A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the award of the degree "Licence en Langue et Littératures Anglaises".

RESUME,

This Work aimed at examining the question of superiority and inferiarity complex based on race and gender in the twentieth-century Ameruca as depicted through Toni Marrison's The Bluest Eye. In the course of our work, we attempted show how, through the pervasiveness of the white standards of creating a distorted definition of beauty where whiteness is associated with beauty whereas blackness is equated with ugliness. Black people developed an inferiarity complex because they internalized the white ideas of beauty which were imposed on them. This work further shows how black men manifested gendered superiarity complex over black women. In fact, black men felt thatthey were emasculated through racial mistreatment and, because of this, black males turnes into oppressors of black females in an attempt to assert their male power in the sexist society of the twentieth-century America. Black women consequently suffered from a gendered inferiority complex. Basing our arguments on The Bluest Eye, this work attempts to prove the assumption that race-based and gender-based superiority and inferiority complex can be broken through conscientisation. It further seeks to prove that superiority and inferiority complex based on race and gender affected negatively black-white and men-women relations during the twentieth-century America as seen through Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Two literary appriaches guided our study. These are New Historicism and Psychoanalisis.