Imposed abandonment, emasculation and muteness of Cholly Breedlove in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Abstract

Toni Morrison assayed fiction from the beginning of her literary career, The Bluest Eye. She was an expert in Virginia Woolf and William Faulkner who were the master of experimentation in the genre of Novel. Morrison expressed and explored the untouched genre of the cycle of oppression which never ended in the African American society. The cycle of oppression is the outcome of the external and internal racism shovelled into them by the European Americans and by their own community of African Americans. The oppression experienced by Cholly Breedlove, father of the protagonist Pecola of The Bluest Eye is a typical representation of wilful oppression. He was oppressed mentally; the oppression developed into trauma and later into a psychological drawback in his character finally taking its shape as a threat to the family and society. Oppression looks like a simple word suggesting a simple problem. But its effects on a character’s psychology are enormous. The objective of this paper is to throw light on the uncared and uncured oppression on Cholly and its after effects which demands a real concern to be shown on the oppressed to avoid the future psychological effects.