The Musical Urn: Structure and Style as Content in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

• Main Authors: Lee, Chieh-lan, 李潔嵐
• Other Authors: Alan Lindsay
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 1998
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/02576383186777888056

碩士 === 淡江大學 === 西洋語文研究所 === 86 === The problem of formal analysis is, historically and logically, to escape the trap of the old form-content distinction for this distinction tends to be simplistic and reductive, separating form from content and seeing content as the important thing and form as the wrapping. Hence, to apply such a method to analyze Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and at the same time to make the analysis more complex, I intentionally involve, besides the two old ones, another two elements into my discussion-- the novel's design of viewpoints and the author's writing style. By examining the text from such a traditional analytic perspective, I hope to find another critical aspect (which was less focused on) of the works of a modern or even postmodern writer. In the first chapter, I briefly introduced the story lines and characters of The Bluest Eye and explained the method applying to offer both textual and critical backgrounds. Then in the second chapter, emphasizing on the three versions of Dick-and-Jane story which is one of the important elements of the novel's formal arrangement, I discussed the close connection between the primer and the subject matter of the novel. Furthermore, the relationship between the scheme of shifting points-of- view as well as printing patterns and the themes of the work was brought into expatiation in Chapter Three. Finally, in Chapter Four, the coordination of Morrison's writing style and the thematic content was listed to complete this four-element-involving analysis on The Bluest Eye. After this analysis, we may find those multiple elements interacting themselves and sharing a certain unity to make the novel as a self-defining body and a work of art. Accompanied with a sense of mobility and a certain musical quality brought by the continuous letters of the third version of the primer in the prologue, the novel can be considered a "musical urn" in which the components integrating with each other finely. And Morrison, by creating for all of her subjects formal features which fuse so inseparably with the matter that an artwork comes into being, makes herself both an imaginative artist and a successful novelist.