Abstract/Description
The ability to connect with and feel empathy for others is an innate quality within ourselves that serves to make each of us human. We empathize with the poor, homeless, and the less fortunate. Empathy drives us to do good for others; it allows us to make a difference in the world in which we live. In her novel The Bluest Eye the unfortunate situations and experiences in which Toni Morrison places her characters force readers to place themselves in the characters situation and grapple with the examination of oneself as a result. Moral essayist Samuel Johnson once wrote, “All joy or sorrow for the happiness or calamities of others is produced by an act of the imagination that realizes the event however fictitious… by placing us, for a time, in the condition of him whose fortune we contemplate, so that we feel… whatever emotions would be excited by the same good or evil happening to ourselves” (Johnson 204). Toni Morrison, in her novel The Bluest Eye, uses the empathy she evokes from her readers as a tool to teach audiences a lesson about the evils of internalized racism, lack of empathy, and rape.
Recommended Citation
Alongi, Samantha
(2009).
Introspection and Self-Transformation: Empathy in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.
Undergraduate Review, 5, 100-103.
Available at: https://vc.bridgew.edu/undergrad_rev/vol5/iss1/20
Rights Statement
Articles published in The Undergraduate Review are the property of the individual contributors and may not be reprinted, reformatted, repurposed or duplicated, without the contributor’s consent.