Morrisons Bluest Eye Essay: Self-Definition -- Toni Morrison The Blue

In Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, the struggle begins in childhood. Two young threatening girls -- Claudia and Pecola -- illuminate the combined power of externally imposed gender and racial expositions where the black effeminate must not only deal with the black males womanly but must contend with the white males and the white effeminates black female, a double gender and racial bind. All the male definitions that applied to the white males female apply, in intensified form, to the black males, white males and white females black female. In addition, where the white male and female are represented as beautiful, the black female is the inverse -- ugly. Self-definition is crucial, not only to being, but to creating. As Gilbert and Gubar so astutely note in The Madwoman in the Attic, For all literary artists, of course, self-definition necessarily precedes self-confidence the creative I AM cannot be uttered if the I knows not what it is (17). One way of descr ibing this work of self-definition is as learning to understand what around and about us and what within us must live, and what must die (Estes, 33). But female definition has not been this sorting out process of self-definition. Instead, it has been a static male definition by nonpayment or by intent. If the female is to create herself, she must begin with a process of self-definition whose first step is, of necessity, a negation of the hitherto established male definition of female. Virginia Woolf calls this killing The Angel in the House (PFW 286). Before she can say yes by creating a positive form she must first say no to the false positive form created by a patriarchal society. Before she can reclaim herself from the negative space of t... ...s vital and true. List of Works Cited Dickinson, Emily. The apprehend Poems of Emily Dickinson. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston Little, Brown and Company, 1960. Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. Women Who Run With the Wolves. New York Balla ntine Books, 1992. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic. New Haven Yale University Press, 1984. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York Penguin Books, 1994. ---, Playing in the Dark. Cambridge Harvard University Press, 1992. Portales, Marco. Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye Shirley Temple and Cholly. The Centennial brush up Fall (1986) 496-506. Rubenstein, Roberta. Boundaries of the Self. Chicago University of Illinois, 1987. Woolf, Virginia. Professions for Women. Collected Essays. Vol.2. London The Hogarth Press, 1966. 284-289.