Violence and Rejection: The Hegemony of White Culture and Its Influence on the Mother–Daughter Relationship in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
Violence and Rejection: The Hegemony of White Culture and Its Influence on the Mother–Daughter Relationship in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Summary/Abstract: For quite a long time, mainstream academic discourse has ignored the significance of the mother–daughter relationship and excluded it from thorough scholarly analysis. However, the theme developed the interest of twentieth-century women’s literature, and the bond between a mother and her daughter marked its presence with the emergence of motherhood studies in the 1970s. Toni Morrison – one of the finest black female writers – in her debut novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), illustrates the complex bond between Pauline and Pecola Breedlove. Their relationship is shaped by the women’s fascination with white culture and the standards it promotes. In the novel, Morrison raises awareness of black women’s marginalisation and the way in which white culture shapes a woman’s vision of herself. The aim of this paper is to analyse the destructive influence of white hegemony on the perception of the black female self and its devastating effect on the mother–daughter relationship in The Bluest Eye.

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