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Volume 10, Numéro 1, Pages 125-144
2025-01-08
Panopticism And The Deconstruction Of The Institutionalized Discourse Of Racialized Beauty In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Authors : Berrezoug Hanaà .
Abstract
The impact of the notion of beauty on individuals is at the heart of The Bluest Eye. The characters’ admittance of their ugliness is a potentially fatal form of self-loathing. Furthermore, it is a means of reinforcing and confirming the normative beauty standards that the Whites have already established against them and that result in Pecola’s development of a scapegoat identity. The racialized meaning of beauty in The Bluest Eye maintains that the outside beauty reflects inner moral virtue. Pecola’s yearning for blue eyes reveals her self-loathing as she condones the normative racialized representations of beauty. Her final descent into madness could be blamed on the White supremacist myth of beauty. Thus, this paper is mainly concerned with Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as a counter-discursive strategy to dismantle the already institutionalized racialized standards of beauty. This research is qualitatively carried out on Michel Foucault’s disciplinary concept of the panopticon to show how America built a massive panoptic system around the Hollywood industry. It further draws upon Morrison’s (1971) “What the Black Woman Thinks About Women's Lib” to reveal how she succeeds in revolutionizing the notion of beauty by building consensual empathy towards a little black girl who goes insane because of this panoptic mechanism.
Keywords
beauty ; counter discourse ; panopticism; race; the bluest eye ; toni morrison
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