Longing for Symbolic Capital in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: A Bourdieun Estimation

Abstract

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye portrays, among other both white and black lives in a less significant mark, the life of a young black girl named Pecola Breedlove whose desperate longing for owning the bluest eyes so as to free herself from the shame and disgrace of her birthed identity has inspired the author to name the novel so. Morrison inserted into the protagonist her (Morrison’s) depraved experience of injustice, inequality, racial discrimination, social stigmatization and, above all, inborn physical outlook, wielded upon the black communities in America during her (Morrison’s) time. While brooding over the question why a black girl would hanker after the bluest eyes, I find the hints, specified descriptions and clarified answers provided by Morrison in the novel logically matched with “Symbolic Capital”, the last of the four capitals delineated by the French philosopher and public intellectual Pierre Bourdieu (1930-2002). Accordingly, this article seeks to appraise Pecola’s yearning for the bluest eyes in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye through Bourdieu’s theory of “Symbolic Capital”.

Diglossia as a Symbolic Capital in Bangladesh: A Bourdieun Analysis

“…Pierre Bourdieu (1986) classifies capital into three forms basing on the field in which it works, e. g. economic capital, cultural capital and social capital. Economic capital can instantly and straightly be converted into money and may be formalized into property rights while cultural capital can conditionally be transformed into economic capital and is likely to be institutionalized in the form of educational qualifications whereas social capital which consists of social connections can be circumstantially converted into economic capital and is likely to be recognized as a title of nobility (Hossain, 2022). There is also a part of cultural capital called linguistic capital where Bourdieu proved that the words people use, the language they speak, the forms of that language, and the ways of expressing them etc., separately or altogether, can indicate the educational value of a person, their social background and their economic conditions.…”