Topdogging Quadrille: an analysis on the portraying of gender roles in The Bluest Eye and Topdog/Underdog

This paper highlighted and problematized the portraying of gender roles in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye (1970) and Parks’s Topdog/Underdog (2001). With a comparative approach, the debate on the matter of father and motherhood associated with the assigned roles of men and women was enlightening to raise awareness to the impact these representative figures have on the characters under examination. Also, the analysis of the synonymic relations that are established in the discourse of characters of the pieces lead to the conclusion that “beauty” in The Bluest Eye means “whiteness” and, in Topdog/Underdog, it means “richness”. Finally, a parallel was set amid “topdogging” and “Quadrille” (ANDRADE, 2013), considering the “topdogging” act in the stories forms a chain of events and consequences in which one move/person is connected to and interferes with the next.