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Bruce D. Perry's The Bluest Eye

763 Words4 Pages

Love is the cornerstone for every human. In other words, people do not just need shelter and food to survive, but they also need to feel loved to build a strong foundation for themselves. In a way, it is even more significant to have a safety net of people who are reliable and are able to provide care than getting plentiful nutrition. Most importantly, people need to feel loved at any early age. As soon as they are born. For at an early age, humans establish their cornerstone through feeling love from their close ones. Around this cornerstone, they build the rest of their house as they grow older, so it is crucial that the cornerstone is placed carefully and thoughtfully. If it is not placed correctly or is completely ignored, children do not …show more content…

People who are placed into dangerous situations like the characters in The Bluest Eye, end up with a serious trauma that stays with them throughout their whole life, impacting the way they act and perceive the world. In order to observe how the community impacts people, a close look can be taken at Bruce D. Perry’s work. As a child psychiatrist, Perry encounters many “emotionally stunted and traumatized children” (35). Through working with such cases, Perry gains new knowledge that he wants to pass on to others. In order to do so, Perry writes books to educate readers about how violence and stress at an early age can affect the developing brain. In particular, Perry’s book, The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog, contains his personal experiences in working with patients who were placed under violence, sexual abuse, or neglect. Important lessons can be learned when reading about “children who have encountered the dark side of human experience” (1). One of the stories is about Sandy, whose experience of her mother’s murder teaches many about the impact that trauma can have on a child’s brain. Another story focuses on Leon, a boy who was placed under such unspeakable deprivation that he did not develop properly. These stories are very similar to the one’s of Pecola and Cholly. Even though Toni Morrison does not provide the reader with an explanation to why Pecola and Cholly end up in such miserable states, the explanation can be found by using Perry’s work. Through picking out the similarities between Perry’s experiences and Pecola’s and Cholly’s stories, the answer to the why can be

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The book is about the tragic murder of the Clutter family. The parents Herb and Bonnie and teens Keyon and Nancy who all lived on their farm in Holcomb, Kansas. The narrator describes the Clutters life through the events of their last day alive. Perry Smith and Dick Hickock murder the family late that night. They flee after the murder and make it to Mexico.

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A Child Called “It” is a memoir written by Dave Pelzer about his abusive childhood and how he managed to escape the hands of his mother. Pelzer wrote this book so that he could share his story and to also address the ongoing issue of child abuse. Throughout the majority of his childhood Pelzer was severely abused by his alcoholic and mentally sick mother. Social services deemed Pelzer’s abuse the most horrendous and gruesome of all such cases reported by that time in California.

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In Wolff’s memoir ‘This Boys Life;’ it is often deemed laborious for the reader to impression much compassion for Toby. Although situated in an abusive household, the protagonist continually makes destructive decisions and elaborative lies. Without prior reflection on their possible consequences, Toby fails to prevent the affect they have on the people around him as well as his own future. Throughout the memoir, the protagonist, Jack Wolff, continually leads himself and the people around him into a preventable down spiral, making it difficult for most readers, especially older onlookers, to composition little or no affection for him.

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In The Gathering of Old Men, by Ernest J. Gaines, and The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, the authors follow the story of different black communities and how they are affected by oppression. In The Gathering of Old Men a white man, Beau, is found dead in a black man’s yard, Mathu. Mathu’s ‘daughter’ brings together all of the black men in the surrounding neighborhoods to say that they were the ones who shot Beau. In The Bluest Eye a black child, Pecola, is oppressed in many ways throughout the story and near the end is raped by her father. The most substantial part of the story however, is afterwards and how she eventually becomes insane from the onslaught of oppression she faced.

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Tobias Wolff’s memoir This Boys Life, charts the young boys trials and adulations, growing up in the turbulent post war 1950s america with a warm hearted but ineffectual mother and a long string of violent and dangerous partners. Poverty and violence in his life rob Toby of his childhood innocence forcing him to hide in his own imagination to shield himself from harm. At the tender age of ten Toby witnesses a major “crash”. Standing “at the cliffs edge” Toby does not realise how much of an ominous sign this is for his life.

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Dr. Bruce Perry began his book The Boy Who Was Raised as a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook – What Traumatized Children Can Teach Us About Loss, Love, and Healing with a statement about children and their resilience. Much like what we discussed in class, Dr. Perry touched on how children were thought to be naturally resilient and that they seemed to bounce back quickly. However, he continued with the statement that even the slightest bit of stress can impact an infant's development. Likewise, we discussed numerous things that can impact the welfare of children, such as attachment, education, and poverty.

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886 Words | 4 Pages

The world is filled with labels, some negative and some positive. When it comes to negative labeling, a person’s sense of beauty in themselves and in the world is impacted. In The Bluest Eye, author Toni Morrison uses her characters such as Pecola to illustrate how another’s labeling can alter the way one internalizes his or her own beauty; Morrison poses an overall negative storyline filled with labels and discrimination that in turn allows the reader to identify the highlighted and deeper beauty that is not always visible to the naked eye. Pecola, a young girl during a time of extreme racism and discrimination, is raised in an abusive and unstable home. The effects of the abuse on Pecola has a large impact on her views of the world and

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Valeria Oceguera Violence in the family Professor Hoffman February 23,2017 A Child Called ‘It” A Child Called “It” by Dave Pelzer is a story about a child named David, who is a victim of abuse from his mother and tells his story of how he struggles to stay alive, search for food and the problems he has in school. David lives with his mother, father and brothers, but at the end of the book, he feels a strong hatred for his family and a strong hate for the people who knew about the abuse, David also regrets being born and questions if God exists. There are many health issues that happen when abuse happens to a child specifically and these include, “suicidal thoughts, eating disorder, PTSD can develop from a childhood of abuse.”

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In The Bluest Eye, Morrison offers multiple perspectives to help explain the intensity of racism and what it means to be oppressed and degraded in society. Through the eyes of various characters, readers are taken on a journey during the 1940s to demonstrate how each black character copes with the unfair standards and beliefs that society has. While some of the characters internalize self-hatred and have the desire to be someone else, others do not wish to change themselves to fit into the societal standards. Throughout the novel, there are clear and distinct remarks that are made to help distinguish the difference between white characters and black characters which is quite crucial. Morrison uses dirt and cleanliness to symbolize how society

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Maltreatment has a severe impact on a child’s current and future functioning and development regarding their emotional, social, cognitive, behavioral, and physical wellbeing.(Frederico 345). Different types of abuse, such as physical, emotional, and sexual have different consequences, but the consequences of all maltreatment, are likely to happen in three stages. Firstly, a child may have an initial reaction such as post-traumatic symptoms, painful emotions, and cognitive distortions. Secondly, children develop coping strategies that are aimed to help increase their safety or reduce their pain. Thirdly, a child 's sense of self-worth is damaged and develop the feeling of shame and hopelessness..

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501 Words | 3 Pages

Hell, humiliation, and hardships is what Dave Pelzer had to deal with for eight years of his atrocious childhood. A Child Called “It” is a memoir that apprises Dave Pelzer’s childhood life, and how it transformed from a mirthful summer to a pure stone-cold winter. Pelzer’s psychotic and alcoholic mother both physically and mentally abused and neglected him from ages four to twelve. Pelzer’s mother referred to him as “the boy” and even dehumanizing him by calling him “a nobody, an it”. Pelzer was treated like a slave, having to do all the chores around the house on time and ordinarily had to play his mother’s tortuous games; these games usually caused Pelzer severe injuries.

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1039 Words | 5 Pages

The short documentary “Child of Rage” presents an example of how experiencing abuse as a child can shape the child later in life and how some children can recover. The intrafamilial abuse that Beth experienced as a one year old affected her behavior later in her childhood when she was adopted. Beth was also able to recover from some of the effects of the child abuse she experienced once she was separated from her adoptive family and taken to a special home. Beth experienced intrafamilial abuse at the hands of her biological father after her mother passed away when she was one.

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1067 Words | 5 Pages

For instance, for this student, before reading this book, I would categorize this different types of abuse differently, from more severe to less severe, and perhaps giving less importance to those I viewed as less severe. But it is important to understand that for each of these victims, each abuse was very serious, very severe, and they should be treated equally. This book is also a great source of understanding for those who were perpetrators of abuse, especially against children, it will help them to understand the consequences of their actions, and how perhaps once act, have completely changed the life of a child. This book is also important to parents and those who work with children, when we, as adults understands the risks that children, adolescents and any person who is not able to protect themselves are facing, we hopefully can be more vigilant of children, women and any possible

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295 Words | 2 Pages

The Bluest Eye centres the story of a twelve-year-old African American girl named Pecola Breedlove. Growing up in a community that places considerable amounts of emphasis on beauty, she is constantly bombarded with images whereby she learns that as long as she is black, she is not entitled to be beautiful, to be loved, or to rise up out of poverty. This reminds her of her “ugliness” and inadequacy. Pecola longs to be loved and accepted by her community as well as in a world which rejects and diminishes the value of the members of her own race and defines beauty according to Anglo-Saxon cultural standards (Ranström,:6). This standard of beauty, which even her peers subscribe to, is represented by a white child actress, Shirley Temple.

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1542 Words | 7 Pages

The Bluest Eyes open with an anecdote of Dick and Jane to show how racism destroys the mental stability of black people. It equates whites with success and happiness while blacks with poverty and unhappiness. This traumatises the minds of Blacks and they begin to dislike their own heritage and skin colour in the white world of Dick and Jane.

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