Pauline’s Personas—an Analysis of The Bluest Eye from Jung’s Archetype Theory文献综述

 2022-08-15 10:43:01

Literature Review

The Bluest Eye is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. A plenty of scholars abroad and at home dedicate themselves to this novel from various standpoints.

In western academic field, the studies on The Bluest Eye are quite comprehensive, covering a wide range of angles, including racial discrimination, identity building, narrative conventions, feminism, postmodernism and so on. This thesis will choose some categories that are related to the analysis of the character Pauline to trace the research on it.

The first category is racial discrimination and identity building. Scholars regard Pauline as a representative of black community, discussing how can a black woman survive in the white cultural hegemony. Mohammad Gholamina Roshan and Mojtaba Gholipour concludes that, for black community, it is difficult to fight for a positive social identity and self esteem, especially under the circumstances that white racism had caused blackrsquo;s own group member to hate each other.

The second category is narrative conventions. Morrisonrsquo;s unique writing techniques have drawn many scholarsrsquo; attention. Representative papers are as follows, Jennifer Lee Jordan Heinertrsquo;s work, Narrative Conventions and Race in The Novels of Toni Morrison, and also Fictions of Authority: Women Writers and Narrative Voice issued by Susan S. Lanser. Among these books and thesis, the diversity narrative perspectives, especially the of employment of Paulinersquo;s monologue has been studied by many researchers.

Feminism is also a popular category when it comes to the study of Morrisonrsquo;s female characters. Nelie Y. Mckay in Critical Essays on Toni Morrison (1988) analyzes this novel from the perspective of black feminism. Mori also connects the feminist criticism with race, gender and class in her work Toni Morrison and Womanist Discourse (1999). In “Probing Racial Dilemmas in The Bluest Eye with the Spyglass of Psychology”, Anna Zebialowicz and Marek Palasinski combine literary and psychological dimensions with the emphasis on the issue of black femininity. They claim that “we chose The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison due to thorny ethical and social issues it raises about the female body and race.”

Compared with the study abroad, the research about Morrison in China starts much later. Not until Morrison won the Nobel Prize for literature, did she received much attention among scholars at home. Wang jiaxiang, who published “The Works of Toni Morrison: A Survey” in Foreign Literatures (1988), blazed the trail in the study of Morrisonrsquo;s work. Sex, Race and Culture: Toni Morrison and the 20th Century Black American Literature (1999) by Wang Shouren and Wu Xinyun, marked a new stage of Morrison study in China, in which they made comprehensive analyses on Morrisonrsquo;s eight novels. In the second chapter, they discusses how black community views the white-dominant society and reveal the distortion of the black soul under the impact of white culture based on the study of The Bluest Eye.

With time goes by, domestic reviewers have made intensive studies on Morrisonrsquo;s work, which can be classified into three types: cultural hegemony, narrative strategy and literary criticism.

The first type is cultural hegemony, which generally centers on the collision of white dominant culture and the marginalized black culture, addressing the importance of building self-identity. Liu Xiaomian holds the opinion that the black need to find freedom to love their race, their families and themselves. She picks an interesting perspective, studying the different responses to the white cultural dominance between the Breedlove family and the MacTeer family. Through the comparison, she draws off their different destinies and appeals blacks to retain their identities and not “bewildered by the white standards of life and beauty”. Moreover, “A Lacanian Reading of Paulinersquo;s Self—Identity” applies three orders theory (the imaginary, the symbolic and the real) by Jacques Lacan to interpret the loss and anxiety of Pauline. The author views Pauline as a pathetic role because she always buries herself in the imaginary world where she can get away from the anxiety and emptiness.

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