The Dis-abling Rhetoric of Race and Gender in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
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David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder define “narrative prosthesis” as “the perpetual discursive dependency” of literary narratives upon disability; they suggest that once one begins to “seek out representation of disability in […] literatures, it is difficult to avoid their proliferation in texts with which one believed oneself to be utterly familiar” (47, 52). Toni Morrison's works are well known to deploy disability as a way to critique social and political oppression towards blacks and black women in particular. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, who has also observed the abundance of disabled women in Morrison's works, claims that with the exception of Pauline Breedlove from The Bluest Eye, these women are not reduced to victims but rather, they are rendered “extraordinary” because they reify an identity that “insists upon and celebrates physical difference” (Extraordinary 115). Consequently, this essay inquires into Pauline's (and also her daughter Pecola's) deviation from Morrison's figuration of black female “extraordinary bodies.” If the Breedlove women “devastate” rather than rally the black community of which they are a part, then this essay's aim is to interrogate why The Bluest Eye seemingly attaches a meaning of “monstrosity” or of “lack” rather than that of “extraordinariness” to disability (Thomson Extraordinary 122).
Abstract
David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder define “narrative prosthesis” as “the perpetual discursive dependency” of literary narratives upon disability; they suggest that once one begins to “seek out representation of disability in […] literatures, it is difficult to avoid their proliferation in texts with which one believed oneself to be utterly familiar” (47, 52). Toni Morrison's works are well known to deploy disability as a way to critique social and political oppression towards blacks and black women in particular. Rosemarie Garland Thomson, who has also observed the abundance of disabled women in Morrison's works, claims that with the exception of Pauline Breedlove from The Bluest Eye, these women are not reduced to victims but rather, they are rendered “extraordinary” because they reify an identity that “insists upon and celebrates physical difference” (Extraordinary 115). Consequently, this essay inquires into Pauline's (and also her daughter Pecola's) deviation from Morrison's figuration of black female “extraordinary bodies.” If the Breedlove women “devastate” rather than rally the black community of which they are a part, then this essay's aim is to interrogate why The Bluest Eye seemingly attaches a meaning of “monstrosity” or of “lack” rather than that of “extraordinariness” to disability (Thomson Extraordinary 122).
참고문헌 (15)
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