Writing About Incest through “Counter-Fiction” and Paradoxes: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
Type de matériel :
10
Nobel Prize in Literature winner Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye, in 1970; that is to say only a few years after the end of racial segregation and the gradual acquisition of civil rights by African-Americans. It recounts Pecola Breedlove’s story: how a young and vulnerable black girl, raped by her incestuous father, descended into madness and believed that she finally had the blue eyes she had dreamt of for so long. The novel’s title does not refer to tragic incest but to alienation, because incest, at the core of the text, is nonetheless paradoxically veiled. The writer has not commented on this theme in her interviews nor in the paratexts added in the 1993 and 1998 editions. Yet, the first rape suffered by Pecola is narrated in detail from the perpetrator’s point of view. This article examines the paradoxes of this novel’s writing and explains its historical significance in terms of literary history and the history of representations. The variation of the points of view and the assignment of a binary silence—that of Pecola’s character and that of the author regarding incest—contribute to rewriting the incest taboo through a “counter-fiction” that is an unprecedented effort to unveil both the tragedy of incest and of racism.
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