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Pecola Character Traits

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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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Morrison came to realize that “beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do” (167). In the afterword of the novel she puts her astonishment: Until that moment I had seen the pretty, the lovely, the nice, the ugly, and although I had certainly used the word ‘beautiful’, I had never experienced its shock – the force of which was equaled by the knowledge that no one else recognized it, not even, or especially, the one who possessed it. (167) The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison’s effort to explore the trauma of color-prejudice that makes a black girl desire for a “radical alteration” by possessing blue eyes. Morrison affirms in the afterword of the novel that “implicit in her desire was racial self loathing” (167).

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Rather than mental instability from within, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye explores disturbed characters who result from societal oppression. Pecola, a young girl who loves in a troubled household, grows up facing many unusual problems. In a racist society, she believes that having blue eyes will solve her problems.

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In the novel The Bluest Eye the author Toni Morrison employs a plethora of literary devices in order to convey not only the adversities of our heroin Pecola, but also to bring attention to some of the deeper more pressing issues in, then, contemporary society. Through her novel Morrison demonstrates how internal racism, and societal perceptions of beauty are damaging to not only the individual being marginalized but also society as a whole. One of the reasons, I will argue, that Morrison uses imagery, diction, and tone to illustrate the repercussions of internalized racism, societal norms beauty standards. In the Bluest Eye Toni Morrison's tone when describing what is, in essence, the ideal black women is entirely bland to the point of

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In the novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison, the author, is able to convey a series of potent and important points across to the reader throughout her realistic depictions of the struggles of her characters. The Bluest Eye follows many characters who are both morally questionable and sympathizable. She presents characters such as Pecola, who is meant to invoke many emotions in the reader, and characters such as Cholly, who she wants the reader to dislike, but only after careful consideration. Topics that she focuses on in the novel are self-image and self-worth. While many of the characters in this novel struggle with these problems, Pecola is undoubtedly the most affected of them all, she is victimized by the popularized view that being white,

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The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison portrays a world of racial inequalities, internalized white beauty standards, and male superiority through the interconnecting stories of various characters in the town of Lorain, Ohio during The Great Depression. The novel centers on Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl living with an unstable, often violent family. Pecola’s father and mother beat each other frequently, and her brother, Sammy, runs away constantly. She is consumed with incessant fear and self-hatred, stemming from her society’s idealization of whiteness.

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Pecola is bullied because she is dark skinned, which makes her ugly. The narrator describes what Pecola does when she gets bullied: “Pecola edged around the circle crying. She had dropped her notebook, and covered her eyes with her hands” while Maureen Paul screamed, “I am cute! And you ugly black e mos” (66,73). Pecola is constantly bullied at school because she is ugly.

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They constantly encounter the problem of not living up to society’s beauty standards, which results in feelings of self-hatred based on race. These feelings perpetuate racism, as society, and even black people, tend to favor white beauty since it is held up as superior. The problems that Pecola, Pauline, and Claudia face in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are not just figments of the past. Today, millions of women across the country feel some sort of self-loathing stemming from dissatisfaction over how they look. It is important that society tries to free itself from these nonsensical standards and celebrate the unique beauty of each individual

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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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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.

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800 Words | 4 Pages

The novel shows black people who are aware of the danger of conforming to Western standards of beauty. In the beginning of the novel, Claudia describes herself as indifferent; She realizes that she does not really hate Maureen but instead hated “the thing that made her beautiful” (Morrison, page 58). Claudia always asked herself “What was the secret? ... Why was it important? And so what?”

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1172 Words | 5 Pages

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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1260 Words | 6 Pages

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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