简析《最蓝的眼睛》中佩科拉的悲剧.doc

【标题】简析最蓝的眼睛中佩科拉的悲剧 【作者】龚 梅 【关键词】悲剧；佩科拉；艺术结构 【指导老师】张亚军 【专业】英语 【正文】I. IntroductionIn 1993, the Swedish Academy awarded Morrison for the Nobel Prize in Literature due to her creation which is poetic and imaginative. She becomes the first black American writer who wins the prize. As a contemporary black American woman writer, Morrison makes an effort to promote black culture. The themes of her works are to perform and explore black history, destiny and spiritual world. A number of critics find the story appealing and praise Morrison for her unique narrative techniques, lyrical and precise language1 and her exploration of the initiation experiences of its black female adolescent protagonist.2 Today, The Bluest Eye has become a female literary classic in the United States.This novel tells the story of tragic fate of a black girl named Pecola: she prays a pair of large and beautiful blue eyes, which can make her become beautiful like other children who have blonde hair and blue eyes. If she had, she would get love from people in order to change her ugly appearance and poverty. However, she is raped by her father and gives birth to a dead baby. After that, she experiences mental disorders. As the result, her ultimate dream becomes a hallucination.This paper mainly attempts to find the origins of the tragedy of Pecola from the American society, community, family and its heroine. It will also discuss the unique structure employed to reveal the role and influence of the novel. Morrison exhorts the black community if they abandon their own culture and pursue the white cultural values blindly, and it is bound to lead to distortion of the soul, depersonalization and tragedy.II. The Origins of the Tragedy of Pecola in The Bluest EyeA. American SocietyA person, as long as he lives in some kind of social environment, will be on the concepts of social constraints, and then relies on the various social standards and the outside world to determine his own value. For a long time, African-Americans are subject to political oppression and economic exploitation. Blacks racial discrimination from the time they set foot on the New World was started there, and blacks were long oppressed in the status of slavery. That the black have always been sold as livestock has destroyed blacks hearts, so their psychological shadow can not be wiped away. Due to historical reasons, American society as a whole has a very strong and deep-rooted prejudices of racism.Orthodox white culture in the United States has always been dominant. From generation to generation, enslaved blacks receive and internalize the whites of the aesthetic standard and blacks divide people into grades in accordance with the depth of color. Blacks have made outstanding contributions for socio-economic development of the United States, but in a white-dominated world and under the pressure of the aesthetic standard of whites, they lost their self-consciousness and formed a“black-is-ugly” concept. This point is already deep-rooted in the minds of the most vulnerable members of society. Jacqueline de Weever, a critic, in her essay explores the crisis of black identity when cultural values are defined by a white society in this novel, and she points out clearly that“the desire to transform ones identity, itself an inverted desire, becomes the desire for blue eyes, and is a symptom of Pecolas instability”.3 Pecola so totally depends on white aesthetic criteria to determine her own value and meet ideas of the expectations of whites, as the result, she will only accelerate the process of self-destruction, so the occurrence of her tragedy must be inevitable.B. Community1. Pecola and CommunityAs a black girl, Pecola not only deeply suffers the influence of her parents, but also is a product of the tragedy of the community.Under the impact of the prevailing social standard and values of a male and white dominated society, the community accepts the white standard of physical beauty white skin, blonde hair and blue eyes that is set by the world where they live. Pecola, as an ugly black girl, is unacceptable and unwanted. What she sees in the community is still others ignorance, mocking and curse, including the white and the black. But Pecolas response is passive and just yearns for blue eyes. She thinks her ugliness in others eyes is true and is the source of all her terrible experience. Pecolas tragedy stems from her desire for blue eyes in the world. She decides that if she had beautiful blue eyes, her life would be magically right itself. She wants blue eyes for two reasons: she can change what she sees and she can change how others treat her. For Pecola, these two reasons are interchangeable because she believes that how people see her(as ugly) creates what she sees(hurtful behavior). The community has victimized Pecola as the member who has lost their identity and worships the other. This kind of powerless solidarity brings forth her injury, insult and humiliation. However, the community itself is a victim in that it might be excluded out of the white society if it can not fit into the advantageous white culture.2. Pecolas Relation with Others in the CommunityWith few ways to confront the terrible scenes, Pecola believes she can change what she sees only by changing herself. If she succeeded changing herself, she would be treated well by others. But, in fact, there are moments when Pecola never can break the destructive connection between what she sees and how people see her.For Pecola, school life is also miserable because of her ugliness and blackness. Most classmates look down upon her and do not want to be her friends. But only Klaudia and her sister Frieda show sympathy to her and protect her. When they see Pecola trapped by the black boys, the sisters come to rescue her bravely. After school one day, a circle of boys taunts Pecola through the signifying verse for her black skin and her father naked sleeps:Black e mo. Black e mo.Ya dadd sleeps nekked.Black e mo black e mo.Ya dadd sleeps nekked.Black e moStch ta taStach ta ta ta ta ta4This verse, with its pronunciation spellings is a typical black vernacular expression that indicates the boys black identity. There is an irony: when they are insulting Pecola for her black skin and the sleep habit of her father, they forget the fact that they themselves are black and their own fathers may have the same relaxed habits. The boys betray their ignorance, self-hatred, and the contempt for their own blackness in the signifying verse. It also indicates the suffocating circumstances in which Pecola finds herself, establishing her as an image of scapegoat.The girl, Maureen deepens the tragedy of Pecola in this novel. Because of rich family, being very beautiful, having light-colored skin and pure green eyes, she has always been loved:When teachers called on her, they smiled encouragingly. Black boys didnt trip her in the halls; white boys didnt stone her, white girls didnt suck their teeth when she was assigned to be their work partners; black girls stepped aside when she wanted to use the sink in the girls toilet, and their eyes genuflected under sliding lids. She never had to search for anybody to eat with in the cafeteria they flocked to the table of her choice.5Maureen is not purely a white, and she is a quarter of black origin, but she is proud of expression that she is a self-proclaimed white. Maureen thinks that she and Pecola are vastly different in identity. When quarrelling with Pecola, she shouted at Pecola:“I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!”6 So beauty and ugliness constitutes a sharp contrast, and the indifference and discrimination spread in the life of Pecola.When Pecola went to the grocery store to buy candies, she had to face the response of owner:He urges his eyes out of his thoughts to encounter her. Blue eyes. Bleardropped. Slowly, like Indian summer moving imperceptibly toward fall, he looks toward her. Somewhere between retina and object, between version and view, his eyes draw back, hesitate, and hover. At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He dose not see her, because for him there is nothing to see.7The humiliation at the grocers store reinforces the old idea that ugliness is inherent and can not be changed by a different way of perceiving the world. When the grocer looks at her with a blankness tinged with distaste, she does not consider that he is ugly she only considers herself to be so. She is sure that the owner of this vision and with all white faces when she met is the same vision. When facing such a vision, she feels the greatest extreme distress and shame, and she thinks she becomes a zero and nothing. So when she sees dandelion on the roadside, she suddenly likes them because she considers they are like her, that is no love and care.The grocery store owner named Mr.Yacobowski is the representative of the white man that Morrison depicts to have the contact with Pecola in this novel. From the white in her community, Pecola receives the humiliation and unacceptance that makes her lost. She is unable to find her own value and to realize her own identity. She just wants to become the“perfect” image in others eyes, like Mary Jane. But Pecola is not completely devoid of naive and childlike innocence and her heart is full of hope. When she sees Mary Janes candies, Mary Janes blue eyes and charming smile, she is excited and full of hope. She imagines that if she had a pair of blue eyes like Mary Jane, she would be loved like Maureen, and she also would have a happier life. This desire which can not be achieved has been further reinforced by the tragic heroine.Geraldine, metazoan woman who has more black descent, makes tireless use of the various cosmetics and all kinds of drugs to cover and eliminate her blackness. Her son Junior, once born, she washed him all day long! Scratch! Clean! She attempted to make him white. At one time, Junior inveigled Pecola into his home, and threw a big cat in her face. When Geraldine went home and saw a black girl in her house, she cursed Pecola:“Get out, you nasty litter black bitch. Get out of my house.”8 Pecola did not do anything to counterattack and to protect herself. On the contrary, the only response left for her is shame and guilt. She endures the abuse silently. Gradually, she believes that she is ugly and unworthy, and she feels shameful about her black and finally loses her own identity.Compared with the white, the black woman in whom the blood of the black race flows is more afraid of the black. Geraldine shouting with the rage deeply hurts Pecolas sensitive and fragile heart. This same ethnic oppression further enhances Pecolas desire for blue eyes.C. Family1. Pecola and Her FamilyPecolas parents are responsible for her misfortune. They fully accept the formal white cultural aesthetic standard. They not only do not give Pecola love and concern, but also do not make her feel safe and provide the proper conditions for self-development. Their negative self-images and attitudes hurt Pecolas self-esteem and self-confidence greatly.The novel begins with a series of sentences that seem to come from a childrens reader. The sentences describe a house and the family that lives in the house Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane. Dick and Janes family is depicted as the idealized paradise that is attractive to all the people.“Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the family. Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are very happy.”9 Then this primer was repeated without punctuation, but people still can recognize what it means. But the third time it was made by Morrison no boundaries of spacing or punctuation, as if we were listening to a runaway tape recorder at high speed:“HereisthehouseItisgreenandwhite IthasareddoorItisveryprettyHereisthefamilyMotherFatherDickandJaneliveinthegreenandwhitehouseTheyareveryhappy”10So the primer becomes the expanding nonsense that is formed with compact single letters. The disorderly arrangement of the words implies a sudden, profound collapse of the natural conditions. The harmony in ideal world is changed. The readers immediately learn that the natural rules have been destroyed. The happy and lovely family presented in the primer is distorted. Here Morrison makes the Dick and Janes story a sharp contrast with the poor living conditions of Pecolas family: shabby home, bitter and hostile parents. It is not a pretty house, but a store apartment. Thus, the compressed words on the first page of The Bluest Eye serve as a structural element, and it makes the readers an implication that the family they will see is the one full of chaos and confusion. It is also a source for Pecolas miserable life.Pecolas family experience is marked by violence and lovelessness. She is inflicted a great deal of pain by her mother. She is decided at the time of her birth that she is an ugly child. Pecola is ignored in her family and often has to face the brutal but darkly formal“battle” between her parents in their storefront home:They fought each other with a darkly brutal formalism that was paralleled only by their lovemaking. Tacitly they had agreed not to kill each other. He fought her the way a coward fights a man with feet, the palms of his hands, and teeth. She, in turn, fought back in a purely feminine way with frying pans and pokers, and occasionally a flatiron would sail toward his head. They did not talk, groan, or curse during these beatings. There was only the muted sound of falling things, and flesh on unsurprised flesh.11Afraid of the fight between her parents, Pecola tries to find ways to endure mental pain. Every time before a fight comes, she often whispers:“Dont, Mrs.Breedlove. Dont.”12 But every time the situation disobeys her will. Pauline douses Cholly with cold water and he begins to beat her. She hits him with the dishpan and then a stove lidEvery time Pecola feels nauseated, so she covers her head with the quilt to let her breathe easily. She has a strong desire that she can disappear immediately:“Please,God,” she whispered into the palm of her hand.“Please make me disappear.” She squeezed her eyes shut. Little parts of her body faded away. Now slowly, now with a rush. Slowly again. Her fingers went, one by one; then her arms disappeared all the way to the elbow. Her feet now. Yes, that was good. The legs all at once. It was hardest above the thighs. She had to be real still and pull. Her stomach would not go. But finally it, too, went away. Then her chest, her neck. The face was hard, too. Almost done, almost. Only her tight, tight eyes were left. They were always left.13Facing the frightening scene of her parents fight, Pecola is scared. She does not want a family like that. But she is not brave enough to take some real measures to change what she sees. She thinks the root of hurtful domestic behaviors is her ugliness. Her response is passive, and she only resorts to praying for disappearance. She hopes that if she can change herself successfully, her life would be magically right itself. That is, what she sees and how others see her will be totally different. She thinks:“Maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs.Breedlove too.”14 But to her disappointment, what her parents do is to exterminate her.2. Pauline an Alienated MotherWhen Pauline just gives birth to Pecola, she thinks Pecola is very ugly and does not like her, so Pauline is a nanny of the white people, and gives all her love to the children in that family. On one occasion, Pecola visited Pauline. Due to carefulless, Pecola beat the jam, and Pauline did not give her the opportunity to explain, but beat her daughter unreasonably, and then Pauline gave a smiling face to coax white children.The mother is the childs first protection, so she should not have so brutally treated her child out of her instinct or out of her responsibility. Even though she has personally experienced discrimination of the white, she soon became the ideal servant of the white. Her life is for the white, and she tries to shape her own model according to the white as far as possible be acceptable. A critic, Kulkarni interprets Pecolas fate in The Bluest Eye, tracing the origin of Pecolas sense of self-inferiority to Paulines self-image. He concludes that:“From the beginning, Pauline Breedloves mirror reflects to her daughter her own sense of inferiority, which, in turn, Pecola radiates back to her. This mother-daughter mirror reflects images of sometimes-self and sometimes-other in their struggle to know who each is, an effort which runs generationally.”15 Pecola not only learns self-inferiority from her, but also learns from the fear from her. The fear is that she is afraid of growth, the whites around the world and the life.3. Cholly a Rootless FatherBecause there is no role models(he does not know who his father is, born by a mother abandoned), as well as the responsibility for the father. Their relations are very misty. Most of all, Cholly does not know how to relate well to his children. When he comes home drunk, he finds Pecola washing the dishes. With mixed motives of tenderness and rage, both fueled by guilt, he rapes her. The unthinkable thing Cholly does to Pecola makes her even more dirty and ugly in others eyes. When Pecola tells her mother about this, unexpectedly, she is almost beaten to death and she is evicted from home at last.Helplessly, Pecola turns to Soaphead Church, a self-declared“Reader, Adviser, and Interpreter of Dreams”.16 She asks him to give her blue eyes. Then she could go back to school and all the dreadful things will