RELEASE OF WOMEN FROM RESTRAINS AND OPPRESSION OF PATRIARCHAL SOCIETY: 'THE BLUEST EYE' - A SELECT NOVEL BY TONI MORRISON (Pages 132-142) by Ch. Ganeswara Rao in THE ENGLISH RESEARCH EXPRESS / ISSN:2321-1164 (Online); 2347-2642 (Print)

Toni Morrison has been awarded abundant prestigious literary awards for her nine novels during her forty year career counting the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for Beloved in 1988, and in 1993, she became the first African American woman awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Morrison is more than an inexhaustible author; she is a literary critic and professor of Literature and Composition. Although countless legendary critics find the discussion of authorial purpose an exceedingly controversial topic, it becomes impossible to overlook Morrison's unyielding literary agenda. She is very vocal about how she wants her work to be interpreted and the messages she wishes to transmit to her audience, and she uses her status as both a respected author and literary theorist to underpin her intentions. Through her works, both fiction and non-fiction, Morrison seeks to deconstruct African American society, and in turn, American society as a whole, using her often troubling narrations that function as mirrors shimmering the injustices of the real world. Her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1970), is crafted in a way that draws the audience into the story and makes them a part of the community that surrounds the two central characters, Pecola Breedlove and Claudia MacTeer. By inviting the audience into the story, Morrison intends to aggravate self-interrogation and eventually, change in the real world. Morrison accomplishes this by evoking traditional elements of African American folklore, the "call and response" style of Black preaching, and inclusive language. In The Bluest Eye Morrison uses the oppressors' tainted sexuality to exemplify the oppression in the society on a number of diverse levels, and she portrays the oppressed as well as the oppressors. She also reveals how the characters who are subjected to coercion often end up as oppressors themselves. The characters’ sexuality thus serves as an indication of the environment that the characters have been subjected to. In the novel, The Bluest Eye, readers find the black directing violence on other blacks. It seems astonishing that in a society where the Negroes are already oppressed by the overriding culture, instead of helping each other, the Africans are seen damaging and hurting their own brethren. Morrison writes both her criticism and her fiction with a calculated purpose. Her purpose is to unite and authorize both the African American community and the American community as a whole by infuriating self-interrogation and indulgent of communal responsibility. She wants the audience to interrelate with the text beyond the reading by internalizing the struggle of the characters and concerning the themes to their personal lives, but asks the audience to believe what could have happened if the community had embraced these broken people as a substitute of treating them as not reusable, as pieces of junk. Ke-ywords: inexhaustible, internalizing, indulgent, diverse, and embraced.