Negrophobia and Anti-Negritude in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Abstract

Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) stands as an outstanding novel of character regarding the destroying effects of Negrophobia among the black on themselves. Pecola Breedlove’s agony over blue eyes arises from an undeveloped Negritude, the discord within the black society towards Negrophobia, and a strong fear of her own race. Pecola’s non-reconciliation with her black identity, inflamed by domestic violence and the black societal indifference, craves for blue eyes, the paradigm of whiteness and white beauty. Consequently, she develops an anti-black neurosis because of a feeling of nonexistence both within her community and the white society, although she remains entangled within the interstitial space of blackness and whiteness as in a purgatory of suffering. Her final madness is the culmination of a black human being who is able neither to accept and defend her Negritude, nor to transcend to a seemingly higher, but fake, state of bein