earticle

영어

The Bluest Eye (1970) written by Toni Morrison illustrates the process of establishment of the racial shame in an African American family in 1940. Pecola, a little black girl, who prays for the bluest eyes for more than one year represents the shameful side of the African American identity as the result of white supremacy among both of the black and the white. Her parents from the South had experienced the symbolic racial humiliating events by the whites respectively on the aspect of gender and race. The parents’ trauma and poverty transmit to their children. And the majority of inhabitants in Lorain having accepted the white supremacy give destructive effect on Pecola. This paper, based on the family theory by John Bradshaw and the trauma theory by Judith Herman, analyzes consequences of the exclusion from the parents and of the daily accumulation of racial humiliating events by the inhabitants. The racial identity of the older generation is degenerated and the younger generation succeeds to the racial shame. Therefore, this paper eventually examines Morrison’s assumption for the survival of the black community to break the transmission of the racial shame.