Assistant Professor, Jat College, Kaithal, Haryana, India
Toni Morrison's first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) makes a scathing attack on the imposition of white/Anglo-Saxon standards of beauty on black women and creation of cultural perversion. It presents a critique of the dominant aesthetic that is internalized by majority of the black community, and attempts to deconstruct the meta-ethnicity, which exercises a hegemonic control over the lives of blacks in America. The Bluest Eye becomes a powerful expression of Toni Morrison's ethnic cultural feminism which differs from existential, political feminism that alienates black women from their ethnic group. The feminist analysis takes into account the intra-racial contexts and locations in the discourse of Pecola, the chief black female protagonist.
