The Tragedy Of The Absence Of Aesthetic Education Under Racial Discrimination

As the first black female writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature,Toni Morrison is considered as one of the most influential and representative figures among contemporary American novelists.She pays attention to the black people,creates a series of stories for them with her unique perspectives,and depicts the special and different survival and psychological conditions of the black people for readers with her rich and magnificent imagination.Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye was published in the early 1970s,but the profound theme and avant-garde thoughts in it are still of great research significance even today.Up to now,many foreign and domestic scholars mainly focus on its theme of the confrontation between the blacks and the whites in The Bluest Eye from different perspectives.Racial discrimination seems to be an inescapable topic in the study of Morrison and her works.However,as an old topic,racial discrimination does not seem to reflect the uniqueness and value of Morrison’s creation.This thesis attempts to analyze the novel The Bluest Eye by using the new theory of “Dual Narrative Progression” proposed by Professor Shen Dan,an internationally renowned scholar in the area of narratology.This thesis consists of three parts: “Introduction”,“Main body” and “Conclusion”.The introduction part starts with the brief introduction of Toni Morrison and the novel The Bluest Eye,and then classifies and summarizes the research on Morrison and the novel from the perspectives of foreign and domestic research.The theoretical foundation and research significance of this thesis are also generally introduced in this section.The first chapter finds out the causes of Pecola’s tragedy from different aspects of the story narration.In the overt plot of the novel,the cause of Pecola’s tragedy is obvious,that is,the racial discrimination suffered by the black people in the white-dominated society.And then through a close reading of the text this thesis reveals a narrative undercurrent hidden under the overt plot--the covert narrative progression,which can reveal the reasons for the formation of Pecola’s tragedy with aesthetic education as the core.These two narrative progressions complement each other and together reveal Pecola’s tragedy which is caused by the lack of aesthetic education under the racial discrimination.The second chapter mainly analyzes the influence of aesthetic education received by the children from the school,the community they live at and the mass media from the perspective outside the family.Living in a specific social environment and compared to those adults,young children are more vulnerable to the influence of various ideas from the outside world when their minds and bodies are not yet fully mature.The third chapter analyzes the life experience of three main child characters from different families in the novel to find the different influences of their family aesthetic education on their growth,because family is the first and most important place for the formation of children’s aesthetic values.Compared with Claudia,Junior and Pecola suffered more as a child.They all actually face the same terrible social reality that is outside the family,but it’s the different aesthetic education they obtain from their family that mainly caused their different life circumstances.The conclusion part summarizes the analysis of the narrative progressions in The Bluest Eye,and from the perspective of story narration draws a new kind of interpretation of the novel which is different from the previous studies.In a word,this thesis takes the “Dual Narrative Progression” as the analytic approach to explore Morrison’s debut novel The Bluest Eye and her thinking about the black people,especially children in a society that is dominated by the white people.