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Love And Hate In The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

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Love is something that many people desire. In “The Bluest Eye,” Toni Morrison describes Love and Hate, referring to the people in the early 1941. This novel through flashbacks describes Love and Hate and its consequences on self-esteem. There are different ways Morrison describes Love and Hate in the novel: First, love for white features. Second, hatred for black features. Third, self-hate. First, love for white features. Society’s standard of beauty is based on white features, blue eyes, synthetic yellow bangs, pinched nose and bowline mouth. There are a lot of black people who desired the white features, one of them is Pecola. Pecola, from the beginning is an object of pity her desire for blue eyes and lighter skin overshadows …show more content…

According to Steele, Black folks are “the most despised race in the human community of races” (White 1991). In the early 1940 when racism was still very much alive and colored people, were being limited to do certain things. Black characters in the novel have grown up in a society that does not find them pretty enough or even worthy to be looked at. Pecola and her entire family the Breedloves. Mrs. Breedlove also known as Polly during her younger years saw herself as ugly, her belief made her feel lonely and cold. She has a bad foot and doesn 't see herself getting married. When she got married to Cholly and moved she felt uncomfortable with the other black women she met because of her hair. “They were amused by her because she did not straighten her hair” (Pg. 118). Another character who was despised for her black features was Pecola. When she was born her mother Pauline Breedlove describes her as smart and ugly: “But Pecola look like she knowed right off what to do. A right smart baby she was. I used to like to watch her. You know they make them greedy sounds. Eyes all soft and wet. A cross between a puppy and a dying man. But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair but Lord she was ugly.” Even in her mother’s eyes Pecola is still ugly, the love a Mother has for her child could not overshadow ugliness in Pauline’s eyes. “They were disgusted, amused, shocked, outraged, or even excited by the story. But we listened for the …show more content…

.” “Black Americans remain the most despised among the community of human races, reinforced via media images. In response is Black self-hate acted out by the political conservatism of Black American Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas as icon. Black Conservatives insist that Blacks who fail, if they want, can succeed much as any other. Conversely, research substantiates that the self-hate pathology Black Americans who fail suffer precipitates a decrease in leukocyte telomere length (LTL). A decrease in LTL is a reduction in life span longevity. Black self-hate then presumes a life-threatening pathology among Black Americans so afflicted. In the aftermath, as the most despised among human races coupled with the internalization of self-hate, is a joint process which accelerates biological aging. The antidote may require Black pride as alternative to the premature LTL aging of Black people in America. “According to Morrison: “So it was. A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfilment.”(Pg.204) The desire for blue eyes destroyed Pecola, she went from being an object of pity, to an object of mockery. “We saw her sometimes, Frieda and I-after the baby came too soon and died. After the gossip and the slow waging of heads. She was so sad to see. Grown people looked away; children those who were not frightened by her,

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Mindy Kaling knew that to be happy she could not compare herself to the icons of beauty, and thus lived a more carefree and upbeat. Unfortunately for the girls in The Bluest Eye they would only scrutinize these icons and identify what make people beautiful. Both authors wrote about image, just in very different ways, Kaling saw it as some societal expectations meant to be broken, where Morrison portrayed the

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In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, there is a girl named, Pecola, and she is constantly teased and ridiculed by characters in the book. For example, Pecola meets a light-skinned boy named, Junior, and one day he invites Pecola to his home and play with his kittens. “Some kittens. We got some kittens. You can have one if you want.”

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They used her weakness to strengthen themselves. They made her feel even uglier than she was to make themselves feel more beautiful. Moreover, Claudia's narration allows the reader to comprehend that Pecola was very beautiful and just wasn’t strong enough to believe she was. In light of this, Pecola’s weakness is enhanced because Claudia is able to see through the paradigm of this standard of beauty and open the reader’s eyes past this standard. It brings them to the realization that if Pecola had the same strength to see past societies standards she would also be considered as

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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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This story punctuates the journey of Pecola in the 1940s where racism and sexism were prominent themes in life how her journey comes to represent fundamental problems with society. This idea finds fruition in the works of Morrison whose protagonist in the story attempts to be the ideal girls which she thinks can only happen through blue eyes. Also, in the current political and social period, this story holds particular significance as women’s rights have again come under siege whether it be through the pro-life laws that limit women’s choices. Therefore, the author advocates for a just society where equality can prevail, and humanity can take precedence over divisive politics and discrimination even though it is done through a creation of a realistic but unfortunate ending. Therefore, as pointed out by, Ted Chiang “Girls have always been told that their value is tied to their appearance; their accomplishments are always magnified if they're pretty and diminished if they're not” This thought can be clearly seen in “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison.

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Pecola saw that Ms. Breedlove didn’t want anything with her and took care of the little white girl. This shows that Pecola is very unwanted and different from the world. Her mother showed this with the white girl. Ms. Breedlove was responsible to keep that house clean, but did overreacted a little bit to Pecola, which kind of wasn’t

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What is the most pressing issue facing society today? In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison argues that it is beauty standards, even calling physical beauty “the most destructive idea[] in the history of human thought” (122). While this may seem outrageous in a world of terrorism, global warming, homelessness, and hunger, beauty standards and the feelings of inferiority that stem from them affect everybody. In severe cases, these feelings can even manifest themselves deeply inside of a person and lead to eating disorders, depression, anxiety, self-hatred, and even suicide. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses the insecurities of the female characters to demonstrate that beauty standards are a danger to society, as they perpetuate racism and self-hatred.

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The social standards of beauty and the idea of the American Dream in The Bluest Eye leads Mrs. Breedlove to feelings of shame that she later passes on to Pecola. The Breedloves are surrounded by the idea of perfection, and their absence of it makes them misfits. Mrs. Breedlove works for a white family, the Fishers. She enjoys the luxury of her work life and inevitably favors her work over her family. This leads Pecola to struggle to find her identity, in a time where perception is everything.

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Toni Morrison´s The Bluest Eye (1970) conveys the Marxist idealism that social and economic realities are the factors that determine the culture and consciousness of a particular group. The struggle within the context of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the rejection of African American people is displayed in Morrison´s work, showing the author´s consciousness. Thus, in this paper I will try to show the author´s belief that human self-realisation is determined and delimited by the dominant class at every level. For this purpose I will focus on the relation between wealth and social class, on how the dominant class, in this case the white one, imposes its values over the black community, reducing its personality and leading its members to lose their identity. I will also try to show how the victims of the capitalist system see themselves trapped in an order from which it is very difficult to escape, and find themselves forced to give up and accept their current condition.

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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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1.1. Introduction Toni Morrison wrote the Bluest Eye. Some of the parts also coexist with her own childhood. She grew up in Lorain, Ohio in 1931 and the narrator is a nine-year-old girl, the age of Morrison similar to the year the book takes place (1941).

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Root, Identity and Community have always been the underlying theme of Toni Morrison. Through the accounts of her novels, Toni Morrison shows several ways in which slavery, which was the most oppressive period in the black history, has affected the identity of African American. In Bluest Eye, Morrison shows that a black woman who searches for her true identity feels frustrated by her blackness and yearns to be white because of the constant fear of being rejected in her surroundings. Thus Morrison tries to locate post colonial black identity in the socio-political ground where cultures are hybridized, powers are negotiated and individuals are reproduced as resistant agents. She not only writes about claiming the superiority by the white but also

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In Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, she validates her theme of how society can corrupt people through the portrayal of a conflicted society of racism to show segregation between the white and nonwhite, symbolic blue eyes to portray what the characters desperately desire in order to have a better life, and an abused

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