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Pecola Character Traits

408 Words2 Pages

Notwithstanding, Toni Morrison entwines the emotional, physical, and psychological impacts of self-hatred through her characterization of the female characters in the novel. Morrison depicts Pecola Breedlove as the protagonist in The Bluest Eye, though she doesn’t particularly do anything heroic, it is clear she endured countless battles and hardships and appeals to the reader’s emotions of sympathy. On page 46, the narrator reveals Pecola’s thoughts, “If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say ‘Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.’” Pecola, who undoubtedly is beauty’s most targeted victim, suffers emotional scarring because she …show more content…

Geraldine, a secondary character in The Bluest Eye exemplifies great measures of how beauty standards can dictate one’s life. Geraldine, who is an antagonist, is characterized as a beautiful young woman who seems to be successful in all aspects of her life. From an early age, Geraldine embraced the Western standards of beauty and dissociated from blacks “to get rid of her funkiness” (Morrison 83). By deviating from blacks and conforming to white expectations of beauty, Geraldine felt like she was cleansing herself from the negative factors that put her down. The issue goes beyond the character of Geraldine because the town she moved to was full of other black women who took on the white ways of living. As described in the novel on Page 82, “These particular brown girls from Mobile girls move through the air….They smell like wood…They sing second soprano…” Nevertheless, Geraldine’s self-hatred takes a toll on several other aspects of her life, including how she raises her family. Geraldine’s self-hatred destroys her family and affects the way she raises her child. For instance, Junior has trouble identifying with blacks or whites at school, has jealousy issues because his mother doesn’t love him and doesn’t love herself. At some point in the spring section of the novel, Geraldine rejects Pecola, and calls her a “nigger”. In Geraldine’s point of view, there

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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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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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