The Ethics of Violent Reprisal: Complexity and Productivity in The Bluest Eye, Corregidora, and Eva's Man

This thesis will explore the morally ambiguous nature of violence when used as a response to racial oppression and misogyny in three contemporary American novels: Corregidora (1975) and Eva’s Man (1976) by Gayl Jones, and The Bluest Eye (1970) by Toni Morrison. All three of these novels feature female characters whose acts of violence may be interpreted as responses to racism and sexism. Violence is often the characters’ answers to abuse, and the results are often egregious and obscene. But just as these women have the capacity to commit heinous crimes, they also inspire sympathy and loyalty in the reader, emotions that complicate any attempt at straightforward vilification. In fact, the way that Morrison and Jones render their characters’ acts of violence shows that violence is necessary, even productive. Though conventional morality would reject these characters’ courses of action, Morrison and Jones’ depict these acts with profound ambiguity while also demanding acceptance. This thesis will argue that these moments of readerly moral equivocation and suspended judgment are initially summoned by the authors’ conscious breaks of narrative convention, breaks that themselves are both violent and progressive. Jones and Morrison break syntactical rules, manipulate narrative structure, and do away with a great deal of conventional punctuation and dialogue designation. The cumulative effect of these breaks is to mirror in the body of the text the violence their characters commit within the narrative. This thesis will also demonstrate the authors’ use of the blues as a complicating mechanism for interpreting the novels’ thematic violence. During specific violent scenes, both authors invoke the blues, a maneuver that renders opaque or at least obscured the violence their characters commit by collapsing divisions of time and demonstrating a causal chain of events that accounts for present action. And finally, in constructing stories of feminine violence, Morrison and Jones confront specific archetypes and