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How Does Pecola's Character Change Throughout The Novel

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However, as the incidents go on, Pecola is turned instead into a mad little girl. Being raped by her father and becoming pregnant has destroyed all her hopes of becoming beautiful in the eyes of her society. She is totally ruined after this accident that she has become crazy. Thus, this is the life of a little black girl who is the victim of a white-dominated culture that has set the standards of beauty regardless of anything. Cholly Breedlove is one of the major characters who helps to bring about the dilemma in The Bluest Eye. He is a helpless, hopeless, miserable, powerless black man who has suffered from humiliation and contempt throughout his life, so he impulsively destroys his family and his daughter's life. In order …show more content…

However, what happened is that cholly ''had not hated the white men ; he hated, despised, the girl" (42). He has seen his helpless weak self in his partner, Darlene. He has hated himself and the girl. He ''looked at Darlene . He hated her.'' He wanted ''to strangle her'' when she could not move after the men leave. Instead of feeling sympathy towards the poor girl, he has hated her so much because he has seen himself in her. He has never considered'' directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess- that hating them would have burned him up like a piece of soft coal, leaving only flakes of ash and a question mark of smoke'' (150). In the article'' failures of Love: Female Initiation in the Novels of Toni Morrison, the literary critic Bakerman describes Cholly as being'' set adrift by the death of his guardian, taunted and humiliated by white men during his first sexual encounter,{…because he} does not know about nurturing love, and feeling love, he is incapable of expressing it healthfully'' (544). In other words, Cholly has found it really difficult to express love or any feeling because he has not been nurtured to do so and he has never found anyone to teach him to do so

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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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Destructive Nature of Racialised Beauty Toni Morrison published her first book, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. In this novel, Toni Morrison shows how societies racist and false beliefs on beauty can be seriously destructive if believed and taken to heart. Toni Morrison displays the destructive nature of racialised beauty through the character in the novel named Pecola Breedlove. Pecola lacks self esteem and believes that she is the blackest and ugliest girl, and she believes that white is the only beautiful race.

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The Bluest Eye illustrates the damage done to a black child when the way she is defined by white society obliterates all positive definitions of her self-worth. Gurleen Grewal reflects that “individuals collude in their own oppression by internalizing the dominant culture’s values in the face of great material contradictions” (21). Indeed, it is evident in the novel how the community at large has accepted light skin as beautiful, and thus has negated beauty in darker skin. Within this dominant culture, white colonialists are the “all-knowing master” that the narrator refers to – the people responsible for giving Pecola “a cloak of ugliness to wear”, which she had “accepted without question” (37). It is this cloak that hides the knowledge of her own true identity and self-worth which, though she “put it on”, “did not belong to [her]” (36).

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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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