"My Mother's Fussing Soliloquies"

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Shakespeare

Abstract

While Toni Morrison famously rejects the idea that Western authors have influenced her work, The Bluest Eye mentions Ophelia in a way that suggests parallels between Shakespeare's victim and Pecola Breedlove. Opposing song, as a form of collective sharing of information that heals the individual, to what this essay identifies as an isolating "soliloquy sense of self," Morrison uses Hamlet as a foil in order to critique Western tragedy. In the process, however, she raises questions about the limitations of Shakespearean drama and of the novel as her own artistic medium. The essay also considers, by extension, Morrison's indictment of readers as selectively appropriating African American culture when they pursue traces of Hamlet in The Bluest Eye. Vernacular African American culture, in particular the blues, emerges as a powerful alternative to the alienation imposed by Hamlet's "soliloquy sense" of the self.