| Summary: | 碩士 === 高雄師範大學 === 英語學系 === 98 === In these technology-intensive modern times, those so called “higher”, or “better” value standards, or images are not neutral any more, but are actually molded and popularized by the dominant power system through different kinds of mass media, including newspapers, magazines, commercial advertisement, or even education at school. While in the process of ideological construction done by the ruling power, the weaker part is instructed at the same time the idea of self-denial and self-hatred.
In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, which was written in 1979, the most poignant victims in probably all of her works, Pecola Breedlove and her family, blindly accept all the dominant ideals of beauty and goodness, deny their own black background, and finally come to destruction in their end. This thesis aims to take Plato’s famous “Allegory of the Cave” as a reading method, by elaborating the relationship between the four elements: the cave, shadows, prisoners, and the puppeteers, to demonstrate how the dominant power system, or the western standard of goodness confines the black women in the novel. And at the same time, the thesis recognizes another black girl, Claudia, as one to escape successfully from the cave, and reminds the reader that one can still regain his identity or autonomy with the support from family and the community.
Therefore, in Chapter One, there is a brief discussion over Plato’s Allegory of The Cave, and a connection between the allegory and The Bluest Eye. Then the first section in Chapter Two utilizes the important element from the allegory—the cave, to explain how the dominant power confines its prisoner geographically and psychologically within the novel. . And in this chapter also, we try to connect the “shadows” projected on the wall of the cave with the ideological symbols presented in the novel to examine how those artificial images structure the female characters’ value system. In Chapter Three, one can recognize some characters from The Bluest Eye as the “prisoners” of Plato’s cave, and can try to explain why these characters fail to escape from the imprisonment. Besides that, Chapter Three inevitably tries to explore the existence and identity of the puppeteers in the cave or that “mysterious all-knowing master” in the novel which brings the horrible misery to those black women. Poignantly but still promisingly, Chapter Four focuses on some characters that provide all the prisoners with hope and courage under the perpetual and unceasing darkness and imprisonment. And the conclusive chapter still focuses on the conception about imprisoning and escaping, to acknowledge Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as a reminder which not only notifies her black people to value their own culture and identity, but also suggests to her every reader a re-thinking of all those too-easily-attainable images provided by all kinds of mass media.
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