Works Cited

Adamson, Joseph, Hilary Anne Clark, and J. Brooks Bouson. ""Quiet As It's Kept":

Shame and Trauma in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Scenes of Shame:

Psychoanalysis, Shame, and Writing. Albany: State University of New York

Press, 1999. 207 - 235. Print. Dealing with shame in The Bluest Eye is

Morrison's attempt at a participatory engagement with her readers. An emotional

involvement that, for Bouson, makes the reader examine the cause of that shame

itself. A failure to meet the expectations of a cultural ideal, leads to psychological

inferiority and a fear of humiliation and rejection. This takes several forms in the

novel - Pecola's insanity, Cholly Breedlove's aggressiveness, Soaphead Church's

misanthropy - stem from grappling with this inferiority complex. "Quiet as it's

kept", the opening line, is a hushing up of something that can open the doors of

shame in a work that constantly wavers between silence and meaning around

who is shamed and why. Bouson also highlights that it again makes possible the

reader's emotional attachment with the novel as the secret-sharer and the shame-

sharer at different levels.

Knapp, John V., Kenneth Vomack, and Jerome Bump. "Family Systems Therapy And

Narrative in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Reading the family dance: family

systems therapy and literary study. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2003.

150 - 166. Print. Jerome Bump examines the concept of dysfunctional families

and focusses on the relatability of it to the white reading audience of The Bluest

Eye. In the light of affective reader role, the exercise of taking the parts of the

novel to place the pieces together as urged by the narrative calls onto the

"Orphan Feeling" of the reader who then attempts to build cohersiveness of the
 story. The exercise is argued to be therapeutic wherein a reader who can relate to

any dysfunctional family in the novel finds a larger meaning in arranging the

narrative making possible the family systems therapy that drives it.

Page, Philip. "The Break Was a Bad One: The Split World of The Bluest Eye."

Dangerous Freedom: Fusion and Fragmentation in Toni Morrison's Novels.

Jackson, Miss.: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. 37 - 59. Print. Split

objects, bodies and worlds in The Bluest Eye, present the larger fractures in the

American world that the novels draws on. The broken berry cobbler, the

smashing of the watermelon, the split couch, and the ruptures of other inanimate

objects represents a fragmentation at the heart of the novel, one that

metaphorically represents the familial and cultural splits that it defines. Page,

however also looks at the fragility of the objects destroyed with the possibility of

fragmentation to be a positive message. It is because meanings can be destroyed

that they can also be refreshed and renewed. Claudia destroys the doll to find

knowledge, the Dick and Jane primer is split into parts throughout the narrative

so that what it represents can be investigated.

Thomson, Rosemarie, and Lori Merish. "Cuteness and Commodity Aesthetics: Tom

Thumb and Shirley Temple." Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary

Body. New York: New York University Press, 1996. 186 - 203. Print. Coupling

the concept of cuteness with the politics of commodification behind it, Lori

Merish highlights that, in The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses the symbolic qualities

of the word in order to highlight the cultural and aesthetic responses to it.

Defined by a white supremacist voice, Claudia's initial refusal to love the image
 of Shirley Temple and cuteness that she exemplifies is a larger refusal to elicit a

generalized yet expected maternal response from young girls like her. For

Merish, this stems from Claudia's refusal to be included in a culture that defines

that cuteness as something that she does not and cannot have hence, becomes her

way of protest.

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