An Analysis Of Alienation In The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison is an outstanding writer in the contemporary literary world and is alsothe first black female Nobel Prize laureate for literature. The Bluest Eye, published in1970, is one of her earliest works. This novel has powerfully presented the silenced blackwomen’s bitterness and struggle because of the long-term double oppression of racialdiscrimination and gender discrimination. In this novel, Morrison has profoundlycriticized the American society, its political prejudice, its racial discrimination and itsgender discrimination. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison has shown several prominent artisticfeatures, such as the structure of the novel, multiple narratives, symbols, metaphors andcontrasts, which have attracted people to read and to imagine and contemplate. Unlikethose writers who emphatically reveal the black people’s economic prejudice andpolitical prejudice, she pays more attention to the black women’s inner world. As a blackfemale writer, her own dual identity enables her to penetrate deeply into black women’sinner world and reveal their psychological bitterness, desperation and distortion under thepowerful oppression of racism and sexism. Therefore, more and more people have begunto pay attention to her novels.This thesis analyzes the causes of the alienation and the alienation features in thisnovel. It consists of three parts: an introduction, a main body, and a conclusion.The introduction briefly introduces Toni Morrison’s significant status in the currentliterary history, her main novels, life experience, current study situation of The BluestEye, the direction, uniqueness and importance of this research. Both domestic andoverseas studies on Morrison mostly dwell on post colonialism, feminism, the specialnarrative devices and writing features. But currently comprehensive and creativeresearches on the analysis of alienation in The Bluest Eye can hardly be found. Therefore,this thesis will analyze the novel based on alienation theories, which has certain practicalsignificance.The main body consists of three chapters.Chapter One mainly introduces the alienation theories, the alienation theme inwestern literature, Morrison’s times, life experience and the foundation of the alienationtheme. The alienation analysis of this thesis is based on Karl Marx’s alienation theory, Freud’s psychoanalysis, and Fromm’s alienation theory. This chapter also analyzes thealienation features in western literature in every single history period from ancientGreece. This thesis illustrates and analyzes the foundation of the alienation theme withthe combination of the historical background, social environment where The Bluest Eyeis created and her own life experience. Therefore, all these show that the analysis ofalienation in The Bluest Eye has both theoretical foundations and practical basis.Chapter Two specifically analyzes the causes of alienation. There are four causes:influence of the dominant white culture, absence of love, failure of school education, andloss of self-identification. The advertisement and broadcast about the superiority of thewhite culture pervade everywhere in the black’s daily life. There are white stars on theTV screen, the light-skin children stars on the candies’ package, and the excessivedescription of the white people’s life in a perfect way wrongly. The black are graduallybrainwashed unconsciously. Then they lose themselves, abandon their traditional cultureand have no self-confidence. They stop loving themselves and they lose the ability ofloving others, which means that they become the invisible men in the society. These fourcauses summarize that the human’s alienation has its profound origins in this society, andmanifest the distortion of human nature and spiritual crisis in the highly developedmaterial society. These causes of alienation should wake people to pay more attention tothe comprehensive development and psychological health to avoid human alienation.Chapter Three explores features of alienation in this novel. The features include threeaspects, respectively alienated relationship among family members (including alienatedrelationships between husband and wife and the alienated relationships between parentsand children), alienated relationship among social members, and the protagonist’sself-alienation. An alienated family is on longer a harbor for a child where the couplesbeat and torture each other instead of loving and taking good care of each other; parentsstop playing the patron role or protecting role in a child’s life. Instead, father bringssufferings to the child both physically and mentally and mother is either powerless toprotect or indifferent to the child’s sufferings. The black community not only has tosuffer the discrimination from the white, but also has to endure the indifference fromtheir neighborhood in the same black community. The black community is relativelyweak and inferior, so people in the same black community are supposed to adhere to themselves and their culture, help one another, support each other and unite together toget rid of their difficulty or trouble. However, these poor people gradually losethemselves and their capacity of love. What is worse, when they are in front of their owndesperate situation and others’ helplessness, they haven’t taken any action to fight back.Instead, they bully the relatively weaker ones in order to gain a kind of satisfaction formothers’ pain. The modern people’s dilemma and spiritual waste land are unfolded throughthe analysis of these features of alienation in daily life.The conclusion summarizes the purpose of the thesis and its significance. Throughthe study and research of alienation, the thesis aims to reveal human’s alienation and thepresent waste land of human’s spiritual world. The thesis also expresses the expectationof the further study and research into the alienation in Morrison’s other works. As toChina, a developing country, it is very crucial to promote the development of the spiritualcivilization as the material civilization develops in this fast developing materializedsociety. The thesis expects the modern people to identify themselves in the materialsociety and to pay more attention to their spiritual crisis to avoid alienation. As long asthere is no human alienation, there are true harmonious relationships among people. Onlyin this case can a really harmonious society be constructed.