Mirror, mirror on the wall...: Constructions of beauty and race in twentieth-century writings by African-American women (Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker).

摘要

The tremendous progress we have made in the twentieth century as a result of the Civil Rights and Feminist Movements would seem to render an examination of beauty and race regressive: hasn't the collective consciousness of American culture been raised to the point where we can see the emptiness of such divisions? Despite changing attitudes about race and gander, the social construction of beauty as white and the power of the beauty myth have remained essentially unchanged. My dissertation examines underlying assumptions about beauty and women and how concepts of race affect concepts of beauty. How have African-American women writers imagined and critiqued beauty over the last century? How have these writers negotiated issues of race, beauty, the gaze, and self-hatred while writing within a dominant discourse which insists that beautiful women are tall, slender, and fair-complexioned?; This dissertation brings together feminist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and theories about gender, race, ethnicity, and the gaze. It begins with an overview of popular notions of beauty throughout this century. It then explores ways in which “beauty” is enforced as a practice and an ideology, primarily focusing on theories of the gaze. This dissertation then examines how individual women writers—such as Nella Larsen, Zora Neale Hurston, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker—negotiate these issues, concluding with an argument for the need to reinterpret and destabilize the gaze.; Chapter One provides an historical overview; Chapter Two explores a theoretical framework for understanding the discursive dissemination of the beauty ideal and its cultural enforcement; Chapter Three analyzes the commercialization of beauty and the fiction of Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston; Chapter Four examines issues of invisibility in the fiction of Toni Morrison; and Chapter Five looks at the poetry and essays of Alice Walker in framing a response to the beauty ideal and the gaze that modern-day women can employ.