Loss Of The Black People's Human Nature

As the first African-American female winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature,Toni Morrison is considered to be one of the most shining stars among African American writers.She has exerted the profound influence both on American literature and the whole literary world.Her novels are famous for the vivid black characters,excellent plots,insightful themes and unique artistic techniques.The Bluest Eye,published in 1970,is Morrison's first novel.On the one hand,the novel has powerfully depicted the bitterness and tragedy of Afro-Americans who suffer from the racial discrimination.The previous studies on The Bluest Eye mainly focus on four angles:feminism,post-colonialism,trauma,and artistic features.Until now,few scholars study this work from the perspective of ethical literary criticism;on the other hand,there are abundant ethical factors in this novel,such as self-identity,incest,parenthood,maternal love,paternal love,the alienated interpersonal relationship and cultural dislocation,etc.Therefore,this thesis tries to apply the method of ethical literary criticism to analyze the ethical factors from three aspects of ethical relationship,namely human-self relationship,human-other relationship and human-society relationship for the sake of revealing the loss of the black people's human nature and Morrison's ethical pursuits in The Bluest Eye.The thesis consists of six chapters in total.Chapter one first briefly introduces Toni Morrison's life,her achievements and her work The Bluest Eye.Then,it presents the general literature review at home and abroad.In addition,the significance of the thesis is also introduced.Chapter two mainly deals with the theoretical basis of this thesis.It contains the main ideas of ethical literary criticism,the development of ethical literary criticism as well as the application of ethical literary criticism in the thesis.Chapter three analyzes the alienated personality of the protagonist Pecola and her father Cholly in terms of human-self relationship.Chapter four explores the twisted interpersonal relationship in terms of human-other relationship,which contains the loveless relationship of Breedlove family and the indifferent relationship between Pecola and others in the community.Chapter five studies the inharmonious human-society relationship,which includes the estranged relationship between the black people and the black community and the distorted relationship between the black people and the white society.Chapter six is the conclusion of the thesis.This thesis analyzes The Bluest Eye from three aspects by using the method of ethical literary criticism,namely,loss of balanced human-self relationship,loss of loving human-other relationship and loss of harmonious human-society relationship.We can know that the black people lose their human nature in the mainstream society.Meanwhile,Morrison expresses her ethical pursuits based on the existing problems of the black people in the work:the black people should keep self-balanced,love themselves,love others,maintain harmony with the society and inherit their traditional culture.Only in this way can African Americans get authentic self-identity,realize real equality and truly melt into American society.Finally,the harmonious society is thus constructed.These are not only Morrison's ethical pursuits,but they can also be regarded as prescripts for solving the problems of African Americans.