In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, published in 1970, the struggle begins in childhood. Two young Black girls – Claudia and Pecola – highlight the combined power of externally imposed gender and racial definitions in which the Black female must not only confront the Black male's female, but must confront the Male's Black female white and the white female, a double gender and racial bond. All the masculine definitions that applied to the female of the white male apply, in intensified form, to the black female of the black male, the white male, and the white female. Furthermore, where the white male and female are portrayed as beautiful, the black female is the opposite: ugly. Self-definition is crucial, not just to being, but to creation. As Gilbert and Gubar so astutely 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' does not know what it means" (17). One way to describe this work of self-definition is as "learning to understand what around us and what within us must live, and what must die" (Estes, 33). But the feminine definition was not this process of self-definition. Instead it was a static male definition “by default” or “by intention”. If woman wants to create herself, she must begin with a process of self-definition whose first step is, necessarily, a denial of the male definition of "female" established so far. Virginia Woolf calls this "killing the angel in the house" (PFW 286). Before he can say "yes" by creating a positive form, he must first say "no" to the false positive form created by a patriarchal society. Before it can regain possession of the negative space of the... center of the paper... it is vital and true. List of Works Cited Dickinson, Emily. The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson. 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 Fall (1986): 496-506. Rubenstein, Roberta. Boundaries of the Self. Chicago: University of Illinois, 1987.Woolf, Virginia. "Professions for women". Collected essays. Vol.2. London: The Hogarth Press, 1966. 284-289.