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Beauty In The Bluest Eye

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Not many people realize how much white standards of beauty, like having blonde hair and blue eyes, affect people of different races. Society has guaranteed that ‘being beautiful’ is not only hard to achieve for people of color, but impossible in many cases. An African American girl cannot change her eye color to one that has been deemed ‘pretty,’ and yet she lets society tell her that not having those pretty eyes is somehow bad. Society has deemed black culture as something dirty and beneath those who have obtained society’s idea of beauty. Caucasian beauty standards influence every main character in the book “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, and it leads to the emotional downfall of Pecola Breedlove. Being beautiful becomes the character’s …show more content…

Many other characters are affected by the fact that they are not what society has deemed beautiful. The character Geraldine is a clear example of an adult who has become obsessed with chasing the ideals of white beauty. In the book, she has shaped her whole life around being as perfect as possible and in doing so, she abandons her sense of self and gives up her culture. She becomes uncaring for those around her, and focusses only on the “order, precision and constancy” of her life (85). She feels no love towards her husband or her son, and only likes the family’s cat. Her desire to have such an ideal family tortures her son. Geraldine feels that she must raise a clean and morally right child, but she does not feel that she has to have any type of bond with him; simply put, she does not love him. She did not let him cry when he was a baby, nor did she “talk to him, coo to him, or indulge him in kissing bouts” (86). She also has the barber “cut [Junior’s] hair as close to his scalp as possible,” with a part etched in to make him look more white (87). Also, even though Junior wants to play with the other black kids, Geraldine will not let

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Introduction: In “The Birthmark” and “Eye of the Beholder,” the authors flip our notion of beauty on its head and bring into question the concept of modern day beauty and who is fit to determine what denotes a beautiful person. They achieve this through the uses of irony, characterization, and isolation. Subject 1-

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They constantly encounter the problem of not living up to society’s beauty standards, which results in feelings of self-hatred based on race. These feelings perpetuate racism, as society, and even black people, tend to favor white beauty since it is held up as superior. The problems that Pecola, Pauline, and Claudia face in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are not just figments of the past. Today, millions of women across the country feel some sort of self-loathing stemming from dissatisfaction over how they look. It is important that society tries to free itself from these nonsensical standards and celebrate the unique beauty of each individual

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Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a tragic story about a young black girl growing up in Lorain, Ohio after the Great Depression. Morrison wrote this novel to portray that the racy themes in the book such as incest, prostitution, child molestation, domestic violence, substance abuse, and racism can not only be experienced by adults but by children as well. So to create a piece of literature that shows what that is like, helps society to better understand what exactly it is that, not just a child, but an African American child, would have gone through during that time. So, in The Bluest Eye Claudia MacTeer, nine years old and her sister Frieda who is 10 years old, live with both their parents in an old house.

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The book “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison takes place in a poor area of Lorain, Ohio in the year 1941. I think this is a great setting for the book. It teaches people now about the hardships that people of color (specifically African-Americans) had to face every day in the early 20th century. Although I like the setting now, I think it would be very interesting to read a book about the same topic in the present time. Hardships for any person of color still exist, even though it may not be as bad or easy to see.

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The narrator claims, that beauty is essential to give us a purpose of life. It has the ability to transform our surroundings, and get us to a higher spiritual level. He explores

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It is the mother’s vulnerability to the racial standards of beauty that is transmitted to the daughter and ultimately leads to her victimization. In fact, the reason of Pauline’s vulnerability to the racially prejudiced notions of beauty lies in her relationship with her own mother. The relationship between Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist, and her mother, Pauline Breedlove, is ironically characterized by lack of love, and emotional attachment, indifference, frustration and cruelty. Set in a small town in Ohio, during the Depression, The Bluest Eye is the story of eleven year old Pecola Breedlove, who, victimized by the racist society, yearns for blue eyes, which, she believes, will make her worthy of love, happiness and acceptance in the

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Toni Morrison, the first black women Nobel Prize winner, in her first novel, The Bluest Eye depicts the tragic condition of the blacks in racist America. It examines how the ideologies perpetuated by the dominant groups and adopted by the marginal groups influence the identity of the black women. Through the depictions of white beauty icons, Morrison’s black characters lose themselves to self-hatred. They try to obliterate their heritage, and eventually like Pecola Breedlove, the child protagonist, who yearns for blue eyes, has no recourse except madness. This assignment focusses on double consciousness and its devastating effects on Pecola.

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Therefore, here attempted to believe that Toni Morrison's very success as a writer may be a testimony to her power to examine themes from various angles and to accept unresolved situations as they are. Patrick Bryce Bjork in his conclusion observes that: "Her[Toni Morrison] characters waver within the contradictions and ambiguities o desire and repression, control and chaos, attraction and chaos, attraction and repulsion, connection and withdrawal" (Song of Solomon, 1977). Some scholars have even come to the conclusion that what Toni Morrison talks about in her novels is almost entirely foreign, different from the notion of the "rugged individualist" that characterizes the works of the Transcendentalists, even distasteful to many Americans

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The novel tells not only the story of Pecola but the story of the whole black community that unable to conform to white standards of beauty are condemned to sink into a pit of darkness. In this paper I will discuss how beauty is constructed in The Bluest Eye. Beauty is one of the main topics in The Bluest Eye and its importance relies on the fact that this is a novel about finding self-identity, but most of the characters from the novel search for their own identity in others. They value beauty over other things such as intelligence because they live in a society in which beauty is constructed in a way that they associate it with being loved and approved by others and as I just said they establish their self-worth based on how others perceive them. In the case of Pecola, she believes that having blue eyes will make her beautiful and wanted and she will never be sad again, as

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Morrison 's first novel, The Bluest Eye, examines the tragic effects of imposing white, middle-class American ideals of beauty on the developing female identity of a young African American girl during the early 1940s. Inspired by a conversation Morrison once had with an elementary school classmate who wished for blue eyes, the novel poignantly shows the psychological devastation of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who searches for love and acceptance in a world that denies and devalues people of her own race. As her mental state slowly unravels, Pecola hopelessly longs to possess the conventional American standards of feminine beauty—namely, white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes—as presented to her by the popular icons and traditions of white culture. Written as a fragmented narrative from multiple perspectives and with significant typographical deviations, The Bluest Eye juxtaposes passages from the Dick-and-Jane grammar school primer with memories and stories of Pecola 's life alternately told in retrospect by one of Pecola 's now-grown childhood friends and by an omniscient narrator. Published in the midst of the Black Arts movement that flourished during the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Bluest Eye has attracted

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