托尼•莫里森《最蓝的眼睛》黑人女性自我认同的缺失(2)

菜单

1.2 Different Attitudes Held by Black Female towards The White 8

1.2.1 Negative Attitudes towards Whiteness 8

1.2.2 Positive Attitudes towards Whiteness 9

Chapter Two The Reasons of Loss of Self-identity Of Black Female 12

2.1 The Influence of the Society 12

2.2 The Influence of Environmental Surroundings 13

2.2.1 Family’s Atmosphere 13

2.2.2 School’s Education 15

2.2.3 Community’s Exchanges 16

2.3 Inpidual Factors 18

Chapter Three Approaches of Identity Construction 20

3.1 Development of Black Culture 20

3.2 Improvement of Family Education 22

3.3 Reformation of Schools 23

Conclusion 25

Works Cited 26

The Loss of Self-identity of the Black Female In The Bluest Eye

Introduction

Toni Morrison's literary excellence lies in her creative combination of the themes of the works and the artistry. Her concerns about the life and experience of the black people, her social consciousness and her special craftsmanship have shaped her writing into the typical black literature. According to Morrison, the survival of the black ethnic group can not be guaranteed only through its possession of political rights and economic independence, but also through the retaining of their black traditional culture. Thus this point provides us readers with a standpoint for either analyzing or comprehending her first novel The Bluest Eye, which was published in 1970.

Since The Bluest Eye describes both the psychological violence of white norms of beauty and cultural citizenship and resistance from the black to that violence in the form of Claudia's angry response, it reveals its affinity to the Black Arts Movement that formed the novel's intellectual context. But beyond their common exploration and critique of "racial self-loathing," as Morrison puts it in her afterword (Morrison 210), The Bluest Eye and the Black Arts movement also shared suspicion, even hostility, toward the social-science discourse that underlay the brown, and toward the minority-citizenship model that Brown helped inaugurate. In short, they rejected the assimilation trajectory of Park and Myrdal, and the portrayal of Negro pathology-that black people need to be near or around white people in order to be spiritually, psychologically, and culturally healthy-implied in Clark. In this sense, the Black Aesthetic would seek a return to the concept of culture formed by Boas, embraced by Hurston, but denied by Park-one that saw African American culture as cohesive, slow to change, and potentially continuous with African tradition.

In our country, scholars have studied this book from quite different pint of view. The first category is the researches about the theme: the tragic fate of the main characters, and the black people. They talk about the causes and look for the solutions for the black. The second one is Postcolonial perspective. By analyzing the culturally and psychologically colonized African Americans in Toni Morrison ’s The Bluest Eye, the authors tries to dig out the elements that result in black people’s self-loathing, self-contempt and the loss of their identity such as Li Xiao Ling ’ s A Study of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye from the Postcolonial Perspective. The third one is comparison. In Han XiaoFang’s Destruction or Survival: Antithetical Characters in The Bluest Eye and Sula, she writes “Due to the lack of redeeming intelligence, family emotional support and community help, the protagonists Pecola and Sula gradually sink into destruction. In contrast, the less important characters Claudia and Nel manage to survive and gain some spiritual growth.” The fourth one is ecofeminism, after deep concern for Nature and black women expressed by Toni Morrison, not only does she explore the interconnections between various forms of oppression, but also proposes solutions to the reestablishment of harmony and order. The last category is sociopsychological perspective. For example, someone explores from Fromm’s sociopsychological perspective. Perceiving from the insights of Fromm's Theory of Love and Social Character Formation, the author argues that alienation and loss of love results in the predominance of non-productive orientation in blacks' character structures, and the ideologies they accept in turn intensify and stabilize the social character, which traps them into a vicious cycle.