In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, the struggle begins in childhood. Two young black girls - Claudia and Pecola - highlight the combined power of externally imposed definitions of gender and race, in which the black woman must not only contend with the black man's wife, but also with the black woman of the white man and the white woman, a double gender and racial bond. All the masculine definitions that applied to the white man's wife apply, in an intensified form, to the black woman of the black man, the white man, and the white woman. Furthermore, where the white man and woman are represented as beautiful, the black woman is the opposite: ugly. Self-definition is crucial, not only to being, but also to creating. As Gilbert and Gubar so aptly note in The Madwoman in the Attic: “For all literary artists, of course, self-definition necessarily precedes self-affirmation: the creative “I AM” cannot be uttered if the “ I don't know what it is. est" (17). One way to describe this work of self-definition is "learning to understand what surrounds us and what concerns us and what in us must live and what must die" (Estes, 33). But the feminine definition has not been this sorting process of self-definition. Instead, it is a static masculine definition "by default" or "by design". indeed, it must begin with a process of self-definition, the first step of which is, necessarily, a negation of the hitherto established masculine definition of “woman.” Virginia Woolf calls this “killing the angel in the house” (PFW). 286). Before she can say "yes" by creating a positive form, she must first say "no" to the falsely positive form created by a patriarchal society Before she can recover herself from the negative space of. ..... middle of paper...... is vital and true List of Works Cited Dickinson, Emily. Ed. Thomas H. Johnson. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1960. Estes, Clarissa Pinkola. Women who run with the wolves. New York: Ballantine Books, 1992. Gilbert, Sandra M. and Gubar, Susan. The madwoman in the attic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984. Morrison, Toni. The bluest eye. New York: Penguin Books, 1994. ---, Playing in the Dark. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992. Portales, Marco. "Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye: Shirley Temple and Cholly." The Centennial Review Autumn (1986): 496-506. Rubenstein, Roberta. Limits of the Self. Chicago: University of Illinois, 1987. Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for women”. Collected essays. Vol.2. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. 284-289.