A Psychoanalytic Study On Pecola’s Tragedy In The Bluest Eye

As the one who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, Morrison has become one of the most popular African-American women writers in contemporary America, and her first novel The Bluest Eye has gained widespread attention. Since the publication of this novel, it has been probed deeply from different perspectives by writers and critics in literary circles, including feminism, post-colonialism, cultural hegemonism and so on. This thesis mainly starts with the study on external factors including social and family environment, and applies Freudian psychoanalytic theories as its main theoretical foundation. It interprets Pecola’s mental abnormality in the process of the internalization of value, and analyzes the formation and development of her tragedy.Living in an abnormal environment without strong and independent personality, one is apt to breed pathological psychology, like inferiority and anxiety. Due to long-term misfortune they have suffered, black community members form a collective trauma gradually. As a black woman with a double identity, Pecola descends to the scapegoat of the black community to undertake the collective disaster. Being raped by her father, becoming pregnant, giving birth to a dead baby, going insane, all of which lead to her falling into the abyss. In light of the trauma from identity and personality, it can be recovered to some extent if cured effectively. However, Pecola pins her hope on the false treatment over and over again, which leads to her inevitable and irreversible tragic destiny. She falls into frantic illusion, believing that only by owning a pair of blue eyes, can she get social acceptance, companion’s respect, and parents’ love.The application of Freudian psychoanalysis contributes to interpreting Pecola’s confusing mental phenomena, probing into the spiritual world of black women, and digging out the substantive issues behind these phenomena. The mental phenomena this thesis explores mainly involve Pecola’s inferiority, anxiety, repression, denial, fantasy, trauma and imbalance of id, ego and superego. A variety of emotional features of the heroine in this novel can be searched according to psychoanalysis. Therefore, the psychoanalytic theories are not confined to Freud’s theories of personality structure, defense mechanism, and trauma. What’s more, Alfred Adler’s inferiority and Karen Horney’s anxiety are included. Pecola’s unavoidable tragedy is the epitome of the whole black community’s destiny. No matter in the past, at present, or in the future, African American issues should be brought to the forefront. To avoid tragedies like Pecola’s ending, blacks should pay more attention to the spiritual world and introspect incessantly so as to cultivate independent and sound personality. Meanwhile, they should keep their black cultural tradition and black subjectivity, unite with each member inside the black community, and avoid blind pursuit of white mainstream culture. Otherwise, such tragedy will become a vicious circle that spreads from generation to generation.