代写英语硕士论文-英美文学英文硕士论文范文,Ecofeminist Pursuit of The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison-托尼·莫里森《最蓝的眼睛》的生态女性主义追寻
Content
Acknowledgement
Abstract in Chinese
Abstract in English
Chapter I. Introduction
1.1 Toni Morrison and The Bluest Eye
1.2 A Review of Ecofeminist Theory
Chapter II. Anti-ecological Phenomenon in The Bluest Eye——The Abused Women and Nature
Seeds in the Hard Ground——Black Girlhood
The Erosion of White-dominated Culture and Androcentrism
2.2.1 White Culture Imposed through School Education
2.2.2 Damaging Effects of White Standard of Beauty of the Dominate Culture Revealed through Mass Media
The Irresponsibility of the Parents and the Black Community
2.3.1 The Loss of Parents’ Love
2.3.2 The Apathy of the Black Community
Chapter III. Morrison’s Ecofeminist Understanding in The Bluest Eye——the Oppression of Racial Society
Racism
Characterization
3.2.1Cholly Breedlove
3.2.2 Pauline Breedlove
3.2.3 The Others
Chapter IV. Morrison’s Ecofeminist Pursuit(or Spirituality) in The Bluest Eye——Creating a Harmonious World
4.1 The Subversion of White Culture
4.2The Function of Black Family and Community in the Reconstruction of Black
Women’s Subjectivity
4.3 The Maintenance of Traditional Black Culture
4.3.1 The Black Blues
4.3.2 The Traditional Ceremony on Aunt Jimmy’s Funeral
Chapter V. Conclusion
Bibliography
After a slow start in the early 1990s，ecocriticism has become one of the fastest-growing and promising areas in literary study and a“self-conscious enterprise”. This thesis attempts to approach Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) from the ecofeminist perspective. Since Morrison was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993, Morrison and her works attracted a rapidly growing of critical attention. A lot of researches have been done at home and abroad. Such eminent critical as Harold Bloom and Henry Louis Gates have done overall research on Morrison’s works from different perspectives with two collections published respectively in 1990 (Toni Morrison) and 1993 (Toni Morrison: Critical Perspectives Past and Present). Wang Shouren and Wu Xinyun’s Gender, Race and Culture: Toni Morrison and American Black Literature of the 20th Century (1999) is the first academic book on Morrison in China, which analyzes Morrison’s first seven novels. Apart from the general comments, there many are many others focusing specifically on themes, structure, and narrative strategies of The Bluest Eye, such as White standard of beauty, black identity, racism, resistance to white culture, structure, narrative strategies. However，a detailed and comparatively profound ecofeminist analysis on it is rarely seen.
This thesis consists of five chapters:
Chapter One briefly introduces Toni Morrison, her works and a review of ecofeminist theory. Chapter Two aims at illustrating anti-ecological phenomenon in The Bluest Eye, such as the abused women and nature, the erosion of white-dominated culture and androcentrism, the irresponsibility of the parents and the black community embodied in the novel. Chapter Three is devoted to interpreting Morrison’s ecofeminist understanding in The Bluest Eye, focusing on the oppression of racism and the characterization. Chapter Four adopts an ecofeminist approach to explore Morrison’s ecofeminist pursuit (or Spirituality) in The Bluest Eye, with the purpose to show Morrison’s subversion of white culture, confidence of reconstructing black women’s subjectivity and maintaining traditional black culture. Chapter Five draws a conclusion about the achievements this research has made and its significance.
This thesis attempts to shed some fresh light on the research of the novel by providing an ecofeminist perspective，in the hope of evoking more readers’ environmental awareness and offering a new angle of studying the novel.
Chapter I. Introduction
Toni Morrison and The Bluest Eye
Toni Morrison, one of the most important contemporary women novelists and critics in American, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is the first black American and the eighth woman for the prestigious award since its inception in 1901. She was born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio, where her parents had moved to escape the problems of southern racism. Her families were migrants, sharecroppers on both sides. Morrison grew up in the black community of Lorain. She spent her childhood in the Midwest and read voraciously, from Jane Austen to Tolstoy. Morrison’s father, George Wofford, was a welder, and told her folktales of the black community, transferring his African-American heritage to another generation. In 1949 she entered Howard University in Washington, D.C., America’s most distinguished black college. There she changed her name from “Chloe” to “Toni”, explaining once that people found “Chloe” too difficult to pronounce. She continued her studies at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Morrison wrote her thesis on suicide in the works of William Faulkner and Virginia Wool，and received her M.A. in 1955.
During 1955-1957 Morrison was an instructor in English at Texas Southern University at Houston, and taught in the English department at Howard. In 1964 she moved to Syracuse, New York, working as a textbook editor. After eighteen months she was transferred to the New York headquarters of Random House. There she edited books by such black authors as Toni Cade Bambara and Gayl Jones. She also continued to teach at two branches of the State University of New York. In 1984 she was appointed to an Albert Schweitzer chair at the University of New York at Albany, where she nurtured young writers through two-year fellowships.
While teaching at Howard University and caring for her two children, Morrison wrote her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970). The story is set in the community of a small, Midwest town. Its characters are all black. Pecola Breedlove, the central character, prays each night for the blue-eyed beauty of Shirley Temple. She believes everything would be all right if only she had beautiful blue eyes. Sula (1973) depicted two black woman friends and their community of Medallion, Ohio. It follows the lives of Sula, a free spirit, who is considered a threat against the community, and her cherished friend Nel, from their childhood to maturity and to death. The novel won the National Book Critics Award. With the publication of Song of Solomon (1977), a family chronicle compared to Alex Haley's Roots, Morrison gained an international attention. It was the main selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and the first novel by a black writer to be chosen since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1949. Tar Baby (1981), set on a Caribbean island, explores conflicts of race, class, and sex. Beloved, Morrison’s fifth novel published in 1987 is considered by many to be Morrison’s best. In Jazz (1992), Joe, the unfaithful husband of Violet, kills Dorcas in a fit of passion. The fragmented narrative follows the causes and consequences of the murder. Morrison’s first novel since the Nobel Prize was Paradise (1998). It is a richly detailed portrait of a black utopian community in Oklahoma. Love (2003), Morrison’s eight novels, moves freely in time as Paradise. It portrays Bill Cosey, a charismatic hotel owner, dead for many years but not forgotten, and two women, his widow and his granddaughter, who live in his mansion.
The Bluest Eye received good reviews, though the reaction was mild compared with the enthusiasm that greeted Morrison’s later novels. The Bluest Eye depicted the tragic life of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wanted nothing more than to have her family love her and to be liked by school friends. These rather ordinary ambitions, however, were beyond Pecola’s reach. She surmised that the reason she was abused at home and ridiculed at school was her black skin, which was equated with ugliness. She imagined that everything would be all right if she had blue eyes and blond hair. Raped by her father, rejected by her peers, and used by a pedophile to kill a dog, Pecola ends up pregnant and insane, and withdraws into a fantasy world in which she was a beloved little girl because she has the bluest eye of all. Against the backdrop of Pecola’s story was that of Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, who managed to grow up healthily despite the social forces which pressured Afro-Americans and especially the black females. During their childhood, they were comforted and nurtured by family members, whose love did not fail them.
1.2 A Review of Ecofeminist Theory
Feminism has more than one hundred years’ history in the west. It refers to various trends that call for equality between men and women in Europe and the United States. Feminism is not a tightly integrated system. There exist larger discrepancies among different theoretical schools over various issues, but they share a common basis—the existing social structure is patriarchal and male-dominated. Since the early 1980s, feminist literary criticism has developed and diversified in a number of ways. As a branch of feminism, black feminism emphasizes the multiple oppressions imposed upon black women. Brewer argues that, “the conceptual anchor of recent Black feminist theorizing is the understanding of race, class and gender as simultaneous forces... and developing a feminism rooted in class, culture, gender and race in interaction as its organizing principle”. “Importantly,” she suggests, “the theorizing about race, class and gender is historicized and contextualized”.
According to The New Encyclopedia Britannica (“feminism”), “feminism” also called ‘feminist movement’ or ‘women’s liberation movement’, refers to a social movement that seeks equal rights for women, giving them equal status with men and freedom to decide their own careers and life patterns. It has its roots in the humanism of the eighteenth century and the Industrial Revolution. Defined in a broad way, feminism focuses on analyzing and examining the oppressed status of women and the modes of representing women.
Feminist theories examine and explain the cause of women’s oppression and functions which patriarchy imposed upon them so that the limit placed upon women can be eradicated. It is necessary for women to break the bondage of these roles. Patriarchy represents the system of male authority that oppresses women through its social, political, and economic institutions. In all the historical forms patriarchal societies have taken, whether feudal or capitalist, sex-gender systems and systems of economic discrimination operate simultaneously. The old notion is that, since women are inherently inferior beings, their only function is to fulfill the needs of men.
Feminist criticism rose up after World War II as a literary branch of the feminist movement, which sets several aims, including overthrowing the established conventions of western literature, breaking the patriarchal standards on which the traditional literary criticism was based, recovering and reevaluating the forgotten and neglected texts written by women writers, and establishing female canons on the basis of the study of woman-centered writing.
Feminist critics believe that culture has been dominated by men to such a high degree that literature is full of unexamined male-produced assumptions. Women have fewer opportunities than men to become writers for they get much less access to the education in poetry, drama, and fiction that the male patriarchy valued. But even when they managed to write, men critics sometimes neglected their work simply because it comes from a woman. Feminist critics also explore the cultural construction of gender and identity. In general, most American and French feminists, who jointly occupy the dominant position in feminist criticism, agree that women are constructed rather than born to be what they are like. However, they are different in their approaches—American feminists tend to be more interested in political analysis of literary works, while the French school focuses on critical theories extending to the reaches like psychoanalysis, and linguistics.
Various forms of feminist theories, such as sociological feminism, ecofeminism and liberal feminism, try to analyze and explain the position of women within society. These theories share similarities in their focus on the oppression of women, but differ in their explanations and solutions. A few important similarities between these theories concern patriarchy, gender stratification, and oppression.
In general, the target of feminist criticism is to “summon up the anger of the furies in order to disturb the complacent certainties of patriarchal culture and to create a less oppressive climate for women writers and readers”. In another word, it is the purpose of feminist criticism to awaken women’s individual consciousness, so as to expose the fraudulent values of patriarchy, break the shackles it has long since imposed on the female and call for their resistance against the unjust treatment to them. Under the common goal, feminist criticism has divided into a variety of sub-schools, which focus on different researching subjects, such as psychological feminism, Marxist feminism, ecological feminism, etc. Of various feminist theories, we will only present a brief review on some of the most influential.
As to ecofeminism, a branch of feminism, it is a newly developed theory. However, it is very important to the development of feminism. As Nature has long been regarded as female in Western culture, it is believed that to be a feminist one must also be an ecologist, because the domination and oppression of women and nature are inextricably intertwined. To be an ecologist, one must also be a feminist, since without addressing gender oppression and patriarchal ideology that generates sexual metaphors of masculine domination of nature, one cannot effectively challenge the world’s view that threatens the stable evolution of the biosphere, in which human beings participate or perish.
In The Bluest Eye, the doubly marginalized black women are suffering not only from sexual discrimination but also from racism and cultural hegemony. The white males put the racial white culture as the norm of the society and promulgate it through the means of school education, mass media and religion. Some black women internalize the white culture and try to cater to the white standard of beauty; they deny their own value and alienate themselves from their families and the traditional black culture and finally lose their subjectivity. On the contrary, some other black women embrace their blackness, make tight knits to their families and rejoice over their specific values and traditional black culture, thus they can get strength to resist the hegemonic culture and find worth in the racial American society.
As a female as well as an African American, Morrison’s works provide a good example for ecofeminist criticism.
Chapter II. Anti-ecological Phenomenon in The Bluest Eye
——the Abused Women and Nature
“The fascinating aspect of theories about the bodies, is that our bodies lie somewhere in the gray area between the physical and the intellectual realm (in itself testifying to the falsity of such dichotomies). On the one hand, they are biological; genetically programmed flesh. On the other, they are continuous sites of signification; embodying the essentially textual quality of a human subject's identity.”
In a patriarchal and capitalist society grounded in the rape of the land, it is crucial that men should be able to tame both the female body and nature. This most often takes the forms of rape and incest, naturalizing the imperatives of the patriarchy into the whole of social interaction on one level, and the exploitation and gradual poisoning of the earth on another.
Seeds in the Hard Ground——Black Girlhood
Throughout the novel, there are two major metaphors in The Bluest Eye, one is marigold, and the other is dandelion. Claudia, one of the narrators, looking back as an adult, says at the beginning of the book that “there were no marigold in the fall of 1941.” She and her sister plant marigold seeds with the belief that “if the marigolds would grow and survive, so would Pecola’s child.” Morrison unpacks the metaphor throughout the book and through Claudia,finally explains it and broadens its scope to all African-Americans on last page. I even think now that the land of entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruits will not bear ...” the soil (which we know will not be fertile enough for the marigolds to grow) represents the hostile conditions that have conspired against Pecola. Although Claudia and Florida attempt to make a difference, there is nothing they can do to make their flowers grow; thus suggesting that individual agency was not a factor in the failure of the marigolds to grow. The land itself made growth impossible, just as social and situational forces made Pecola’s growth impossible. In other words, Pecola is like a flower, she is dependent on her environment for sustenance. Her baby, like the seeds in the backyard, dies before his chance to live. The implication is that Pecola, like many other African-Americans, never had a chance to grow and succeed because she lived in a society (soil) that was inherently racist, and would not nurture her.
The other flower, the dandelion, is important as a metaphor because it represents Pecola’s image of herself. As Pecola passes some dandelions going into Mr. Yacobowski’s store, “Why, she wonders, do people call them weeds? She thought they were pretty.” While in the store, Mr. Yacobowski humiliates her, she again passes the dandelions and thinks, “They are ugly. They are seeds” Obviously, Morrison employs the metaphor to show that Pecola has transferred society’s dislike of her to the dandelions.
The Erosion of White-dominated Culture and Androcentrism
The white disseminate and reinforce their cultural values through the cultural institutions—school, mass media. These institutions construct the white myth—the whites are lofty and beautiful and the blacks are degraded and ugly, which, unfortunately, is convinced by those blacks who have estranged from their indigenous culture, and therefore they are controlled physically and psychologically. The inability of the blacks just reflects the power of the cultural hegemony that insidiously but poisonously destroys the life of the blacks. And in this way the authority exerts its rule over the blacks efficiently.
2.2.1 White Culture Imposed through School Education
The Bluest Eye opens with three versions of the “Dick and Jane” school primer so prevalent in the public schools at the time (the 1940s) of the novel. The story of Dick and Jane and the green-and-white house is a classic normative statement of white middle-class American culture, which provides the context within which the lives of Breedloves and the MacTeers are set. The text is employed to contrast sharply and ironically with the experiences and voices of the three children, Pecola, the narrator Claudia MacTeer and her sister Frieda MacTeer. The first version of the primer is double spaced and follows the accepted rules of capitalization and punctuation, rendered in “Standard English”—correct and white. The second version is less clear yet still comprehensible although written without proper capitals or punctuation. The third, whose wording is likewise unaltered, is completely run together; it is just one long collection of consonants and vowels seeming to signify nothing. Through the school primer, parts of which serve as headings to some sections of the book, white culture provides a background for Claudia MacTeer’s story.
These three versions are symbolic of the lifestyles that Morrison explores in the novel either directly or by implication. The first is clearly that of the alien white world (represented by the Fisher family) which impinges upon the lives of the black children and their families while at the same time excluding them. The second is the lifestyle of the two black MacTeer children, Claudia and Frieda, shaped by poor but loving parents trying desperately to survive the poverty and racism they encounter in Ohio. The Breedloves’ lives, however, are like the third—the distorted version of “Dick and Jane,” and their child Pecola live in a misshapen world which finally destroys her. The simulated “here is the house” quotation, with its variants, serves several purposes: as a synopsis of the tale that is to follow, and as a subtly ironic comment on a society which educates—and unconscionably socializes—its young with callous disregard for the cultural richness and diversity of its people.
2.2.2 Damaging Effects of White Standard of Beauty of the Dominate Culture Revealed through Mass Media
In The Bluest Eye Morrison turns to Hollywood and popular culture as conduits for ideologies of racial superiority. She reveals how Gobineau’s doctrines became crystallized in the cultural images of the 1940s as representation of physical beauty; references to the movies, billboards, magazines, window signs, dolls, Mary Jane candy and Shirley Temple films pervade The Bluest Eye. Hollywood reinforced, without having to justify it, the scaffolding of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century racism and implicitly articulated Gobineau’s doctrine that the ‘white race’ was ‘superior to all others in beauty’ and that ‘the human groups are unequal in beauty; and this inequality is rational, logical, permanent and indestructible’.
The Bluest Eye suggests that the media bombarded black communities and their children with commercial messages in the 1940s. Susan Willis argues that such messages equate American culture with white culture in the novel (Willis 1989). Pauline only encounters the image of Greta Garbo when she discovers the cinema as an adult. When Henry moves into the MacTeer house, he flatters young Claudia and Frieda with an already familiar reference to “Greta Garbo and Ginger Rogers.” In addition, Maureen admits that she learned from her mother to emulate the almost white Peola over her “black and ugly” mother, Delilah, in Stahl’s film, Imitation of Life.
Like Maureen, Pecola looks to Hollywood for standards of female beauty and, thus, power. The epitome of the good, the true, and the beautiful is, of course, Shirley Temple, a depression-era white film child-star whose childhood frivolity conveyed hope to the struggling nation.
The Irresponsibility of the Parents and the Black Community
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison challenges America’s complacent belief in its benevolent self-image through representations of children who experience race, class, and gender oppressions. Morrison lets her child-characters speak while critically invoking their socio-economic contexts. Instead of blaming the children for their own suffering, she blames their families, their community, and, ultimately, their nation. Pecola’s insanity is the result of the loss of her parents’ love and the apathy of the irresponsible black community.
2.3.1 The Loss of Parents’ Love
Morrison attacks both the myth and legend about the relationship between one and his or her biological family. One commonly held myth of almost all cultures is that human beings (as do some other mammals) instinctively protect, accept, and nurture their offspring. And legend declares that black people more so than people of many other cultures have always been very protective and caring of their offspring.
However, in the Breedlove family there is little warmth and love exhibited toward the children. Morrison ironically uses the term breed love to show the family’s shortcoming. Instead of breeding love, the family breeds hatred.
Pecola’s parents are often powerless themselves, subject to the whites who employ them, victims of their poverty and the culture which invalidates them. In addition, they themselves have been physically or emotionally abandoned by their families—Pauline was made an outsider because of lameness; Cholly was rejected by both of his parents. Traumatized children themselves, they continue the trauma by denying their own weakness in their abuse of parental power, by instilling their own fears of impotence, and by calling upon their children to fulfill their own unmet needs. Pecola’s mother’s experiences provide a foil for her daughter’s and prefigure her plight. Though Mrs. Breedlove is marked by a physical handicap, a lame foot, she, like her daughter, longs to attain beauty. Hollywood- produced images of Clark Gable and Jean Harlow introduce Mrs. Breedlove to “physical beauty” and romantic love, and the narrator comments sardonically, “Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion. In equating physical beauty with virtue, she stripped her mind, bound it, and collected self-contempt by the heap”.
2.3.2 The Apathy of the Black Community
The white standards also have devastating effects on the African-American community as a whole. Under the fierce impingement of white culture, the black community has lost its responsibility in protecting and supporting its individuals. Pecola’s madness, coupled with her family history, excites scorn rather than sympathy of the community.
Chapter III. Morrison’s Ecofeminist Understanding in The Bluest Eye
——the Oppression of Racial Society
3.1 Racism
Writing as a realist, Morrison could not possibly write a story set in the 1940s involving blacks without somehow depicting the racism that abounded in the larger environment and was the ultimate cause of Pecola’s low self-esteem and search for beauty. Everything in the greater society reminded her that she was on the outside—that she did not belong or rather that she did not exist. The white storekeeper does not acknowledge that she is a person when she enters his store because he does not look at her, for “how can a fifty-two year old white immigrant storekeeper with the taste of potatoes and beer in his mouth, his mind honed on the doe-eyed Virgin Mary, his sensibilities blunted by a permanent awareness of loss, see a little black girl”, and when he does, she senses in his eyes a kind of distaste because of her presence, a distaste made more evident when he speaks to her in an impatient voice. This is the kind of humiliation that reinforces her heartfelt belief that she is ugly and thus has no place in her environment. Added to this kind of encounter are the billboards along the streets that are graced with images of beauty—white beauty—constantly reminding her of her shortcomings.
In The Bluest Eye Morrison is specifically connected with a particularly impalpable form of racist ideology that, because of its indefinable nature, is paradoxically more pervasive, psychologically damaging and difficult to contest than extreme and overt forms of racism. When Cholly Breedlove reduces his family to a state of homelessness, puts them all ‘outdoors’, Claudia, the now mature narrator, reflects upon her new awareness of the social, psychological and economic constraints on the black community.
Pecola’s pregnancy and psychosis represent extreme consequences of racism. By weaving Pecola’s story into a web of very different but interconnected narratives, however, Morrison suggests that the erasures of abstraction occur in layers, rather than as an absolute. Claudia, who despises Shirley Temple, minimally resists the self-effacing impetuses that seduce Pecola. In contrast, with lighter skin, greater economic stability, and long familial and pedagogical histories that promote assimilation, Maureen, Geraldine, and Soaphead all suppress their “surpluses”. To complicate matters, however, Morrison dissociates their abstraction from the hoped—for empowerment of citizenship. Instead, all of these characters endure varying degrees of powerlessness while also suffering a devastating lack of familial or communal intimacy. Through their social and political bankruptcy, Morrison suggests that self-abstraction offers nothing more than a false promise to black Americans.
3.2 Characterization
3.2.1 Cholly Breedlove
3.2.2 Pauline Breedlove
3.2.3 The Others
Chapter IV. Morrison’s Ecofeminist Pursuit (or Spirituality) in The Bluest Eye
——Creating a Harmonious World
4.1 The Subversion of White Culture
In The Bluest Eye, Morrison offers a profound critique of codified and institutionalized white language and ideology through the subversion of a school primer that privileges whiteness. Her projection is to expose and revise the ideological deployment of language through a critique of education, culture and religion, and in a rejection of exclusionary American discourse, Morrison instead privileges the language, idiom and cultural forms of the black community.
But Morrison takes one step further. Certainly, she investigates the why—the reasons for racism, guilt, and self-hatred, but she also exposes the how— the modes by which these destructive elements are circulated and diffused throughout American society. The movie theater is one example she offers in the novel, but more interestingly, she has created a text that is itself a physical embodiment (and deconstruction) of the traditional sociohistorical narrative, of which Dick and Jane is a part. Perhaps, in some sense, Morrison is offering us a sample of how cultural narratives should be deconstructed: not around a mythological Dick and Jane Utopia, nor even around an omniscient, journalistic, and “historic” exposure of a Pecola-like story. Rather, Morrison’s telling of the Pecola tragedy is a community endeavor that is tempered by omniscient subnarratives of the Breedlove family and the Lorain community, as well as by the first-person narration of Claudia’s story, Morrison upsets the textbook primer sociohistorical narrative with one that is interwoven with fact and fiction, truth and myth, story and memoir. She subverts the dominant and destructive cultural history of Dick and Jane like stories by acknowledging the many narratives, both real and mythological, that inform Lorain’s sociopolitical situation.
4.2 The Function of Black Family and Community in the Reconstruction of Black Women’s Subjectivity
The black family and community play a very important role in the black individual’s life. Because of the lack of parents’ love and irresponsibility of the community, Pecola loses her sanity, while with the love of their parents and the support from their family, Claudia and her sister Frieda grow up healthily.
As Carol B. Stack concludes, “A pattern of cooperation and mutual aid among kin during the migration north…and the domestic cooperation of close adult females and the exchange of goods and services between male and female kin” were strategies these communities used for coping with poverty. Zollar qualifies Stack’s argument, claiming that these networks were not just reactions to conditions, but rather that they are inherent features of African American family units.
The Maintenance of Traditional Black Culture
The African American folklore and history that play such a central role in Morrison’s stories were part of her everyday life as a child. From her parents and grandparents she learned about black myths, music, and cultural rituals, and heard tales of black suffering and achievement. Her mother sang constantly, much like the character “Sing” in Song of Solomon, while her Grandmother kept a “dream book” in which she tried to decode dream symbols into winning numbers. Morrison’s real life world, therefore, was often reflected later in her novels. She sees her literature as functioning much as did the oral storytelling tradition of the past that reminded members of the community of their heritage and defining their roles. In her works, Morrison makes extensive, subversive use of folk language and music. In The Bluest Eye, the black culture is reflected mainly through the black blues and Aunt Jimmy’s funeral.
4.3.1 The Black Blues
4.3.2 The Traditional Ceremony on Aunt Jimmy’s Funeral
Chapter V．Conclusion
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