What Should I Be In Your Blue Eyes

As a female black American writer,Toni Morrison is known for her wonderful writing.Morrison’s maiden work The Bluest Eye tells the story of the little black girl Pecola’s tragedy.This novel has been misread,misunderstood and abandoned for nearly three decades since its first edition.But it cannot be buried forever all the time because it is a book which subverts the dominant discourse in order to win African Americans’ equal treatment with the other people in America.It does have a practical social value.Set in 1940,the story in The Bluest Eye happens before the American Civil Rights Movement breaks out in 1955 and the reclamation of racial beauty in the1960 s,when the race discrimination is still severe.Standing in the national elites’ place and wishing to change the nation’s fate through the novel,Morrison subverts the power system by using the marginal discourse in this novel;and because of the power system and social pressure Morrison must create a character named Soaphead,who is the representative of the dominant culture,so as to contain this subversion.But Soaphead is not successful in containing the subversion because he does not belong to the white dominant society totally,although he uses dominant discourse to give Pecola a pair of the bluest eyes.Meanwhile,by exerting the marginal discourse,it shows that Morrison devotes herself to speaking out for the marginalized people and appeals for much more attention to and care for them.This thesis rebuilds the main characters’ self-fashioning processes from the perspective of the New Historicism,so as to demonstrate how the society influences the life of these characters,and then examines the attitudes that people should keep when they exist in the world.While analyzing the subversion and containment in TheBluest Eye,the thesis will explore how Morrison subverts the social rule and law,and discover how Morrison displays the containment of the subversion.Subversion and containment indicate that Morrison hopes to strive for equality for the black people while trying to maintain the dominants of current America culture.She is sympathetic to the subaltern,yet she does not want to change the existing social structure.The thesis is divided into six parts.The first part is the introduction.It briefly introduces Toni Morrison and The Bluest Eye.It then analyzes and summarizes the international and domestic review of the novel,and also the inadequacies of these literary studies.Finally it states the research significance of this thesis and how this thesis will analyze this novel from the perspective of the New Historicism.The second part is the theoretical framework.This thesis will analyze the text in light of historicity of text,textuality of history,self-fashioning,subversion and containment and power discourse.The third,fourth and fifth parts are the main and important body of this thesis.The third part discusses the protagonists’ self-fashioning through historicity of text and textuality of history;the fourth part is about the subversion and containment in the novel;the fifth part shows why and how Toni Morrison uses marginal discourse and thick description in the novel;the sixth part is the conclusion.Morrison displays the social environment by the characters’ self-fashioning and shows her care and love for the blacks especially the marginalized people.But by using both subversion and containment,she also tries to maintain the dominant social order while criticizing it.