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The story in The Bluest Eye happened in 1940s. Although slave system had been cancelled for almost one century, black people were unable to get rid of the racial discrimination that existed in every corner of American society. Morrison focuses on the real record of the white-dominant culture’s destructive impact on the black’s cultural mutilation so that she can get the attention of the masses to such a serious racial problem.
Toni Morrison’s virginal work, The Bluest Eye tells us a story that a black girl endures various unbearable experiences on the road of yearning for a pair of blue eyes which white people own. Through the exquisite description of the black’s different fates and humiliating life, the writer vividly and authentically presents the life of people at the bottom for readers.
The thesis uses the tragedy of two representatives, Pecola and Mrs. Breedlove as the starting point and thus goes deeply into the life environment of those black females. And on that basis, the author of the thesis can analyze the causes of their tragic lives and go down to the bedrock. After a series of thorough inquiring and judging, it can be dissected that the root of the black woman’s tragedy is their alteration of values together with the aesthetic standard under both the racial and sexual discrimination for a long time. The social system in early 1940s in America had a destructive physical and mental influence on African Americans. What’s more, the discussion around the narrator, Claudia MacTeer also provides a comparison with Pecola which enriches the analysis of black female characters in the novel.
The thesis aims at arousing the attention and concern of more scholars and this really has great significance for getting a deep knowledge of the African American literature and studying the works of the black female writers. Furthermore, readers can better understand the black people’s life and culture through such a platform.
A number of domestic scholars and foreign scholars have studied the novel, The Bluest Eye. Here, a brief introduction is clearly made about both the domestic research status and the overseas research status.
As for the research abroad, Barbara Christian refers in The Contemporary Fables of Toni Morrison that the shinning points in the structure are the four-season main framework of the novel and the narrative variation in it. And they are the blasting fuse of the tragedy of the poor protagonist, Pecola (117-118). Ogunyemi has such comments that “scapegoat” is the very subject of the novel. Geraldine’s cat and Pecola are scapegoats. People throw shame and hate into them so that they feel they are not that poor and ugly (112-120). Another scholar, Page says in “Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison’s Novels” that Morrison uses flowers and nature as images to show the bad result of racial discrimination and cultural colonization. The black go far away from their home in Africa and come to such a materially affluent but mentally infertile land of America.
A Chinese scholar, Chen Yiying employs Foucault’s theory of “gaze”, “see”, and “be seen” to analyze the image of “eye” in the novel and paraphrase the title “the bluest eye” as “the saddest I” (73-76). Another scholar, Zheng Yurong has the comment that the real cause of Pecola’s tragedy is not the racialism. The denial and abandonment of herself in such a white-dominated society is the root of her miserable life. The black choose to be away from their home and desire to become a member of the white（61-63). From the viewpoint of feminism, Zhang Xuexiang points out that women are the chief culprit that have caused God’s abandonment of human beings and they have broken human’s dream to be with God. So they are doomed to be punished for their evilness (67).