ipl-logo

Morrison And Lamar: A Literary Analysis

928 Words4 Pages

In The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, a girl named Pecola Breedlove faces adversity and misfortune throughout the book. This book ties back to modern day things in society. For example, To Pimp a Butterfly, by Kendrick Lamar, signifies white people being faulty in restraining “colored people” from meeting their full potential. Both Morrison and Lamar commented on how oppression manifests itself as internalized racism several themes such as: Beauty, Society and Class, and Women and Femininity. In The Bluest Eye and the song Complexion (A Zulu Love), both Morrison and Lamar presented Beauty as one of their major themes. In the book The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl, prays every day for beauty. Breedlove is taunted by many people due …show more content…

Breedlove also vigorously desires to have blonde hair and blue eyes and believes that having these qualities would allow her to fit in. More or less, Lamar’s song, Complexion (A Zulu Love), highlighted the details of self-love and self-confidence. Kendrick goes on to tell the story as a cotton-picking slave, who is forced to submit to his master. He again proceeds to point out how he’s pro ending the cycle of history to improve America’s future. When we hear the word beauty most people think of qualities that most white people possess. The literal meaning behind Beauty is “a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.” Most people view the features that white people obtain as the general thing you need to be beautiful. Morrison and Lamar emphasize how African American view themselves when it comes to beauty. However, Lamar hails African American to see the beauty they’ve they been blinded to see “Beauty is what you make it, I used to be so mistaken / By different shades of faces” (Complexion (A Zulu Love)) Lamar conveys unity within all races rather than branching into their own

Show More
Related

Societal Isolation In Mary Shelley's Frankenstein '

1483 Words | 6 Pages

She wrote that her inspiration for the story was a conversation she had had when she was little with another little black girl who had a fascination with blue eyes, much like her character Pecola Breedlove. Morrison is known for her stories that circle around how racism and misogyny affect black women. For The Bluest Eye, a little girl named Pecola Breedlove goes insane from the inhumane treatment she faces as an eleven-year-old african american girl in the Great Depression. There are many points in the book where she is dehumanized and treated less than dirt, even by her own parents. Her father in a bid to feel in control despite how much white men have controlled him, rapes his daughter and she becomes pregnant with his child.

Read More

Notes On The State Of Virginia Thomas Jefferson Analysis

571 Words | 3 Pages

Jefferson wrote a lot about "beauty" when he mentioned about the outlook of races. He described the African

Read More

I Want To Be Miss America Summary

575 Words | 3 Pages

“Beauty is not just a white girl. It's so many different flavors and shades.” A quote most famously used by Queen Latifah. Julia Alaverze the author of ‘I want to be Miss.America’ faced the struggle of loving and appreciating her beauty when she moved to the United States with her family.

Read More

Cholly's Cruelty In The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

1090 Words | 5 Pages

In the novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Morrison details the life of a young African American girl named Pecola who grows in Lorain, Ohio in the years following the Great Depression. The book’s purpose is to explain how and why Cholly Breedlove, Pecola’s father, came to molest his own daughter. An alcoholic and barbaric, Cholly's baleful and belligerent behavior is a reflection of his troublesome upbringing as a child. While only four days old, Cholly’s parents abandon him, leaving Aunt Jimmy to rescue and adopt him. Shortly after Aunt Jimmy dies, two white men devastate Cholly’s first sexual encounter, who coerce Cholly to continue while they smile contemptuously.

Read More

Dont Touch My Hair Essay

331 Words | 2 Pages

The song represents a journey to self-acceptance of not only one’s hair, but as well as self-acceptance of yourself as an African American Woman. In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Pecola, a young African-American in the 1960’s experiences the same shame that comes with being black in a White America. The song, uncovers this for

Read More

What Is A Fallacy In Between The World And Me

892 Words | 4 Pages

Therefore Black beauty is meaningless in America, according to

Read More

Imagery In The Bluest Eye

807 Words | 4 Pages

The first piece in my portfolio is a piece of Pecola with blue eyes. One of the overarching ideas presented throughout The Bluest Eye is that white features, specifically blue eyes, is the epitome of physical beauty. Throughout the book, there is vivid visual imagery of blue eyes such as those of “lovely Mary Jane” (Morrison 50). The use of the word lovely further correlates her physical appearance and blue eyes with beauty. This causes Pecola to crave blue eyes so desperately that “every night, without fail, she prayed” in order to gain what she and everyone else unanimously view as beauty (46).

Read More

The Bluest Eye: Life Story Of A Girl Named Pecola

281 Words | 2 Pages

The Bluest Eye is a story about a girl named Pecola and her life story in a society where she is at the bottom of a scale. The story explains how she got impregnated by her father called the seed. Also how her baby never grew and ended up dying and also what she went through as a child never being able to reach the beauty standards of society. The story exceeds certain points of views from Pecola 's friends, family, and her own. Pecola reaches a certain point in society where she wants to be seen as beautiful and have a better life than she has, so she wishes she could have blue eyes so she can be beautiful.

Read More

Race And Colorism In Toni Morrison's The Origins Of Others

857 Words | 4 Pages

As a rising intellectual, I believe Toni Morrison’s discussion of the beginnings of race and blackness, in addition to the unpacking of African Americans’ internalized oppression which has resulted in colorism, make The Origins of Others a necessary and thought provoking reading--despite its flaws. The Origins of Others is written on a bases that questions the meaning of race, its purpose, and how it has been projected onto individuals so extensively that it has become a social norm throughout the world; Morrison develops these questions in way that allows room for the reader to form his or her own opinions without feeling stifled or led on. Morrison dives right into her topic from the beginning by asserting that, “Race has been a constant arbiter of difference, as have wealth, class, and gender--each of which is about the power and necessity of control” (3). In other words, race, like many other categories of division in capitalistic and patriarchal societies, was created as means of power and control and throughout the novel Morrison builds on this concept. She chooses to define race as “the classification of a species” (15)--chooses because race is no longer defined that way--to say that race itself is not the issue because it does not apply to the color of one’s skin but simply what kind of animal one is classified as (upon which the human race would be classified as homosapiens).

Read More

The American Dream In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

1002 Words | 5 Pages

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.

Read More

The Effects Of Motherhood In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

3280 Words | 14 Pages

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

Read More

Theme Of Double Consciousness In The Bluest Eye

1542 Words | 7 Pages

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.

Read More

The Nature Of Racialised Beauty In The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

800 Words | 4 Pages

(Morrison, page 57) It was the ideology of whiteness that made Maureen Paul beautiful. When Claudia and Frieda were younger, they were happy with their blackness. “We felt comfortable in our skins, enjoyed the news that our senses released to us, admired our dirt, cultivated our scars, and could not comprehend this unworthiness” (Morrison, page 57). This may suggest that Claudia resists the pressure to conform to Western standards of beauty.

Read More

Self-Worth In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

1172 Words | 5 Pages

Toni Morrison, in numerous interviews, has said that her reason for writing The Bluest Eye was that she realized there was a book she wanted very much to read that had not been written yet. She set out to construct that book – one that she says was about her, or somebody like her. For until then, nobody had taken a little black girl—the most vulnerable kind of person in the world—seriously in literature; black female children have never held centre stage in anything. Thus with the arrival of the character Pecola Breedlove, a little hurt black girl is put to the centre of the story. Pecola’s quest is to acquire “Shirley Temple beauty” and blue eyes – ideals of beauty sponsored by the white world.

Read More

Identity In The Bluest Eye

835 Words | 4 Pages

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

Read More

More about Morrison And Lamar: A Literary Analysis

Related Topics

Open Document