On Cultural Integration in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

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  1. Introduction
  Toni Morrison is one of the most outstanding African-American women writers whom people can not ignore in the literary world. Morrison's career has been one of accolades and acclamation. In 1975 Morrison won the National Book Award, and in 1978 the National Book Critics Circle Award and the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters Award. In 1988 she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and in 1993, for her collective achievements Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.
  Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. The Bluest Eye is a story of young African-American female in America, which emphasizes on Pecola, Claudia, Frieda and the happy and painful experiences in their growth. The big success of this novel is mainly due to Morrison's perfectly integrating mainstream American literary tradition with African-American culture. By adopting mainstream American literary tradition, she has achieved her real purpose of revising mainstream tradition to express African-American experiences and reclaim African-American culture and values. The integration is just like a bridge that can help the African-Americans live in the dominant society and realize their self value.
  2. The Approach to Integration
  Morrison's educational background paves the way for her writing in an American way. What she has learned from mainstream American literature is mostly modernist and postmodernist narrative techniques: fragmentary narration, multiplicity of voices, mythic patterns, and biblical allusion, etc., but when she tells her story she uses the mainstream American writing techniques critically which is called "signifyin(g)" in the African-American literary criticism. Put forward by Henry Louis Gates Jr., arises from black vernacular, signifyin(g) is itself an important part of African-American traditional culture. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison applies signifyin(g) to repeat and revise mainstream American literary tradition, and consequently rediscovers African-American traditional culture.
  (1) Revising Mainstream American Literary Narration
  Techniques of fragmentation are carefully employed in Toni Morrison's narrative, and the fragmentary narration of the novel reflects the discontinuity of black history and the chaos in the lives of African-American people. Just take the Dick-and-Jane primer for example. In the second and third paragraphs of this prologue Toni Morrison proceeds to deconstruct the Dick-and-Jane primer by rewriting the text in two formats. The use of the repeated texts is a structuring design and a thematic concern serves to question the very model of the dominant culture. The second and third texts are quite different from the standard version in form, which shows the challenge to the dominant white culture reproducing hierarchical power structures. For the white the life described in the primer is the ideal one, but for the African-American the fact is that it is impossible for them to live as the white do. By using the Dick-and-Jane primer as the novel's prologue, Toni Morrison indicates that the happy life of the white describes in the primer introduces actually the miserable life of the African-Americans in the novel. She returns to an earlier practice- of the white voice introducing the African-American text- to demonstrate her refusal to allow white standards to arbitrate the success or failure of the African-American experiences. Toni Morrison's manipulation of the primer is meant to suggest the inappropriateness of the white voice's attempt to authorize or authenticate the African-American text or to dictate the contours of African-American art.
  (2) Revising Mythic Patterns
  The Bluest Eye and the Demeter-Persephone myth share a lot, such as a barren season and the mother-daughter bond. Despite those similarities, however, The Bluest Eye diverges from the myth in a critical way. The Demeter-Persephone myth shows the power of the mother-daughter bond and the critical importance of mothers to the earth's prosperity. Pecola's mother Mrs. Breedlove, however, abandons her daughter emotionally before the rape, most clearly in the scene in her white employers' kitchen when she comforts the white girl and pushes her own injured daughter to the floor. Thus, The Bluest Eye is structured to increase the reader's sense of the dissonance between the archetypal story and the novel.
  The same to the myth of Oedipus, and in The Bluest Eye, too, the myth appears in a peculiar and distorted fashion. First, Oedipus seeks answers about his identity from oracles, family, and servants. In his seeking, Teiresias tries to dispel his illusion, lead him to see truth and experience self-knowledge. Pecola looks for her place too, but no one provides helpful answers or even clues to who she is or should become. In the end of the myth Oedipus blinds himself in a fit of grief and guilt. He laments his condition, but sees the truth, and claims an identity. He also gains stature by bravely accepting the exile he had decreed as further punishment for himself. By contrary, Pecola who sees with what she believes to be blue eyes is really blind. She has no claim to an identity and wholeness but has instead been divided in two, inside and outside the mirror. Pecola also becomes an exile: "walking up and down, her head jerking to the beat of a drummer so distant only she could hear".
  (3) Revising the Image of God
  Despite its great influence on African-Americans, the Bible is not African-Americans' original belief. African-American interpretation of the Bible is from the perspective of African-American culture and values. Nevertheless, the acknowledgement of biblical influence is not Toni Morrison's real purpose. Her true intention is to revise the white authoritative biblical interpretation and deconstruct its shackle on African-Americans. In The Bluest Eye, God's characteristics are not limited to those represented by the traditional Western notion of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost. Instead, Toni Morrison suggests an imperfect God- the existence of evil and the suffering of the innocent.
  Among Toni Morrison's characters, Pecola is the one whose life seems most vulnerable to the whims. As Pecola is thrown out of Geraldine's house, she sees a portrait of an Anglicized Jesus "looking down at her with sad and unsurprised eyes" (76), an image of a God who seems either incapable of helping her or complicit in her suffering. The Western tradition pictures God as a stoical figure who demands perfection from his creation because of his own perfection, whereas with these portraits of Jesus, Toni Morrison introduces us to the shortcomings of the Western model of God, who consequently possesses many of the characteristics of imperfection and is far from the west's omnipotent, infallible God. And thus raises the problem of how a supposedly omnipotent and loving God can allow the existence of evil and suffering.
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