"Adjustment without Improvement": la Gabbia del Tempo in The Color Purple, The Bluest Eye e I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings

The thesis focuses on three novels written by African American women writers between 1969 and 1982: The Color Purple by Alice Walker, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou. The three novels present incredibly similar plots: the reader follows the three female protagonists in their childhood and adolescence, while the three of them experience separation from their mothers, abuse from their fathers or father figures and disenfranchisement from the dominant white society. Even though the plots have all of these important common traits and themes, one of them ends tragically: The Bluest Eye. The protagonist of The Bluest Eye is an eleven-year-old girl, Pecola Breedlove, who lives in a wrecked family with an alcoholic father and an absent mother with a monomania for everything that is white and clean. The Breedloves, with their illness, live in their own time frame, where every mistake seems to be committed over and over again, without possibility of progression. They are unable to react to their condition of poverty and discrimination because they try to be assimilated by a world which does not accept them. The immobility of their time comes to a fatal conclusion when Pecola is raped by her father and gives birth to a stillborn baby, symbolizing the definite passage into non-generative time. In the other two works, The Color Purple and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, the protagonists go from a situation of immobility, where their fate seems to be doomed just like Pecola's, to a condition of progress and innovation: they both become mothers, initiate their path towards adulthood and become independent women. In the thesis, I will present the instruments through which the other two protagonists, Maya and Celie, are able to move into generative time and analyze the reasons why Pecola is unable to do the same.