Contemporary Women's Fiction. Feminist Narratives in Selected Twentieth Century Women's Novels

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Chapter 3. TONI MORRISON'S THE BLUEST EYE:
READING RELIGION, ETHICS AND AESTHETICS OF THE AFRICAN-AMERICAN WOMAN:
Whether we generalise or codify Toni Morrison's writing as African-American women's fiction or feminist fiction or postmodern fiction, it remains a 'generic' ambiguity. Rather than such definitive signifiers, Toni Morrison's oeuvre of fiction is quite possibly best summed up in her own words, when she tells an interviewer:"I write for black women. We are not addressing the men, as some white female writers do. We are not attacking each other, as both black and white men do. Black women writers look at things in an unforgiving loving way. They are writing to repossess, rename, reown".
This repossession and renaming is a process that becomes Morrison in a like manner as Alice Walker, Maya Angelou, Gloria Naylor or Toni Cade Bambara-enacting this identity is Morrison's fiction, as reformative and not static, or, to borrow from the French philosopher, Gilles Deleuze, active, not reactive. Morrison effectively "refute(s) the hierarchical order shaped by the concepts of centre and periphery and question the ideology on which the order is based" (Pal 2439) through her fiction, and also particularly in the novel under present consideration, The Bluest Eye (1970). While the apparent strand of postmodernity in Morrison's fiction is her accentuation of certain identifying characteristics of Afrocentrism, the celebration of difference is visible as well, as is the reliance on metanarratives. And although it has been stated that "exploring the complexity of Black female experience in white America," Morrison, in The Bluest Eye in particular, attempts to magnify and eventually "resolve the contradiction inherent in her African-American identity" (Ibid). Morrison's novels are an exploration of blackness-a blackness that includes the woman, the coloniality, the Postcoloniality, the enslavement, the prejudices, the denial of basics, of an identity, of

Subashish Bhattacharjee is a UGC-Research Fellow and Teaching Assistant at the Department of English, University of North Bengal, India. He is also Visiting Faculty at Cooch Behar Panchanan Barma University and University of North Bengal, Jalpaiguri Campus. He has numerous publications to his credit. He is also the founder and Editor of The Apollonian: A Journal of Interdisciplinary Studies.
Dipak Barman is a Research Scholar at the Department of English, University of North Bengal, India. He has formerly been a Guest Faculty at ABN Seal College, University of North Bengal. He has published several articles in reputed journals and edited books, and presented papers in seminars.