Feminism In The Bluest Eye

Toni Morison, a prolific American writer has written on the pathetic condition of the suppressed and downtrodden with zest and zeal to highlight the western ideological apparatuses through which the African and other colonized countries are represented.The Bluest Eye is Morrison’s first novel published in 1970. In this novel, she questions the western standard of beauty,revealed through the postmodern perspective that it’s socially constructed and how this strategic subversion has created a ‘myth of white is right’. Morrison wants to persuade the African-Americans from recognizing themselves through the western camera obscura. Instead, she wants to subvert that tendency and boosts them to value and celebrate the blackness. Blackness is pride not a curse, as she demonstrates how the black women characters suffer through the biased representation. Morrison manifeststhat the white voice is inappropriate to dictate the contours of African-American life. In this novel, the

Morrison has vividly justified the white ideological oppression and how Pecola internalizes and manipulates it. The novel has the vigor of relating the incidents precisely to draw analogy between the ambivalent aspects of black temperament. Pecola gets ignored by the white folk which is quite fathomable, but the anger and dislike shown to her by her mother (and a sweet attitude towards the white child) is puzzling and problematic. Morrison through a post-modernistic stance problematizes the concept of black identity through the ambivalent attitude of Breedlove family. Mrs. Breedlove finds a reflection of her own in Pecola which is “ugly” not only for others but for her also. She dislikes the ugliness and in turn herselfbecomes the victim of it by putting the standard of “white is