Apartheid and Scarred Consciousness in Toni Morrison’s 'The Bluest Eye'

  • Dr Papiya Lahiri
Keywords: online English research journal, research papers publisher, UGC approved journal, High impact factor journal

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is one of the greatest novellas ever written, highlighting the neglect faced by an eleven year old black girl impacting her identity in such a way that she internalizes the projected standard of beauty, forgetting hers. Desire of being loved, acting as the motivating force behind Pecola’s life—gives her a scarred consciousness of a distorted vision of the society, where people were unreal even with themselves. They pretended to be someone they were not, and abandoned their family to belong to the minority white family. Their ideals became theirs and this was their inheritance of being able to serve those who took away their name and identity forever. The paper discusses the extent to which consciousness be scarred for life, under an epidemic problem of apartheid.

Keywords: Aparthied, The Bluest Eye, Scarred consciousness, victimization, racism.

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Author Biography

Dr Papiya Lahiri

Dr. Papiya Lahiri is an Asst. Prof. with the Dept. of Humanities and Social Sciences Jaypee University of Information Technology Waknaghat, Dist. Solan, Himachal Pradesh.

References

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3. Janeway, Elizabeth, “Women’s Literature”, Harvard Guide to Contemporary American Writing, Ed. Daniel Hoffman. Delhi: OUP, 1981 p383.
4. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye.New York: Vintage International Edition, 2007.
5. Ogunyemi, Chikwanye O. “Order and Disorder in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye” in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, XIX (1977) pp 112-120
6. Otten, Terry (1989). The Crime of Innocence in the Fiction of Toni Morrison. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
7. Schapiro, Barbara. “The Bonds of Love and the Boundaries of Self in Toni Morrison’s Beloved”, Contemporary Literature, 32. 2 (Summer 1991), 205.
8. Tatum, Beverly Daniel (1987). Assimilation Blues: Black Families in a White Community. New York: Greenwood Press.
Published
2020-02-05
How to Cite
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Section
Research Papers