Introduction
The purpose of this thesis is to examine what the Harlem Renaissance is and the reflections of the Harlem Renaissance in Toni Morrison’s novels: Beloved and The Bluest Eye. This thesis will explore racism, slavery, and black feminism, and how these themes are portrayed in these two books. These investigations will elucidate the traumas of black people due to their skin color and how they have struggled against white oppression. Toni Morrison crafted compelling stories through the sufferings and experiences of African-American people because of racism and slavery. As an African-American novelist, she hailed from a poor southern migrant family, and her grandparents had firsthand experiences with slavery. Toni Morrison's parents had to move to different cities to escape racial violence. Her family sought to provide their children with a strong education about Black folk culture, values, and beliefs because they believed it was the only way to challenge racism for Blacks. Toni Morrison deeply loved the black community she lived in and learned a great deal from observing it. Later, she divorced her husband while pregnant, implying that her marriage was one of the unhappy periods of her life. She continued her life independently and criticized other women who obeyed their husbands. Toni Morrison believed that women should challenge their husbands and be strong. Morrison gained significant recognition for her study of American racism and its consequences on Blacks, especially Black women, and she endeavored to be a voice for Black women in literature. Her novel Beloved was based on the story of Margaret Garner, a slave woman who killed her children because of slavery.
Harlem Renaissance
The Harlem Renaissance was a cultural, social, and intellectual movement that took place in Harlem, New York, after World War I and lasted until around 1935 during the Great Depression. The Harlem Renaissance, also known as the New Negro Movement, was considered to be a golden age in African-American art. After the American Civil War, African-American people continued to live under harsh conditions, seen as an inferior class because white people enslaved them. White people held authority in society, and African Americans endured harassment, torment, and lynching. Sometimes struggles emerged between these two races, but unsurprisingly, white people were the winners, forcing blacks to relocate to other areas. From 1910 to 1920, more than six million African Americans migrated from the rural South to the cities of the North in what was called the Great Migration. During this period, Harlem became the capital of cultural activity for African-Americans, teeming with publishing houses, nightclubs, and theatres thanks to black people. They had many terrible experiences because of whites and felt disconnected from their roots, which can be seen as a reason for the cultural explosion; thus, their negative experiences shaped their personalities. There was a relationship between their music, writings, artworks, and their individual experiences and personalities.
Racism
Binary oppositions such as weak-powerful and black-white are created by humans who desire to be on the powerful side. Racism, where some races consider themselves superior to others, categorizes Black people as an inferior class because of their skin color, as their black skin does not meet white standards of beauty. All the traumas experienced by Black people result from being Black. People are marginalized, and this marginalization is the outcome of racism. Throughout history, many wars have been based on racial discrimination, with people killing and abusing each other due to these obsessive thoughts.
Slavery
Slavery is viewed as an outcome of racism. It is a system where individuals can own slaves and force them to obey their owners. Slaves work under harsh conditions without receiving fair wages. Slavery is based on a relationship of dominance and power, beginning with the arrival of Africans in America, where they were viewed as laborers. The American economy was transformed thanks to African labor. African people had no rights; they were captured, sold by slave owners, and forced to work without the ability to refuse. Many slaves faced physical and mental health problems due to their conditions, and even children were sold into slavery to survive in extreme conditions.
Black Feminism
Black feminism examines female issues and how they are characterized, focusing on spiritualism, folk traditions, mother-daughter relationships, and African-American history and culture. Black women faced numerous oppressions and created a theory to show gender oppression. They experienced double marginalization, enduring both racial and sexual mistreatment. In America, being Black and a woman meant being nothing, with these women used as sex objects during slavery, experiencing rape, torture, physical and psychological abuse, and racism. Some writers, like Toni Morrison, sought to be the voice of Black women and address their oppressions through literature. Morrison attempted to exhibit the ascribed roles of women and their effects on Black women in America.
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In The Bluest Eye, black women are portrayed as the influence they suffer from white society in their search for their own identity. These black women are excluded from a universe of love and tenderness, where the figure of a man is a key element in their entrapment in madness, silence, sexual oppression, and hopelessness.
Despite The Bluest Eye focusing on black women and their families, white women play a strong and surprising role in the novel. Their societal status influences the behavior of black women, as they represent the ruling class and are taken as models.
The novel also highlights how black women define strength, beauty, and youth based on standards learned from films, similar to how Pecola, the main character, adopts these standards. This interaction of black women with mass culture creates a form of colonization. Their beauty standards, if any, are inadequate when compared to those of the ruling class, especially concerning the loss of identity, which represents submission and lack of power. Black women start to identify with and aspire to be like those women who hold power and beauty. They seek acceptance and love, like those movie stars. Ironically, the white movie star women are also exploited and reduced to objects, but the black women in the novel do not perceive this reduction. Mrs Breedlove, for example, used to go to the movies even when pregnant, where she was introduced to the idea of romantic love and physical beauty, destructive ideas rooted in envy and insecurity.
Physical beauty becomes the cause of the dark episodes involving Pecola, whose life becomes an endless battle between her real appearance and her desire to have blue eyes, the ultimate symbols of hegemonic white beauty. While Pecola, a child, represents the ultimate symbol of black appearance, rejected by white society, the novel constantly reminds the reader of how ugly she is, reinforcing her desire to be beautiful, loved, and accepted. Even her mother, right after her birth, frames her as ugly, setting her on a path from which she will never recover.
When Mrs Breedlove goes to the movies, she escapes from her self and perhaps her unconscious image of failure: a black working-class woman in a white-dominant society, poor, illiterate, handicapped, missing some of her front teeth, and in a failed marriage. It is precisely during this period, the Forties, that movies, according to Dingwall, show Toni Morrison demonstrating that being a black girl, experiences how her family and friends treat her, the girl who lacks support from family and community. The story is not just about Pecola; it's also about people in her community.
Both of Morrison’s novels elaborate on domestic violence, rape, and white beauty standards. However, The Bluest Eye solely concentrates on black feminist problems. Black women experienced double oppression, first by the white-dominated society and second, within their own families. Rape, torture, physical and psychological abuse, and racism were nightmares that deeply affected the lives of black women in the United States. The works of both Walker and Morrison focus mainly on slavery, racism, segregation, and how black people suffered both psychologically and socially since being forcibly brought to America. Both novelists attempted to illustrate their particular perspectives in the texts by constructing fictional narratives.
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