Abstract
Claudia, the young female narrator of Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye, is fascinated by the mysterious, seductive yet also destructive nature of beauty. As a young girl growing up in Ohio in the years following the Great Depression, she experiences a disjunction between abstract white beauty ideals and the materiality of her own female black body. Claudia asks: ‘What was the secret? What did we lack? Why was it important?’1
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Notes
Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye (London: Vintage, 1999), 57.
Paul C. Taylor, ‘Malcolm’s Conk and Danto’s Colors; or, Four Logical Petitions Concerning Race, Beauty and Aesthetics’, in Beauty Matters, ed. Peg Zeglin Brand (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 62; Katherine Stern, ‘Toni Morrison’s Beauty Formula’, in The Aesthetics of Toni Morrison: Speaking the Unspeakable, ed. Marc C. Connor (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000), 78.
W. E. B. Du Bois, ‘Criteria of Negro Art’, The Crisis 32 (1926), 293.
Eugène Delacroix, Études de Figures Volantes Nues (1836–40); Charles Le Brun, Groupes D’hommes Précipités (1672); Edgar Degas, Femme Nue, Échevelée, Penchée en Avant à Droite (1860–2).
Elaine Scarry, On Beauty and Being Just (London: Duckworth, 2000), 30.
Umberto Eco (ed.), On Beauty: A History of a Western Idea, trans. Alastair McEwen (London: Secker & Warburg, 2004), 14.
Isobel Armstrong, The Radical Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 3.
James Wood, The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief (New York: Random House, 1999), 218–19.
Toni Morrison, Sula (London: Vintage, 1998), 31.
Tobin Siebers, ‘Disability Aesthetics’, JCRT 7, 2 (2006), 65.
Wolfgang Kayser, The Grotesque in Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1981).
Susan Willis, Specifying: Black Women Writing the American Experience (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987);Toni Morrison, ‘Rediscovering Black History’, in Toni Morrison: What Moves at the Margin, ed. Toni Morrison and Carolyn C. Denard (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2008), 39–55;Davis (ed.), The Disability Studies Reader, xvi.
Naomi Wolf, The Beauty Myth (London: Anchor Books, 1992), 17.
Peg Zeglin Brand (ed.), Beauty Matters (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 7.
Toni Morrison, Song of Solomon (London: Vintage, 1998), 149.
Toni Morrison, ‘Behind the Making of the Black Book’, Black World 23, 1 (1974), 89.
Malin LaVon Walther, ‘Out of Sight: Toni Morrison’s Revision of Beauty’, Black Literature Forum 24, 4 (1990), 777.
Bertram D. Ashe, ‘“Why Don’t He Like My Hair?” Constructing African-American Standards of Beauty in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God’, African American Review 29, 4 (1995), 2.
Paula Black, The Beauty Industry: Gender, Culture, Pleasure (London: Routledge, 2004), 2–3.
Toni Morrison, Jazz (London: Vintage, 2005), 23.
Kathryn Lasky, Vision of Beauty: The Story of Sarah Breedlove Walker, illus. Nneka Bennett (New York: Walker Books, 2000).
Morrison, Tar Baby (London: Vintage, 2004), 9.
Bill Cosby, ‘Introduction’, in The Black Book, ed. Middleton A. Harris (New York: Random House, 1974), i.
Cheryl A. Wall, ‘Toni Morrison, Editor and Teacher’, in The Cambridge Companion to Toni Morrison, ed. Justine Tally (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 144.
Sara Blair, Harlem Crossroads: Black Writers and the Photograph in the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Princeton University Press, 2007), 259.
Cheryl A. Wall, Worrying the Line: Black Women Writers, Lineage and Literary Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 102.
Toni Morrison, ‘Rootedness in the Ancestor’, in Black Women Writers (1950–1980): A Critical Evaluation, ed. Mari Evans (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1984), 345.
bel hooks, ‘Postmodern Blackness’, Postmodern Culture 1, 1 (1990), 23.
Toni Morrison, Conversations with Toni Morrison, ed. Danille Taylor-Guthrie (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994), 247.
Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race and Gender (London: Harvard University Press, 1988), 86.
Toni Morrison, A Mercy (London: Chatto & Windus, 2008), 47.
Maud Ellmann, ‘The Power to Tell: Rape, Race and Afro-American Women’s Fiction’, in An Introduction to Contemporary Fiction: International Writing in English since 1970, ed. Rod Mengham (Oxford: Polity Press, 1999), 46.
Wendy Steiner, The Trouble with Beauty (London: Heinemann, 2001), xxii.
Maxine Sheets-Johnstone, The Phenomenology of Dance (London: Dance Books Ltd., 1966), 119.
D. W. Winnicott, Playing and the Reality (London: Routledge, 1971), 133–4.
Sondra Horton Fraleigh, Dance and the Lived Body: A Descriptive Aesthetics (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1987), 51.
Alice Walker, ‘Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self’, in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose (London: Harcourt, 1983), 385–94.
Toni Morrison, The Dancing Mind: Speech upon Acceptance of the National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 16.
Ibid., 7.
Toni Morrison, ‘Home’, in The House that Race Built: Original Essays by Toni Morrison, Angela Y. Davis, Cornel West and Others on Black Americans and Politics in America Today, ed. Lubiano Waheema (New York: Pantheon Books, 1997), 5.
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© 2012 Alice Hall
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Hall, A. (2012). Foreign Bodies: Disability and Beauty in the Works of Toni Morrison. In: Disability and Modern Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230355477_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230355477_3
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