analyses the individual black body and the collective black body,and elaborates an image of a complete redefined black body through the interaction of individual black body and collective black body.In the end,the conclusion part summarizes how Morrison exposes the depreciation of black body values and the impact on black society by depicting grotesque bodies in the mainstream white society.On this basis,this thesis combines the novel and Bakhtin's Grotesque Body Theory and tries to propose a possible solution for the construction of the black body and find a way out for the self-integrity of the blacks.