A Study Of The Bluest Eye Under Cultural Hegemony

The literature this thesis analyzes is The Bluest Eye, the first maiden work of Toni Morrison who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993. Although this novel was published in 1970, its unique implication and foresight remains highly valuable for research today. In this novel, Morrison depicted the state of colonized black ideology against the backdrop of American cultural hegemony, which led to the miserable fate of black girl Pecola, unveiling this phenomenon of white cultural colonization in the public eye. The upper class in America exploited and oppressed black people physically by controlling the political and economic lifeblood and took advantage of it to control cultural field to colonize the spiritual world of the black. In the novel, the upper class in America brainwashed the black mainly through mass media, schools and religion and infilled white people's values into the moral framework of the black, which eventually forced the latter to abandon their racial characteristics and completely lose their voice in the American society. It is the problem this novel mainly reveals.This thesis, from the prospective of cultural hegemony, lays stress on analyzing the phenomenon of cultural colonization in the novel, discussing on how the cultural hegemony indoctrinated the black in terms of mass media, schools and religion and built the aesthetic standard that “white skin is pretty while black skin is ugly”. Then,with the combination of Foucault's theory of knowledge and power and Bentham's concept of “Panopticon”, it expounds how the black conducted self-discipline and became “tamed flesh” under the mighty cultural hegemony of the white. At last, it points out that although the black society affected by the cultural hegemony became a supervised “jail”, there still existed black elites who kept fighting against the aesthetic standard of the white, and the expression of awakening self-consciousness of the black.However, this kind of awakening consciousness was the revolt of female stuck in the margin of society and neglected by the black community, which resulted in the vulnerability of revolt. Therefore, in its conclusion, this thesis proposes that the fundamental reason of this vulnerable revolt is that the black people who suffered from discrimination were also discriminators in another aspect, and it continues to analyze that the media culture has functions of removing racial gap and forging racialidentity. We should also see that it is essential for American society to forge racial identity, but it should not base on the removal of another racial characteristics. Only when the American society gives up bias and discrimination and becomes inclusive enough to embrace racial culture of the black can the United States forge the melting pot of races in the real sense and realize racial identity so as to make America an inclusive and powerful country.