earticle

영어

This paper examines Pecola’s family photography and visual images in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Pecola’s family are the victims of the standards of the white society. Pecola is an ugly black girl who yearns for the blue eyes of a white girl but is incapable of attaining these. Her mother, Pauline escapes into the movies, dreaming of looking like Jean Harlow. And she feels happy when she is working for a rich white family. Her father, Cholly is rejected by his father and discarded by his mother. He is shamed as two white hunters shine their flashlights on his nakedness. These traumatic situations have a great influence on Pecolar’s family life and make Pecola’s family revere whiteness. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison provides visual images, such as Pecola’s house, Dick and Jane, Shirley Temple, Mary Jane, Jean Harlow, and the white baby doll, et al. These are the embodiments of racial ideology. By looking at themselves through the eyes of white culture, Pecolar’s family internalize their ideals of racial consciousness and are never able to escape them. Morrison criticizes racial violence embedded within white ideology through Pecola’s family photography based on visual images.