Black Feminism in the Bluest Eye: Double Marginalization and Resistance

Abstract

Toni Morrison'sThe Bluest Eye documents the construction of black female subjectivity by the mass spread of images of femininity in American patriarchal and racist society. These images affect on women's body and their sexuality forcing black women like Pecola and Pauline to negate their selves and try to live the life of white women. Doubly negated because of their race and gender, black women characters experience themselves as wounded or imprisoned in their racial and gender roles. To protest this marginalized situation, Morrison gives black female characters a central and strong position and advocates for female bonding among them. By making the oppression visible, Morrison advocates for woman's empowerment and freedom to overcome patriarchal and racial domination. As a form of resistance, Morrison also designs it as a multi-voiced novel that makes communities as sites of meaning as women often carry communal or local memories, oral forms, music, and rituals.