Abstract
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a work of deep emotional outburst, filled with desperate enquiries on the bases of the prevalent racial disparity based on color. She deplores the Western standards of ideal beauty created and propagated with and amongst black community, and the damage done to black women through the construction of femininity in a racialized society based on whiteness as the standard of beauty. The novelist presents a situation where a lop-sided sense of value deprecates the moral fibre of the society. The attendant loses and damages are unquantifiable, exemplified in the Breedlove’s family. Beauty is a physical attribute, but it is weighed higher than other more significant parameters, like moral rectitude, the bases of credible leadership on which society’s development depends. This concept is highlighted by the novelist when she indicates that for Cholly Breedlove, ugliness was behavior. This study adopts Emmanuel Mounier’s philosophical theory of Personalism as the critical tool to examining the moral depravity visited on the characters in the novel based on color. This theory seeks to establish and affirm the dignity of the person; it is based on the concept of the human person as an ontological whole: the nature of man as a being with a self-worth, self-esteem and unique identity. The unwholesome situation visited on the Breedlove family is an anathema to the principles enunciated in the theory of Personalism.
Citations
IRE Journals:
Effumbe KACHUA, PhD.
"Beauty as an Inverse Functional Paradigm in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals Volume 5 Issue 1 2021 Page 387-393
IEEE:
Effumbe KACHUA, PhD.
"Beauty as an Inverse Functional Paradigm in Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eye" Iconic Research And Engineering Journals, 5(1)
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