Surviving Vulnerability, or the Perverted Empowerment of a Community in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Authors

Keywords:

Toni Morrison, Black identity, Community, Collective guilt, Social catharsis

Abstract

This paper aims at analyzing the different forms vulnerability takes and the various responses it triggers in a community that is socially, historically and culturally defined as vulnerable: the black community in America in the 1940’s. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye depicts several characters who are in turn victims of their vulnerable state as blacks in a white-dominated society, and the ways they try to resist, and even sometimes reverse their given status of inferior beings–or not.

Author Biography

Christelle Ha Soon, Rouen Normandie University

Christelle Ha Soon is a Ph.D student in American Literature at Rouen University (ERIAC Research Laboratory), France, working under the supervision of Anne-Laure Tissut.

After working for two years on the works of Toni Morrison, she obtained her Master’s Degree in English in 2010 at La Sorbonne University (Paris IV), before passing the French Teaching Exam (CAFEP-CAPES) in English the following year.

She is currently doing her doctoral thesis while teaching in a high school in Paris. Her research focuses on the construction of identity in ethnic American literature, especially in African-American and Chinese-American literature through the works of Toni Morrison and Maxine Hong Kingston. She is most particularly interested in the cultural conflicts and dilemmas evoked in ethnic American literature, eventually leading to the making of a plural identity through writing and the manipulation of language.

She took part in several international conferences both in French and English, during which she looked at the possible risks and benefits that would result from the invention of a new political, social but also literary identity, through the creation of a new and somehow unknown language.

Leaves n°3 : Vulnérabilité / Vulnerability

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Published

2017-01-30

How to Cite

Ha Soon, C. (2017). Surviving Vulnerability, or the Perverted Empowerment of a Community in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Leaves, (3). Retrieved from https://revues.u-bordeaux-montaigne.fr/leaves/article/view/264

Issue

No. 3 (2017): Vulnerability

Section

Vulnérabilité et fiction

License

Copyright (c) 2017 Christelle Ha Soon

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.