Contemporary Women's Fiction
Feminist Narratives in Selected Twentieth Century Women's Novels
©2015
Academic Paper
71 Pages
Summary
Women’s writing in the twentieth century has shown a dramatic shift in its preoccupations and intentions. Rather than occupying itself with the trivialities of the social and domestic spheres, the writing by women in the latter half of the twentieth century and approaching the twenty-first century inheres concerns such as political, historical, questions of gender equity and rights, interrogations of normative and patriarchal practices and other such issues that have not been adequately addressed in women’s writing thus far. The four essays in the present volume are certainly not exhaustive or adequate in this regard — that of addressing this lacuna in literary scholarship — but it may be viewed as a attempt to bridge the proverbial gap. As a precursor to further scholarly works in the area, already existing as well as forthcoming, the essays discuss the works of Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Bapsi Sidhwa, Manju Kapur and Sunanda Sikdar. Although the essays purport to exploring select areas of the authors’ oeuvre, the distinctive fictional structures of the authors help us to explore wider theoretical and critical issues such as postmodernity, postcolonialism, feminism, globalism, nationalism and other related issues.
Excerpt
Table Of Contents
4
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We would like to thank our teachers, especially at the university, who have inspired us
significantly to engage with issues more critically and interrogatively. We would like to
acknowledge the inspiration of Prof G.N. Ray especially--a teacher and guide who has
striven to endow us with the values that he himself abides by. This book is also a small
dedication to him.
We would like to thank out parents for their patience, cooperation and understanding in our
efforts.
Our colleagues at respective places of employment deserve mention and acknowledgement
for their support.
5
INTRODUCTION:
THE SPACE OF/FOR WOMEN'S WRITING
Women's fiction as a genre in itself is a rather late development, with a gamut of postcolonial
and postmodern women authors producing the largesse of the literary output attributed to this
development. Women's writing generally encompasses issues that are considerably more
varied than those of the mainstream authors' works: issues such as women's rights and its
myriad occupancies come forth in such writings that allow a commiseration of approaches
both theoretical and practical. The radicalisation of writing in the twentieth century and the
increase and upsurge in women's education could be cited as some of the reasons for the
literary production in this genre as well as the increase in interest in women's writing. The
scope of the volume coincides with this spurt in scholarship dedicated to exploring the
possibilities of women's writing.
Some of the earliest and more popular instances of women's fiction in the English language
are in the works of Aphra Behn, Jane Austen, the Brontës, Elizabeth Gaskell, Elizabeth
Barrett Browning, Harriet Martineau, George Eliot, and thereafter widening vastly with the
onset of the twentieth century to include authorship as varied as Virginia Woolf, Dorothy
Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Muriel Spark, Iris Murdoch, Doris Lessing, Jean Rhys,
Margaret Drabble, A.S. Byatt, Beryl Bainbridge and a spate of later authors who practised
gradually varying techniques of approach to a woman's language. The linguistic necessity
was mandated only insofar as to facilitate a distinction for the genre -- although it is
debatable whether there were any real world implications of the linguistic divide. However,
with the evolution of women's writing moving forward from the canonical, the necessity to
explore the specific territories became a more pertinent imperative on part of scholars, thus
attributed to the immense spurt in scholarship specifically addressing the lacuna of
investigation that takes into consideration specific studies rather than locating forced points
of similarity. As has been previously noted in Dr. Chakraverty's study of women's writing:
"[Women's] text have occupied a central position in all literary writings representing a high
standard of social and literary theories, attempting to examine not only with technique but
also with tabooed subject matters in various forms such as fiction, drama, prose and short
stories" (Chakraverty 1-2).
One of the most iconic books to deal with the `context' of women's writing, or `literature', to
be more specific, is Elaine Showalter's 1977 book, A Literature of Their Own: English
6
Women Novelists from Brontë to Lessing, maps a broader readership by specifying the
literary importance of women's writing. Besides the more renowned literary representatives
among the women authors of each successive period, Showalter's book is notable for its
sweeping survey inclusive of remarkable women authors such as Florence Nightingale,
Charlotte Yonge, Dinah Mulock Craik, Margaret Oliphant, Elizabeth Lynn Linton of the
Victorian and its peripheral periods; Mary Braddon, Rhoda Broughton, and Florence Marryat
of the immediate post-Victorian period, and later authors such as Sarah Grand, George
Egerton, Mona Caird, Elizabeth Robins, Olive Schreiner--authors whose writings reflect a
particular cultural awareness that was absent from the predominantly `patriarchal' ordination
of literature of thee previous periods. The present volume does not intend to compete with
Showalter's magnificent volume, and neither do we seek to compensate for the absences in
that or any subsequent volumes of critical contemplation on women writers (a substantial
bibliography of such works is provided at the end of the volume). The necessity to indulge in
compiling a volume like the present one arises at least partially from Showalter's comments
in her seminal essay, "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness":
"The dominant culture need not consider the muted, except to rail against `the
woman's part' in itself. Thus we need more subtle and supple accounts of influence,
not just to explain women's writing but also to understand how men's writing has
resisted the acknowledgement of female precursors. [...] women's fiction can be read
as a double-voiced discourse, containing a `dominant' and a `muted' story."
(Showalter 344)
It is essential to map at times creative writings and output by sections of society considered or
rendered marginal. Women's writing conforms to the very rubric of representative creative
practice by a marginalised group and of a style and subjectivity that deals with an isolated
section of critical or practical thought. In the words of Susie Tharu and K. Lalita:
"We believe that a feminist literary history must map the play of forces in the
imaginative worlds in which women wrote, and read their literary initiatives not as an
endless repetition of present day rebellions or dreams of triumph, but as different
attempts to engage with the force and the conflict of the multiple cross-cutting
determinations of those worlds."
(Tharu and Lalita 1993: 26)
7
The process of creativity, of creation and of literary production has different ethics and values
for women writers who allow the proliferation of their own ideals and conditions to seep
through the literary fabric as opposed to more patriarchal literary excursions where the
opinions of the woman are considered as removable isotopes. Not only have women
challenged the role and authority of patriarchy through their `writing back', but they have
also produced some of the most definitive and radicalised examples and instances of literary
history, producing a mutinous linguistic element that acts as an ideal for emancipatory
circumstances, as Beauvoir states:
"Much more interesting are the insurgent females who have challenged this unjust
society; a literature of protest can engender sincere and powerful society."
(Beauvoir 718)
It is notable that all five women authors considered in this volume belong to the insurgent
sections, producing non-conformist and non-pacifist literature that challenges not only the
social mores and patriarchal oppression but also the ideologies that have set back women's
rights, education and other contingencies farther back.
From in between the pioneers of women's writing to the present practitioners of the `genre'
we have allotted chapters to a selection of authors and their works chiefly to demonstrate the
range of creative output that is possible in this era of globalisation. Modern day publishing
has sought to give impetus to authors irrespective of national, regional or linguistic barriers,
and the objective of this volume is to endorse that very ethos in as many ways as possible.
The postcolonial, postmodern domain of fiction is rife with practitioners who have shown a
consistent tendency to outdo themselves with each consecutive attempt. The following
chapters in the volume are dedicated to selective readings of such authors who have shown
incredible flair in their writing. Each author has been seminal in her contribution to the genre
of longer works of fiction, producing some of the finest and most distinctive works of fiction
in the last century, and continuing further into the present century. Besides feminist issues,
the authors concern themselves with issues such as race, gender, sexuality, incest, infidelity,
LGBTQ rights and issues, migration, diaspora, colonialism, postcolonialism, globalisation,
education, marriage, child psychology, environment and ecology, language, religion, caste,
colour, nationality, regional issues, partition, politics, statehood and affiliation, besides
myriad other dimensions that assert themselves through their works. The volume is a mere
8
introductory piece towards what is definitely a far wider area of contention, and, as we hope
towards a companion volume of equally wider academic scope.
The authors covered in this volume are by no means exhaustive or definitive examples of
women's writing, but rather a showcase of the evolution of this sub-genre in terms of its
movement from the practitioners of the preceding centuries to those women writing at the
intersection of change in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Authors such as Margaret
Atwood, Toni Morrison, Bapsi Sidhwa, Manju Kapur, Taslima Nasreen and Sunanda Sikdar,
who have been explored critically in this volume with regard to select works, are literary
practitioners who have showcased remarkable literary abilities in their writing, mostly a
significant oeuvre. Although Taslima Nasreen's and Sunanda Sikdar's writing is not strictly
in the domain of English language writing, but it was imperative to show how the
proliferation of a postcolonial ethos of fiction-making is also visible on the translation sphere.
The transnationalism of the two authors' translated works and their importance in
postcolonial studies presently produces the ambit of theoretical conduit necessary to approach
the texts and the authors from a theoretical point-of-view. While the majority of the authors
are decidedly postcolonial as per the literary generic they belong to, even Toni Morrison's
fiction is assimilated as part of the configuration with which the comparative study of the
authors' work is dealt with in the present volume.
There are several glaring omissions in the volume, especially if we consider the absence of
Alice Walker, Doris Lessing, Iris Murdoch, Zadie Smith, Kiran Desai, Jhumpa Lahiri, Angela
Carter, Mahasweta Devi, Bapsi Sidhwa, Anita Desai or the numerous other equally
significant authors of the genre we like to call here `women's fiction'. An apologetic attempt
is made at the end of this volume by introducing these authors, but a more prescriptive and
necessary detailing is expected in a later, and possible, companion volume. As it stands, an
exhaustive study of women's writing is not possible due largely to the immense variety and
cornucopia of writing that has emerged of late. However, the current volume marks an
(apologetic) attempt to chart the territories of existing women fiction writers, using a blend
that highlights the possible varieties at our possession.
The first chapter is focused on Nobel laureate Toni Morrison's highly acclaimed first novel,
The Bluest Eye (1970). The novel is noted for its narrative technique and its realistic portrayal
of the conditions of a young black girl's growing up in times when oppression for the woman
of colour came not only from racial considerations and issues but also economic and gender.
9
The issues which are covered in the chapter can also be found across Morrison's other works,
namely her concern with the issues of religion, racism, and gender issues such as incest or
incestuous rape or the inter and intra-gender paradigms that plague relationships across
colour, caste, creed, religion, language and nationality. The essay is also an extensive study
of the concept of the `fourth face of God' which had also been discussed in Allen
Alexander's essay but with the added perspective of the transnational and postcolonial
theoretical scaffolding that underpins the essays in this volume.
The second chapter is dedicated to a close reading of the various issues that can be found in
Margaret Atwood's novel, Surfacing. Atwood, a Booker winner, writes widely on
environmental issues, also allowing the infusion of feminist interrogation of her interested
areas. She is also a postcolonial author insofar as her conditioning as a Canadian author
seeking emancipation from American neo-imperialism is concerned. The novel deals with
multiplicities including the context of `gaze', animality and perversion, colonialism of the
globalised world by American hegemonic forces and environmental issues. The chapter is an
attempt to capture these diverse areas of Atwood's investigation and argument through an
analysis of the individual novel. Multiple theoretical thrusts can be found in the chapter, thus
also acting as an exercise in theory-in-practice.
The `Afterword' to the volume presented a unique dilemma to us--should we present an
Afterword that tries to locate similarities in the various authors discussed or should we
discuss their dissimilarities, or even their individual literary characteristics? However, the
resolution was provided through the very lacuna in the present volume--the absence of
multiple authors whom we would have liked to include. Therefore, the Afterword also acts as
a glossary where we have written short biographical entries on important twentieth century
women writers across nationalities. The short span of volume length allotted to the entries
dissuades us from writing at length about each author but we have discussed thei salient
features of their writings, their important works and any celebrated awards or prizes won by
them. Much like the book, the list too seems inadequate to us at various times but should act
as a precursor to a follow up volume rather than a full fledged glossary that could cover most
or all reference work for the presently discussed genre.
Journals such as Women's Writing (Taylor and Francis) and Contemporary Women's Writing
(Oxford) have provided a wider stage for interaction between the scholarly reader and the
possibilities in the thus far isolated `genre' of women's writing, consisting in part of fiction.
10
With volumes such as the present one and also multiple volumes being dedicated towards the
reading of individual authors by renowned academicians, it is inevitable that the genre of
women's writing is to be well developed not merely in practice but also in analysis in due
time. The deficiency in substantial analyses of women's writing requires longer discussions
than this, and the Afterword could possibly act as an induct towards a more significant
volume with a wider spread of women fictioneers who may be analysed from a comparative
and theoretical perspective replete with considerations of Poststructuralism, postcolonialism,
postmodernism and the scaffolding of world literature in a globalised world.
Works Cited
Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley. New York: Knopf, 1953. Print.
Chakraverty, Lalima. Gender and Culture in the Works of Indian Subcontinent's Select
Women Novelists. New Delhi: Atlantic, 2012. Print.
Showalter, Elaine. "Feminist Criticism in the Wilderness." Modern Criticism and Theory: A
Reader. Ed. David Lodge. New Delhi: Pearson, 2007. 325-348. Print.
Tharu, Susie and Lalita, K. Women's Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, Vol. I. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.
Tharu, Susie and Lalita, K. Women's Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present, Vol. II. New
Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1993. Print.
11
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."
1
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 suffrage and of opinion, the suppression of free will and rationality, of
expression--of being "a Black woman in a white male hegemonic society" (Ibid).
One of the fundamental queries pursued in this essay--the question of religion and
godhead--is also a contested area for Morrison, by extension of the Eurocentric values that
such coded religion endorses. As Morrison states: "My work requires me to think about how
free I can be as an African-American woman writer in my genderised, sexualised, wholly
racialised world."
2
The questioning takes a hermeneutic, more than an epistemic, format--
12
the ordinance is on the emancipating from a European epistemology which privileges
canonical religion, whiteness, and other remedial ancillaries whereas the blacks are
marginalised and forcefully removed from the mainstream
3
. The Bluest Eye, an early novel,
as well as one which brought considerable attention to Morrison, exposed the layers of
impairment that this whiteness of the mainstream inflicted upon the minoritarian blackness.
While interrogating the hegemonic formations that constructed micro-societies of each black
existence Morrison also endorsed a questioning of religion--`the fourth face of God' as Allen
Alexander's excellent essay
4
introduces to us as being innately and intricately absorbed
within the narrative of the novel. Why the extensive suffering without any iota of salvation
from the pre-condition of fallenness only on the part of the Black?--is a question that seems
to emanate from Morrison's The Bluest Eye.
The `double consciousness' which Morrison explores in The Bluest Eye is rooted in African-
American existence--the inclusive exclusion of the community, on the basis of color, from
the American dream and parallel experiences. The psychological fragmentation of the
African-American individual facing such discrimination and exclusion is methodically
explored by W E B Dubois:
"[The] Negro is a sort of 7th son, born with a veil and gifted with second sight in this
American world, a world which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets
him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation
this double consciousness, this sense of always looking at one's self through the eyes
of others, of measuring one's soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused
contempt and pity."
5
This mirroring oneself through prejudiced eyes is a practice that the African-American
individual, the sufferer, and especially the oppressed black woman has to undergo--othering
the self continuously in order to locate the vantage point. The absent centre of whiteness and
blue eyes is made the most desirable object, and its continued absence makes her own
existence criminal and ugly for Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist of the novel. The American
dream for this young African-American girl is to become the object of her fetish--a fair, or
pure white woman, with blue eyes--symbols of Caucasian-ness that she is genetically devoid
of. Perhaps the tradition of alienating the African origin person is also extensively responsible
for the psychological evolution of Pecola in this manner, the justification of slave narratives
by historians, politicians and philosophers including Hume, Kant and Hegel, and the
13
development of eugenics as an exploration into the deficiencies of an entire racial
community.
Before encroaching upon the domain of the `fourth face of god', we shall explore some of the
other relevant areas for considering the novel, including the fundamental concepts of African-
American identity, blackness and the conception of beauty, and the representation of a
psychological fragmentation that Morrison aptly induces with her exploratory, almost
postmodern style of narrativising. Morrison's layered style of fiction makes it difficult to
place within specific contexts without the possibility of overlapping ideas, but it is also this
diversity that ensures her intense validity beyond the very society or culture she consciously
affects in her novels, to a greater readership, presenting her personal critique of
historiography through what Henry Louis gates refers to as "speakerly texts"
6
.
The ideological and socio-normative policies of the dominant group are reinforced through
the institutions that affect the regulations--education, mass or popular culture, healthcare,
media, religion et al. And, by extension, it is the image of the dominant race or group that
becomes a normative status for all subordinate social classes and racial groups--a viable and
enviable non-being of whiteness, white-defined beauty and blue eyes which the protagonist
of The Bluest Eye wishes to appropriate in and for herself. Patricia Hill Collins has identified
the axis of beautification and the multiplicities involved in the `Afrocentric' concept of
beauty thus:
"From an Afrocentric perspective, women's beauty is not based solely on physical
criteria because mind, spirit, and body are not conceptualised as separate, oppositional
spheres. Instead, all are central in aesthetic assessments of individuals and their
creations. Beauty is functional in that it has not meaning independent of the group."
(Collins 89)
And this holistic notion of beauty when corrupted by a hybrid sense of artificial beauty is
"probably the most destructive idea in human history and thought" (Morrison 1999).
Morrison's fiction is replete with a distinct atmosphere of a Black woman's survivalism in a
scenario where she is shunned by white man's exclusivity and is also a victim of the rages of
the African-American male, and where her psychology is the content to be dominated and
transformed, as
14
"Indeed, the interests of the oppressors lie in changing the consciousness of the
oppressed, not the situation which oppresses them . . . for the more the oppressed can
be led to adapt to that situation, the more easily they can be dominated".
(Freire 47)
Beauty, or the contemporary cultural connotation of the concept of beauty, is a major site of
conflict in The Bluest Eye, engendering the interrogation of broader and more varied
discourses, as Ágnes Surányi remarks:
"A tragic story of child abuse, with race, gender and class mixed in, The Bluest Eye is
concerned with racial self-loathing, the loss of identity, and shame. Even though the
setting for the story is 194041 the beginning of World War II for the United States
it is also "presentist" in concept, ideologically grounded in the 1960s when "Black
is Beautiful" entered into the popular, if more militant, discourse. Setting out to write
a story that she herself wanted to read, Morrison worried that this slogan of racial
pride would be unable to dispel the long-term psychic effects of prejudices rooted in
racialism and sexism."
(Surányi 11)
The popular culture phenomenon that had been rooted in Black consciousness was potent
enough to transgress into the racial psyche as a permanent fixture. The icon-bearing impact of
Hollywood culture, of the several consumer-centric industries that decided on the definition
of beauty ensured it at the cost of a marginalised section that would be brutally cut off from
that very segmentation of beauty. In The Bluest Eye the chronicling of this beauty locates the
centre of this manufactured beauty in the white sections of the American populace, and the
Blacks on the other end of this hegemony of appearance. The variations of the reception of
this ideological `beauty' are to be seen in Claudia's mutilation of the doll to find out the
essence of the blue eyes that represent this notion of beauty, and in Pecola's ardent desire to
become invisible, limb by limb, as an attempt to escape the squalor of her life, but her
inability to get rid of the complexion of her eyes. "Like Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man her
"ugly" black skin impedes any acknowledgment of the child within" (Surányi 12).
Pedagogy, adoption and adaptation are indeed the blunt instruments of the white society's
domination over the African-Americans, as Morrison recounts. Strategic curriculum ensures
the modelling of the young learner within the prescribed social normative of white society, as
even the school primer testifies to:
15
"Here is the house. It is green and white. It has a red door. It is very pretty. Here is the
family. Mother, Father, Dick and Jane live in the green-and-white house. They are
very happy . . ."
(Morrison 1)
Going against the grain of humanism and enlightenment rationality as means of self-progress,
education thus becomes a confinement that upholds stereotypes and prejudices without overt
or violent means, rather through the propagation of an ideology. This ideology of preference
is what Morrison directs her diatribe against, and she is conscious of the acquiescence that
African-Americans showcase when encountering the effects of such ideological strategies. It
is such false appropriation that leads to the eventual disintegration of the psychological
makeup of Pecola: "Ontologically insecure, she is doomed to fragmentation. Her eventual
retreat into insanity reveals her pathetic inability to cope with her hostile environment" (Pal
1994: 2440). However, this collapse of an African-American girl's identity does not cause
Morrison to launch into an indictment against the vicissitudes of the dominant white class,
but rather to ensure a balanced overview where she carefully examines the fault lines existing
within the Black community as well, especially if we are to inspect the development of the
character of Cholly Breedlove, Pecola's father, an individual who amply presents the vices of
his racial masculinity or patriarchy with justification. Paternal rape has been a common
signifier of the deterioration of Black society in America in such novels as Ralph Ellison's
Invisible Man and Alice Walker's The Color Purple as well--always depicted as a taboo but
ever present as a dreadful, and very real, spectre of Black associativeness.
Two values which definitively populate the fiction of Morrison, and especially The Bluest
Eye, are the contexts of family and African-`Americanism'. Pecola is devoid of a stable and
nurturing family structure, unlike Claudia, and is therefore always in a state of hapless
ambiguity. The scaffolding of the family structure produces an ontological certainty which
Pecola lacks, and longs for. Morrison affects her novels with the most poignant, poetic and
aesthetically rendered scenes of mother-daughter interaction, and a similar scene in The
Bluest Eye brings out the absent familial centre in Pecola--the scene where Claudia's
sickness is met with a fretful mother. Although an incorrect usage within the current scenario
of gender enquiries, Morrison's depicted sororities are wholesome and inclusive for
themselves, preparing a strong bond that helps execute the most difficult personal decisions.
Furthermore, Morrison does not merely have to contend with the question of Afrocentrism,
16
that Alice Walker takes up radically and specifically, but has to advocate African cultural
values in conjunction with her innate Americanism:
"Whereas Alice Walker in her recent novels tends to take a radical Afrocentric
feminist position, Morrison while advocating African cultural values is also conscious
of the complexity of her situation as African and American and therefore explores the
dynamics of cultural conflict."
(Pal 2443)
Beyond the generic enquiries that may be directed to Morrison's The Blest Eye is the
interrogation and presentation of religion in the novel. As Allen Alexander states:
"Religious references, both from Western and African sources, abound in Toni
Morrison's fiction, but nowhere are they more intriguing or perplexing than in The
Bluest Eye. And of the many fascinating religious references in this novel, the most
complex-and perhaps, therefore, the richest-are her representations of and allusions to
God. In Morrison's fictional world, God's characteristics are not limited to those
represented by the traditional Western notion of the Trinity: Father, Son, and Holy
Ghost. Instead, God possesses a fourth face, one that is an explanation for all those
things-the existence of evil, the suffering of the innocent and just-that seem so
inexplicable in the face of a religious tradition that preaches the omnipotence of a
benevolent God."
(Alexander 293)
Morrison does not possess access to a specific or expressive Satan, and her only recourse is to
deviate from the floating signifier and icon of a benevolent God and to present one who is
hybridised by African folklore--a mischievous denizen of the heavens who discharges the
duty of both pleasure and suffering. The hybridization affects in a Janus-headed mode--the
African tradition of omni-emotive god/s affects Western models just as much as the Western
models affect the African traditions involving multiplicities of God. "If The Bluest Eye can in
any way be characterized as an initiation story, then a major portion of a character's initiation
involves discovering the inadequacy of Western theological models for those who have been
marginalized by the dominant white culture" (Ibid). The religious metaphors are not merely
objectively located in the novel but also in the characters who equate Christianity with
whiteness that they wish to appropriate or have already adapted to psychologically, and as an
anti-Black equation. Characters ranging from Pauline Breedlove to Soaphead Church,
17
Geraldine and Mr. Yacobowski all attempt to negate Pecola's sense of an identifier religion, a
distinction that she bears along with her fascination for whiteness and blue eyes. Religion,
quasi-middle-class living, and an obliteration of Black psychological markers are ideological
salvation for individuals who wish to escape the common fate of the Blackness of African-
Americanism.
Curiously, the image of an African religious tradition is reinforced by Cholly Breedlove, as
Allen Alexander recounts Morrison's depiction of the incident of Cholly's witnessing a `God-
like' white man. In his childhood, at a church picnic, "Cholly watches the father of a family
raise a watermelon over his head to smash it on the ground and is impressed with the man's
god-like stance, which he sees as the opposite of the unimpressive white image of God"
(Alexander 1998: 294):
"[A] nice old white man, with long white hair, flowing white beard, and little blue
eyes that looked sad when people died and mean when they were bad".
(Morrison 106)
Although this image of `god-likeliness' impresses Cholly, he is reluctant to adopt it as a
practice or ideology, and, at least for the time, embraces his African heritage. However, the
lack and inadequacy which Cholly feels with regard to this white-man's religion is considered
to be of paramount importance by Pauline who vehemently denies her African roots with the
expectation of assimilation into a whiter mainstream, even if as a subordinate, but closer to
the dominant ideological, social, cultural and racial group. However, this is in contrast to
what the traditional religiosity of Africa is, and serves to convolute or unnecessarily pollute
the benevolent practices, as God, in the African-influenced theological outlook is "neither
threat nor rival" to humans, but
"God is ... the very basis or ground of the creature's fullest possible self-realization ...
Black religious experience ... is about being and becoming more human under God".
7
But this becoming human, in Pauline's eyes, is the exclusive domain of the white man, the
middle-class section of a race based on color who create the regulations in the most powerful
democratically administered nation, and therefore not a possibility for Cholly to be a
participant of.
18
Unlike the African tradition of god, where the divine figure is seen as immanent to the human
or the mortal, Western theology views Godhead as distinct and transcendent to mortal
existence, an "otherworldly presence who, despite Christ's role as redeemer or fallen
humanity, regards human weakness, in the form of sin, as something disconnected from the
divine" (Alexander 1998: 295). The Western canon of God ascribes a stoic and patriarchal
position for him, dictating terms which are to be observed by all and sundry, a role which is
taken up by an immense section of the white populace. God in the African tradition, on the
contrary, is a friendly figure who possesses a sense of humour and a streak of fallibility--
proportionately human. Cholly attempts to interpret and integrate these characteristics into
himself, but fails because he has long been dominated by the Western, chiefly white canon,
and his reading of the African tradition of Godhead is awry and inflected with attempts and
kindness along with the fallacies of white divinity. On the other hand, Morrison reads into the
character of Pauline as inappropriate and self-defeating--a woman who privileges white
religion over her own traditional religious location. Morrison believes that God is not
homogeneous or unilateral with the conditioning of humanity, and that is the reason why she
introduces, or rather endorses the `fourth face' of God--not expressly a Black face but one
that does not shun blackness as inferior. Western theology has largely confined the notion of
God into a benevolent transcendental signifier without any participation in the tragedies of
humans, but African tradition, showing God as a willing or inactive participant or audience in
the tragedies of humans makes `Him' palpable within human and general cultural
narratives--even the tragedy of blue eyes, of the violation of Pecola and all its allied histories
is thus accountable in Morrison's hybridization of Christianity.
The fourth face is finally developed when Cholly's impression of the white man breaking the
watermelon at the church picnic is accounted, reinforcing the heritage of African tradition of
God:
"It must be the devil who looks like that--holding the world in his hands, ready to
dash it to the ground and spill the red guts so niggers could eat the sweet, warm
insides. If the devil did look like that, Cholly preferred him. He never felt anything
thinking about God, but just the idea of the devil excited him. And how the strong
black devil was blotting out the sun and getting ready to split open the world."
(Morrison 107)
Details
- Pages
- Type of Edition
- Erstausgabe
- Publication Year
- 2015
- ISBN (PDF)
- 9783960675273
- ISBN (Softcover)
- 9783960670278
- File size
- 388 KB
- Language
- English
- Institution / College
- University of North Bengal – Department of English
- Publication date
- 2016 (April)
- Keywords
- Essay Toni Morrison Margaret Atwood Bapsi Sidhwa Manju Kapur Sunanda Sikdar Women's literature Postcolonialsm Feminism Feminist literature Postmodernity
