ISSN: 2347-7474
International Journal Advances in Social Science and Humanities
Available online at: www.ijassh.com
CASE STUDY
Role of Women Novelists and Feminist Criticism in English Literature
with Special Reference to Toni Morrison’s the Bluest Eyes
Roshni Duhan*
Teaching Assistant, IGNOU, Study Centre, Rohtak, India.
*Corresponding Author:Email:[email protected]
Abstract
Feminist literary criticism, arising in conjunction with sociopolitical feminism, critiques patriarchal language and
literature by exposing how these reflect masculine ideology. It examines gender politics in works and traces the
subtle construction of masculinity and femininity and their relative status within works. There were many women
novelists as well as there was Feminist Criticism due to Feminism prevalent in the society. In the West, the second
wave of feminism prompted a general revelation of women's historical contributions, and various academic subdisciplines, such as women's history and women's writing, developed in response to the belief that women's lives and
contributions have been underrepresented as areas of scholarly interest. Much of this early period of feminist
literary scholarship was given over to the rediscovery and reclamation of texts written by women. Studies like Dale
Spender's Mothers of the Novel (1986) and Jane Spencer's The Rise of the Woman Novelist (1986) were groundbreaking.
Keywords: Feminist criticism, Feminism, Literary theory, Philosophical Discourse.
Introduction
Earlier discussion of women's broader cultural
contribution can be found as far back as the 8th
century BC, when Hesiod compiled Catalogue of
Women,
a
list
of
heroines
and
goddesses. Plutarch listed heroic and artistic
women in his Moralia. In the medieval
period, Boccaccio used mythic and biblical women
as moral exemplars in De mulieribus claris
(1361–1375), directly inspiring Christine de
Pisan to write The Book of the City of
Ladies (1405). Women writers themselves have
long been interested in tracing a "woman's
tradition" in writing. Mary Scott's The Female
Advocate: A Poem Occasioned by Reading Mr
Duncombe's Feminead (1774) is one of the best
known such works in the 18th century, a period
that saw a burgeoning of women's publishing. In
1803, Mary Hays published the six volumes of
Female Biography. Virginia Woolf's A Room of
One's Own (1929) exemplifies the impulse in the
modern period to explore a tradition of women's
writing. Woolf, however, sought to explain what
she perceived as an absence; by the mid-century
scholarly attention turned to finding and
reclaiming "lost" writers. And there were many to
reclaim: it is common for the editors of
dictionaries or anthologies of women's writing to
Roshni Duhan| March. 2015|Vol.3|Issue 03|29-34
refer to the difficulty in choosing from all the
available material. Trade publishers have
similarly focused on women's writing: since the
1970s there have been a number of literary
periodicals such as Fireweed and Room of One's
Own which are dedicated to publishing the
creative work of women writers. There are a
number of dedicated presses, such as the Second
Story Press and the Women's Press. In addition,
collections and anthologies of women's writing
continue to be published by both trade
and academic presses.
Women Novelists
Women had distinguished themselves in the 19 th
century as poets and novelists and some of them –
Jane Austen, The Brontes, George Eliot, Mrs.
Browning – are among the greatest names in
English literature. With greater opportunities of
education in the 20th century it was inevitable
that more and more women should compete with
men in the popular field of fiction. Those of the
first quarter of the century include Baroness
Orczy, Countess Russel, May Sinclair, Mary
Webb, Katherine Mansfield, Rose Macaulay,
Victoria Sackville West, and Rebecca Wast.
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Baroness Orczy (1865 – 1974) was of Hungarian
birth. She settled in England and became
immensely popular for her romantic stories of the
Scarlet Pimpernel. The hero, an indolent man of
fashion rescues the nobility from the terrors of the
French Revolution. Besides the many sequels to
Scarlet Pimpernel she wrote other historical
romances. Her last novel Links in the Chain of
Life (1946) is autobiographical. Countess Russel
(1866-1941), gentle satirist made her name by
ridiculing the Germans in “Elizabeth and her
German Garden (1898)” and in several other
volumes. May Sinclair (1879-1946) produced her
most ambitious work in The Divine Fire (1904), a
study of a poetic genius, which does not quite
succeed. The same failure marked her psychoanalytical Mary Olivier (1919). Mary Webb (1883
-1927) was a gifted writer of country life, but her
novels Precious Bane, Gone to Earth and others
were never popular because of a highly conscious
and intense style. Katherine Mansfield (18881923). Wife of Middleton Murray, was born in
New Zealand. She won high reputation as a
writer of short stories: Bliss (1920), Garden Party
(1921), The Dove’s Nest (1923), and Something
Childish (1924). Feminist theory is the extension
of feminism into theoretical or philosophical
discourse. It aims to understand the nature of
gender inequality. It examines women's social
roles, experience, interests, and feminist politics
in a variety of fields, such as anthropology and
sociology, communication, psychoanalysis, [1]
economics, literature, education, and philosophy
[2]. Feminist theory focuses on analyzing gender
inequality. Themes explored in feminism include
discrimination, objectification (especially sexual
objectification),
oppression,
patriarchy,[3][4]
stereotyping, art history and contemporary art
and aesthetics. Feminist theories first emerged as
early as 1792 in publications such as A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman by Mary
Wollstonecraft, “The Changing Woman”, “Ain’t I a
Woman”[5], “Speech after Arrest for Illegal
Voting” and so on. “The Changing Woman” is a
Navajo Myth that gave credit to a woman who, in
the end, populated the world [6]. In 1851,
Sojourner Truth addressed women’s rights issues
through her publication, “Ain’t I a Woman”.
Sojourner Truth addressed the issue of women
having limited rights due to men's flawed
perception of women. Truth argued that if a
woman of color can perform tasks that were
supposedly limited to men, then any woman of
any color could perform those same tasks. After
her arrest for illegally voting, Susan B. Anthony
gave a speech within court in which she addressed
the issues of language within the constitution
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documented in her publication, “Speech after
Arrest for Illegal voting” in 1872. Anthony
questioned the authoritative principles of the
constitution and its male gendered language. She
raised the question of why women are accountable
to be punished under law but they cannot use the
law for their own protection (women could not
vote, own property, nor themselves in marriage).
She also critiqued the constitution for its male
gendered language and questioned why women
should have to abide by laws that do not specify
women.
Few Important Women Novelists
Jane Austen: Who hasn’t read Sense and
Sensibility or Pride and Prejudice? The English
writer first gave the novel its distinctly modern
character through her treatment of ordinary
people in everyday life, creating the comedy of
manners of middle-class life in the England of
her time in her novels.
Colette: The French writer’s best novels are
remarkable for their command of sensual
description. Her greatest strength as a writer is
an exact sensory evocation of sounds, smells,
tastes, textures, and colors of her world.
Emily Dickinson: The American lyric poet
lived in seclusion and commanded a singular
brilliance of style and integrity of vision. With
Walt Whitman, Dickinson is widely considered
to be one of the two leading 19th-century
American poets.
Zora Neale Hurston : The American folklorist
and writer, whose work celebrated the African
American culture of the rural South was
associated with the Harlem Renaissance.
Alice Munro : The Canadian short-story writer
gained international recognition with her
exquisitely drawn stories, usually set in
southwestern Ontario, peopled by characters of
Scotch-Irish stock. Munro’s work is noted for its
precise imagery and narrative style, which is at
once lyrical, compelling, economical and intense,
revealing the depth and complexities in the
emotional lives of ordinary individuals.
Verginia Woolfe: The English writer’s novels,
through their nonlinear approaches to narrative,
exerted a major influence on the genre. While
she is best known for her novels, especially Mrs.
Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, Woolf also
wrote pioneering essays on artistic theory,
literary history, women’s writing and the politics
of power.
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Feminist Criticism
Feminist criticism is literary criticism informed
by feminist theory or by the politics of feminism
more broadly. It can be understood as using
feminist principles and ideological discourses to
critique the language of literature, its structure
and being. This school of thought seeks to
describe and analyze the ways in which literature
portrays the narrative of male domination in
regard to female bodies by exploring the economic,
social, political, and psychological forces
embedded within literature [7].
Its history has been broad and varied, from classic
works of nineteenth-century women authors such
as George Eliot and Margaret Fuller to cuttingedge theoretical work in women's studies and
gender studies by "third-wave" authors. In
general, feminist literary criticism before the
1970s-in the first and second waves of feminismwas concerned with women's authorship and the
representation of women's condition within
literature; including the depiction of fictional
female characters. In addition, feminist criticism
was concerned with the exclusion of women from
the literary canon. The 1980s can be
characterized as a decade in which feminist
literary critics looked both backward, to earlier
feminist critical work, and outward, to the work of
feminist in other disciplines [8]. Sometimes the
earlier work was developed relatively uncritically;
sometime it was rigorously attacked and found to
be lacking. The work in other disciplines often
forced literary critics to adopt their own
approaches in order to incorporate the most
interesting and effective aspects of these
alternative approaches. One of the critics who
reviewed some the earlier work was Torli Moi
(1985).
She broke down the perceived opposition between
the Anglo-American and French traditions
through a summary and analysis of the main
kinds of these criticisms, albeit with the notable
exclusion of black studies. Moreover, she
introduced the possibility of incorporating the two
traditions. Subsequently, others, including Sara
Mills and her coeditors (1989), have drawn on her
work to bring a combined approach to a number of
well-known literary texts.
However, at the same time, other critics still
worked mainly in one of these two traditions.
Following on from Showalter’s exploration of
nineteenth and twentieth century novelists, Jane
Spencer (1986) explored the work of a number of
neglected women writers of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries. This exploration of an
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earlier period enabled her to claim that women
writers played a much more important role in the
development of the novel than had been allowed
by other (male) historians of the genre [9-10].
However, whilst some feminists were developing
and reacting against existing feminist criticism,
others were questioning the definition of theory
itself. Barbara Christian (1987) argued that
defining theory as abstract logic privileged a
Western philosophical tradition and excluded the
theoriuring of people of color which is found in
story making and telling, riddles, and proverbs.
Despite such debates, many other feminist critics
still found the use of theory effective. However,
the theories within the discipline of literature,
even those which were feminist, were increasingly
perceived as less than adequate and many
feminist critics looked to work being written by
feminists in other disciplines to compensate for
this inadequacy. Whilst feminist criticism has
traditionally been interdisciplinary, combining
textual analysis with an interest in the social
construction of gender, during the 1980s this
interdisciplinary
approach
broadened
to
incorporate work in disciplines previously
ignored. For example, feminist critics looked to
gender theory in science, such as Evelyn Fox
Keller’s (1992) feminist critiques of the
construction of science; history, including Joan
Scott’s (1992) discussions of an approach which is
both feminist and poststructuralist; and queer
theory, which identifies and reverses homophobic
categories to link sexuality with and race political
activism, as in Eve Kosofsky Sedgewick’s (1985)
study which identifies the links between
homophobia and misogyny. The legacy of such
incorporations plus the revisions of the earlier
feminist criticism meant that feminist literary
critics writing in the 1990s inherited a rich legacy
on which they could base their work. The
combining of existing feminist criticism with
feminist theory from other disciplines proved to be
a productive dynamic in the 1990s.
Important influences on feminist literary criticism
in the 1990s included Liesbet van Zoonen’s (1994)
work in media studies. The close relationship
between some media study approaches, which
consider the visuals and narrative characteristics
of texts and genres through semiotic and
structural analysis, the traditional literary
criticism has meant that this relationship has
been a comfortable one and conductive to the
production of much interesting work.
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Toni Morrison
Morrison’s Life and Art
The American writer, winner of the 1993 Nobel
Prize for Literature, is noted for her examination
of black experience (particularly black female
experience) within the black community.
Her Beloved (1987), based on the true story of a
runaway slave who, at the point of recapture, kills
her infant daughter in order to spare her a life of
slavery, won a Pulitzer.
Toni Morrison was born and brought up in Lorain,
Ohio, which is in the north but her maternal
grandparents had emigrated from Alabama to
Ohio in order to escape racism and poverty and to
find greater opportunities for their children. Her
father likewise left Georgia to escape the racial
violence rampant there. She grew up in what has
been called “a vibrant African American culture.”
In her interview Toni Morrison talks of the rich
cultural and imaginative life of her family.
Morrison and Women Characters
In a 1986 interview Toni Morrison explained that
she came to writing fiction because she felt that
“There were no books about me, I didn’t exist in
all the literature I had read . . . This person, this
female, this black did not exist . . .” So she
stepped in to fill the vacancy.
In the beginning she was “just interested in . . .
placing black women center stage in the text, and
not as the all-knowing, infallible black matriarch
but as a flawed here, triumphant there, mean,
nice, complicated woman, and some of them win
and some of them lose. I’m very interested in why
and how that happens, but here was this vacancy
in the literature that I had any familiarity with
and the vacancy was me, or the women I knew. So
that preoccupied me a great deal in the
beginning” [11].
This explains her focus on Pecola and Claudia and
Frieda in The Bluest Eyes (1970) and on Sula and
Nel in Sula (1973). Later on she was also to be
“onterested in the relationship of black men and
black women and the axes on which those
relationships frequently turn, and how they
complement each other, fulfil one another or hurt
one another and are made whole or prevented
from wholeness by things that they have
incorporated into their psyche”
The Bluest Eyes
The Bluest Eyes novel is about growing up black
and female and poor in racist American. Pecola
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Breedlove who is the central character ironically
comes from a loveless poor home which is almost
broken. Claudia the narrator and her sister
Frieda belong to a more stable home where they
are loved, but economically they are only slightly
better off. Since Claudia is recalling her childhood
days with Pecola, we have an eyewitness account
of their curiosity and their fears about
menstruation, pregnancy, and what love is. In
Lorain, Ohio, 9-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her
10-year-old sister Frieda live with their parents,
who take two other people into their home: Mr.
Henry, a tenant, and Pecola Breedlove, a
temporary foster child whose house was burned
down by her wildly unstable father, Cholly: a man
widely gossiped about in the community. Pecola is
a quiet, passive young girl with a hard life, whose
parents are constantly fighting, both verbally and
physically. Pecola is continually reminded of what
an "ugly" girl she is, fueling her desire to be white
with blue eyes. Most chapters' titles are extracts
from the Dick and Jane paragraph in the novel's
prologue, presenting a white family that may be
contrasted with Pecola's; perhaps to incite
discomfort, the chapter titles contain much
sudden repetition of words or phrases, many cutoff words, and no interword separations. The
novel, through flashbacks, explores the younger
years of both of Pecola's parents, Cholly and
Pauline, and their struggles as African-Americans
in a largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant
community. Pauline now works as a servant for a
wealthier white family. One day in the novel's
present time, while Pecola is doing dishes, a
drunk Cholly rapes her. His motives are largely
confusing, seemingly a combination of both love
and hate. After raping her a second time, he flees,
leaving her pregnant. Claudia and Frieda are the
only two in the community that hope for Pecola's
child to survive in the coming months.
Consequently, they give up the money they had
been saving to buy a bicycle, instead planting
marigold seeds with the superstitious belief that if
the flowers bloom, Pecola's baby will survive. The
marigolds never bloom, and Pecola's child, who is
born prematurely, dies. In the aftermath, a
dialogue is presented between two sides of
Pecola's own deluded imagination, in which she
indicates strangely positive feelings about her
rape by her father. In this internal conversation,
Pecola speaks as though her wish has been
granted: she believes that she now has blue eyes.
Claudia, as narrator a final time, describes the
recent phenomenon of Pecola's insanity and
suggests that Cholly (who has since died) may
have shown Pecola the only love he could by
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raping her. Claudia lastly laments on her belief
that the whole community, herself included, have
used Pecola as a sort of scapegoat to make
themselves feel prettier. Henry Louis Gates Jr.
calls Toni Morrison’s writing “an anomaly,”
because it is both popular and difficult. “A subtle
craftsperson and a compelling weaver of tales,” he
writes, “she ‘tells a good story,’ but the stories she
tells are not calculated to please” [12].
The reader encounters both these features in the
initial pages of The Bluest Eye. First to contend
with is an extract from the now discredited Dick
and Jane reader, which millions of American
schoolchildren, up until approximately the 1970s,
used to learn how to read. For varying reasons,
the primer fell out of favor approximately four
decades ago. Prior to that, it was part of the
American educational establishment, and many
older adults readily recognize the characters and
are able to recite specific sentences. The first
sentences of the novel replicate a brief and
conventionally written passage from the primer,
followed by the same sentences minus all marks
of punctuation, and finally, the same passage
repeated with all spaces between the words
eliminated.
Morrison’s alteration and distortion of the words
is jarring. The repetition duplicates our own early
reading experiences where sentence following
sentence
yielded
increasing
detail
and
understanding, but along with the memory of the
drill comes the recognition of the power of words
and ideas. Awareness of hierarchy and exclusion
are central issues in the novel, experienced
minimally in the domestic life but as a pervasive
and insidious influence outside the home. An
example in the opening of the novel is embodied
in the figure of Rosemary Vilanucci, the sisters’
next-door neighbor. The name “Vilanucci”
identifies her as belonging to one of the white
immigrant families that came to the industrial
Midwest for the promise of employment.
Rosemary taunts the sisters by sitting in the
family Buick eating bread with butter on it. The
scene is reminiscent of the dramas all children
must endure in the early years of identity
formation. It also functions as a portal into the
divisions between people and classes and points to
the destructive influence of internalizing the
idealized images of the dominant culture. The
black sisters are burdened with “double
consciousness”-a term from the writings of W.E.B.
Du Bois that refers to the two identities minority
people carry with them-one of their actual self
and the second as the “other” or the “object” as
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rendered in the eyes (or gaze) of the white person.
Women of color’s concerns and struggles have
been marginalized, slighted and even ignored
within the agenda of women’s movement [13].
However, unlike the Womanist movement which
ignores the problems of black women, Morrison in
Tar Baby argues both black women’s and white
women’s suppression in male dominant society
with class-sensitive manner. it becomes apparent
that the upper-class characters discriminate
against others feeling superior and avoid having
close relationship with the poorest class. For
instance, in The Bluest Eye, the upper-class
family living close to the school playground
humiliates Pecola who belongs to poorest class. A
light-skinned, wealthy black girl, Maureen who is
new at the local school, accepts everyone else’s
assumption that she is superior and temporarily
befriends her and makes fun of her. Pecola even
raped by her father and she gets pregnant. With
this trauma, Pecola begins to think that her
father’s abuse is resulted from her ugliness and
becomes convinced that beauty would make
people respect her, and would solve all of her
problems [14].
When she stays at the MacTeers, the only family
that helped her and took care of her, she spends
the happiest time in her life. Pecola wishes to
have blue eyes obsessively since she feels that
they will make her loved and accepted by the
people in her life. Pereira states that Pecola's
desire for blue eyes reflects a community absorbed
by white ideas of what is beautiful. Both the
beauty ideal and the "economic freedom" appeals
to African American women since African
American women "[are] denied access to the most
ordinary kind of jobs”. So they believe that
without beauty there is no way to earn their
living or live a comfortable life. However, the
African American women’s position in the society
seems harsher than white women in general since
they experience triple oppression as race, class
and gender simultaneously. As long as they are
exposed to the symbolic meanings attached to the
devalued images created by society and media,
black women will continue to suffer from
discrimination and the male domination [15].
Conclusion
Toni Morrison’s novels Tar Baby and The Bluest
Eye articulates race, gender and class conflicts
while constitute a critique of the oppression of
black women in the United States and how the
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social structures are influenced by these conflicts.
African-American female characters in both of
Morrison’s novels are influenced bymultiple
oppression and are triply marginalized on account
of their race, gender and class. Racism plays a
vital role as it oppresses inferior groups,
especially in this case the black women who are a
gendered subaltern. These issues of racism and
being the second sex get more complicated in the
context of a capitalist society where the poor black
women are exposed to more repression and
discrimination.
Mostly,
in
white
women
narratives, there is a tendency to underestimate
black women’s oppression. As Feifer and Maher
pointed out the fact that ‚there are prominent
distinction between the black feminist and
womanist movement from the modern feminist
movement, and this has created a separation of
ideologies from one another. Toni Morrison’s
fiction is mostly concerned with racism, the black
women’s oppression and class conflicts and how
they interact to lead discrimination in the society.
As she indicates that narrative has never been
merely entertainment for me, it is, I believe, one
of the principle ways in which we absorb
knowledge [16].
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