What Pecola saw with her bluest eyes : a literary exploration in Toni Morrison'sThe Bluest Eyes

摘要

A tragic heroine of Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Blues eyes, lives in a small-town where people has taken the values from the larger white American culture, believing blond hair, blue eyes, light skin and keen features are the measures of beauty for them, which are not norms for black people. So Pecola hopes she will be accepted and loved only when she has the bluest eyes of all. Because of her ugliness, however, she was insulted by playmates, rejected by school teachers, yelled at by neighbors, rendered invisible by shopkeepers, and raped and impregnated by her father, and she retreats into insanity because she couldn’t find any place in the “real” world, where there is healthly, sane place for her.Insanity, death, and violation of a society’s norms which recur in the later works by Morrison’s, are some major literary themes in Morrison’s novels, Here in this paper, I want to explore how these literary themes come out with her ambitious techniques in her first novel, The Bluest Eyes, and how they developed and changed into her later works beautifully to create Morrison’s great literary world.