Race over Psychoanalysis:Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye Revisited

Abstract

This paper reconsiders how (much) psychoanalysis is available in the discourse of race and ethnicity, by reexamining the motif of incest/rape and the wretched subject position of the black father in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye. For this purpose, first, I look briefly at a couple of African-American critics’ views on the complex critical relationship between race and psychoanalysis. Then, exploring the call-and-response pattern as an African-American version of intertextuality, I argue that the motif of incest in The Bluest Eye should be discussed in its relation to similar issues in other African-American literary texts, rather than analyzed as a symptom of desire in the psychoanalytic context. In the third part of this paper, in order to illuminate the reason why the African-American fiction writers are concerned with the negative subjectivity of black male characters, I look into the historical condition of the problematic formation of black fatherhood in the antebellum South. Finally, for a better understanding of the way psychoanalytic theory can help us analyze the social pathology of racism, I look through the various interpretations on Cholly Breedlove’s rape of his daughter and then I read closely how the desire and fantasy of the failed black father makes his daughter a wretched victim.