THE BEAUTY MYTH IN TONY MORRISON’S THE BLUEST EYE

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.