Cinema in Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye Essay -- Toni Morrison Bluest

Cinema in Toni Morrisons The Bluest EyeIn Toni Morrisons novel, The Bluest Eye, characters learn how to perform social functions though video. Pauline goes to the movies in search of a more glamorous identity. Instead, the unattainable witness she sees onscreen reaffirms her low place in society. Laura Mulveys article, Visual and Other Pleasures, explains films ability to indoctrinate patriarchal social bon ton. This ability is certainly applicable to Morrisons novel. Film reinforces the Breedloves place in society, teaches Claudia to love Shirley Temple and constructs women as familiar objects for pleasure. Mulveys article also examines the powerful, restless male gaze. In The Bluest Eye the female gaze is constructed as dirty, unnatural and wrong. Women and children in this novel are relegated to the role of unresisting sexual objects. Little girls are subjected to the gaze of Cholly and Soaphead Church. Mulvey defines this type of gaze as fetishistic scopophilia. In both Mulveys article and Morrisons novel film is used as an instructional tool to create identity and reinforce social and gender roles. Films power to enforce social order is revealed in Paulines trips to the movies. She is drawn to the physical beauty and therefore taught to value beauty above anything else in society. Pauline receives an education from the movies. It was really a simple pleasure, but she learned all there was to love and all there was to hate (Morrison 122). Pauline learns how to order her world though film. She is taught to love beauty and hate ugliness. Film, however, also teaches her to hate herself because of her ugliness. At first Pauline identifies with the beautiful white women she sees in the movies. ... ...so presents the idea of scopophilia and active male gaze. Morrison further examines these ideas by constructing an active female gaze. When Pecola and Claudia experience this type of gaze they do not feel powerful, but sinful. Morrison also depicts women in the role of passive sexual objects. These women are laboured to submit to the male gaze and are powerless to control it. In The Bluest Eye Morrison examines Mulveys assertions about the role of cinema, the active male gaze and the passive female. She proves cinemas ability to assign social scripts and the total domination of the active male gaze over little girls. Works CitedMorrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. modern York, New York Penguin Group, 1994.Mulvey, Laura. Visual Pleasure & Narrative Cinema. Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington, IN Indiana University Press, 1989. 14-26.