| dc.description.abstract | The Bluest Eye is the first book of Morrison, a novel of initiation concerning a
victimized adolescent Black girl who is obsessed by the White standards of beauty
and longs to have blue eyes. The novel describes about Pecola, the main character in
the novel and a symbol of the black community’s self-hatred and belief in her own
ugliness. Others in the community, including her mother, father, and her neighbour
named Geraldine, a middle-class black woman who cares for physical appearance; act out
their own self-hatred by expressing hatred toward her. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest
Eye lends itself to rich conversations about race, class, gender, and sexuality. It
further illustrates discrimination, exclusion and symbolic violence against Pecola
because of her physical appearance which is incompatible with the concept of beauty.
This study aims at investigating how beauty discourse in the novel encourages
me to find out the construction of the discourse represented and examining the beauty
myth that shackles the female character’s mind. The writer applies two appropriate
approaches to give clear description and further explanation in accordance with
problems: Feminist and Marxist approaches. Feminist approach is taken into account
because the black women’s characters in the novel suffer through the construction of
femininity in a racialized society; it constructs femininity in a racialized society.
Marxist approach that is applied in this thesis also deals with class of society.
The data of this study is qualitative. The writer collects data from the
statements and narration in the novel focusing on the obsessions, efforts, and
discourse of beauty particularly spotted to the main character. Those data are then analyzed using inductive method. This study finally reveals that the construction of
Caucasian beauty is counterfeit because human race cannot be singularized. | en_US |
