Abstract
The clash between the black culture and the mainstream culture in the United States as well as the marginalized existence of the black culture is always the focus of Afro-American fiction writers. In their works they depict the twisted black culture and the loss of it, and attempt to call for cherishing their native culture. Toni Morrison is, undoubtedly, one of them, and more importantly she goes beyond that and explores the tragedy of identification. Through the depiction of a black little girl in the novel The Bluest Eyes, who crazily searches for a pair of blue eyes, Tony Morrison reveals the devastating influence and hurts of the concept of value of the mainstream culture, specially the standard of the aesthetic appreciation – blue eyes, golden hair, and white skill – on the black people,especially black women and children. In addition, she shows the loss of their cultural/ethic identities, spiritual breakdown and self-denial during the process of the identification. Based on textual analysis of the novel, the
thesis aims at exploring the tragedy of Pecola as the result of the identification of the blacks in the mainstream culture, and further reveals that her tragedy is actually the tragedy of the blacks when they fully identify themselves with the mainstream culture.
摘 要
美国黑人文化和白人主流文化中的冲突,以及黑人文化的边缘性一直是非裔美国作家所关注的焦点。在其作品中,他们描述了黑人文化的扭曲和迷失,力图唤起黑人对民族文化的珍视。托尼·莫里森无疑是这类作家中的先驱,而且更为重要的是她超越了一般的非裔美国作家的创作而探寻了黑人在文化认同中的悲剧。在《最蓝的眼睛》这部小说中,通过一个黑人小女孩佩科拉寻求一双蓝眼睛的故事,莫里森揭示出美国白人主流文化的价值观,尤其是社会流行的审美标准—蓝眼睛,金发,白皮肤—对黑人(特别是黑人女性和小孩)的影响与戕害,展现了在对主流文化的认同中黑人的迷失,分裂与自我否定。本文试图在对这篇小说的文本分析的基础上,剖析佩科拉悲剧的根源在于黑人群体对主流文化的认同,进而揭示出她的悲剧就是整个黑人群体的悲剧。
Introduction
Toni Morrison is, undoubtedly, a special and unique fiction writer in world literature. As a woman and an Afro-American, she goes beyond the simplistic dichotomies of the black male literary tradition in which the world is divided into black/white, good/evil, virgin/whore, self/other, male/female paradigms, and provides her readers with a new perspective to reexamine black tradition and black culture in modern society. Moreover, she keeps aloof from other major Afro-American writers and makes a thorough exploration of the marginalized world—black women. In fact, when Morrison begins writing in the 1960s and 1970s, there is just a paucity of books about the black woman, and there is no fiction representing her experience: “this person, this female, this black did not exist center-self.”(Furman 6) Black women’s text, in America, Morrison
notes, projects a wide gaze. “It’s not narrow, it’s very probing and it does not flinch,” and she is writing to “repossess, rename, renown.” (Furman 6)
The Bluest Eye is her first fiction and is the best that exemplifies her attitude and her moral consciousness. Through the story of Pecola, the marginalized little black girl, Morrison demonstrates the psychological disintegration of Pecola whose blackness is an affront to a society in which blue eyes are valued above all others, and the dislocation and loss of black culture with the corrosion of white mainstream culture, and more importantly, the tragedy of identification.
In fact, as Toni Morrison becomes one of America's most celebrated contemporary authors, The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, has gained increasing attention from literary critics. Most of story is narrated by a young black girl, Claudia MacTeer, who is part of a poor but loving black family in Lorain, Ohio, in the 1940s. However, the primary focus of
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