The Bluest Eye: Impact of White Beauty Standards on Black Lives
The Bluest Eye offers an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of Black girls and women. Implicit messages that whiteness is superior are everywhere. The novel follows the abolitionist and traditionalist novel, and there are multiple narrative voices. It is characterized as a bildungsroman. Furthermore, the novel concentrates on two topics: the highlight of the notion of racism and classism.
Pecola’s Struggle with Beauty Standards
The person who suffers most from white beauty standards is, of course, Pecola. She connects beauty with being loved and believes that if she possesses blue eyes, the cruelty in her life will be replaced by affection and respect.
Metanarrative and Silence in The Bluest Eye
This is a metanarrative novel, meaning that it exists within the context of critical theory and postmodernism. The author explains this respective knowledge and experience. Thus, the metanarrative is a story beyond the story, about short stories.
Giving Voice to the Silenced
Kind of metanarrative: the silenced characters. Toni Morrison uses the novel to detail a complex view of the situation, which is why she chooses this format instead of a political study. This idea of giving voice to silenced characters is a way to let the oppressed speak in a way that they could not otherwise. So, there is great strength in embodying the voice of the silenced characters. This device lends the study of subjectivity to the story, so we sympathize with the characters. Even with Cholly, we have details from when he is making love with Darlene that make us sympathize with the gentle movements he makes.
The Central Silence
Morrison says there is a silence at the center of the story, and this is the rape of Pecola by Cholly, since we don’t know why he does it. Another silence in the story is Sammy’s silence. A wild boy without the love of his parents, Sammy could be a replication of Cholly, another future tragedy in the story. Moreover, Shirley Temple is presented as a picture of society and real life. She is presented as a mark of chaos in Pecola’s mind.
Postmodernism in The Bluest Eye
Postmodernism is a broad range of:
- Responses to modernism, especially refusals of some of its totalizing premises and effects, and of its implicit or explicit distinction between ‘high’ culture and commonly lived life.
- Responses to such things as a world lived under nuclear threat and threat to the geosphere, to a world of faster communication, mass-mediated reality, greater diversity of cultures and mores, and a consequent pluralism.
- Acknowledgments of and, in some senses, struggles against a world in which, under a spreading technological capitalism, all things are commodified and fetishized (made the object of desire), and in which genuine experience has been replaced by simulation and spectacle.
- Resultant senses of fragmentation, of discontinuity, of reality as a pastiche rather than as a weave.
- Reconceptualizations of society, history, and the self as cultural constructs, hence as rhetorical constructs.
- A reaction to, refusal, and diffusion of the elements of modernist thought which are totalizing: which suggest a master narrative or master code, i.e., an explanatory cohesion of experience; the result may be a sense of discontinuity, of the world as a field of contesting explanations, none of which can claim any authority.
- Parodies of all sorts of meta-narrative and master-code elements, including genre and literary form.
- The challenging of borders and limits, including those of decency.
- The exploration of the marginalized aspects of life and marginalized elements of society.
Modernism vs. Postmodernism
Modernism and postmodernism both share an emphasis on subjectivity and stylistic technique, a rejection of traditional artistic conventions, a multiplicity of narrative points of view, and preferences for fragmented forms, collage, and repetitions. Postmodernism rejects what it calls ‘the depth model’ and its binary oppositions:
- Authenticity vs. inauthenticity
- Signifier vs. signified
- High art vs. popular culture