Portrayal of Human Relationships and its Impact on Identity Formation in The Bluest Eye

Abstract

In the male dominated American society, black women were dominated by both the whites and the black males. They faced triple oppression of race, gender and class. Treated merely as sex objects, their space in American society was insignificant and faceless. So when the black women writers determined to establish their identity womanhood, a plethora of black women writers emerged to challenge the hegemony of the masculine perspective through their writing. Among all of them, Toni Morrison is a powerful voice and one of the most remarkable and influential novelists in the field of contemporary African American literary circle. Any literature and its structure is built on human relationships and that is the reason that a writer's art and its greatness lies in the deft portrayal and presentation of such human relationships. These relations may be the sources of comfort, connection, and happiness and they may also be the sources of obligation, responsibility, enmity, and friction. The genius of Toni Morrison lies in her writing about human beings and rich rainbow human relationships, especially of Afro-American people. The present paper attempts to explore and analyze a wide range of human relationships depicted in her novels. The aims and objectives of this study are to understand and analyze the different aspects of human relationships, such as, exploitation, deprivation, alienation and so on. Two types of human relationships are discussed in this paper. Those are parent-child relationship and the relationship between man and woman. This paper also tries to analyze how these relationships play a very important role in the formation of identity. Historical background of the blacks and African American literary tradition is also peeped into to understand the writing of Toni Morrison. The historical background of the blacks has highly influenced the human relationships of her characters.