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Pecola's Credibility

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Author/Speaker The author, Toni Morrison, showed us throughout the novel how credible and trustworthy she is. Her credibility is shown through the way she uses Claudia to narrate most of the book. By using Claudia, a seven year old, as a narrator, it shows the readers how trustworthy it is, because she doesn’t censor anything she tells the readers. She doesn’t understand the the conversations she overhears between the black women. Claudia was deeply affected by the way Pecola was treated, even though she was young she understood that Pecola wasn’t treated fair. The author and speaker’s reputation conveys being controlled by authority. Claudia mentioned how she was never to start conversation with an adult. She had to treat adults with respect. …show more content…

She attacks the way they treated each other when they should have stood together, not tear each other down. She felt that too many young black girls grew up hating what they looked like and thinking they were ugly. They were constantly compared to white girls, who were the beauty standards in that time peiod. In addition to that, their beauty was determined on a scale of how black they were. Lighter black girls, such as Maureen, a light-skinned, mixed girl, were considered to be the most beautiful. “When teachers called on her, they smiled encouragingly. Black boys didn’t stone her, white girls didn’t suck their teeth when she was assigned to be their partners--” (Morrison 62). This quote shows how Maureen got treated better than Claudia and Pecola, just because her skin was lighter. Pecola’s teachers never smiled at her and she never failed to be the object of the boys’ stones. Morrison wanted to show that being black is beautiful no matter what skin tone one …show more content…

The Breedlove family is the subject of inferiority due to their presumed ugliness. “The master had said, ‘You are ugly people.’ They had looked about themselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at them from every billboard, every movie, every glance” (Morrison 39). They believed that whiteness was the only beauty out there, because that’s what everyone else believed. All the movie stars and people treated well were white. Believing blue eyes could save her from her world of ugliness and tragedy, Pecola wished for them for so long. She thought that if she had something that was considered beautiful, people would stop treating her poorly. “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights---if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (Morrison 46). Through this book Morrison wanted to show that anyone could be beautiful, because beauty is something that goes beyond one’s appearance. “Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do” (Morrison

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These women with beautiful, pure souls were wiped off their self identity and value. They were unknowledgeable of such richness they contained, due to acts of unkind treatment. This treatment passed down caused psychological issues, such as poor self esteem to these women. The actions of being treated as nothing gave them the idea, they were merely dirt on the ground that people walked on. Nothing to the white race they were, but to the generation they created looked to them in awe.

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“It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights - if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.” In this quote found in Chapter 3, in the Autumn section of the novel, it showed the desire of Pecola to have the Bluest Eyes. Pecola wants to have blue eyes not because she wants to be beautiful but because she wants to change how she sees reality. Pecola experiences a lot of things and one thing led to another and she saw her parents have a violent fight, she thinks that the only solution to her pain is if she sees something different. In Pecola’s perspective, one’s physical appearance is the most important thing and that people

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Interpretive Response to The Bluest Eye - Not only does Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye reveal the undeniable theme that white is beauty. She also affiliates sex and sexuality with humiliation instead of something pleasant. The idea of whiteness as the beauty ideal mainly revolves around Pecola, but is first introduced in the story through a toy doll.

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Claudia MacTeer- She’s the narrator of the story. Claudia is a strong independent nine-year-old fighter that isn’t tractable and rebels against adults. She makes it her mission to fight against the black community idealizing the white beauty standards. Cholly Breedlove-

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A three-hundred-year history of slavery in America led to a psychological oppression of black people in America, which still exists today. Toni Morrison decides not to delineate how white dominance has affected African-Americans culturally yet she challenges American standards of white beauty and how that beauty is socially constructed within our culture. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses society’s image of beauty to demonstrate how the value of black beauty is diminished by racial prejudices and dilemmas through the lives of Pecola Breedlove, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, whose young minds were affected by this internalized idea that the color of your skin determined how perfect or worthy you were seen, not to yourself and on the inside, but

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These oppressions persist today and so do their effects on black families and even more in young black people. Because Morrison makes the issue not only beauty but also our perception of ugli-ness in general, the problem of the “ugly little girl asking for beauty” is a cultural problem. Every time a young person looks in the mirror and sees that they are not as beautiful as a movie star or not as as beautiful as the television, magazine, and billboard ads tells them they should be, they feel the fear of rejection and abandonment, and through this novel, readers have experienced the emotional pain of that which destroyed Pecola. “Suffering with Pecola, knowing that pain con-sciously, feeling it, acknowledging it openly and directly, most of

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They however cannot reach this ideal of blond hair, blue eyes and white skin. Therefore they are forced to feel inferior. This implies that they are taught to hate themselves. This is what the evil of colonialism has done to the African Americans in the name of “civilizing mission”. In the novel white’s ideologies as well as their cultural values have culminated into a dangerous trap for Pecola whose life is dominated by ideas and beliefs regarding white beauty – a thing so superficial and

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In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the way Pecola values herself directly correlates with what white society considered beautiful at the time. The impact white society has on the self-assurance of minorities, especially minority women, is not only evident in Morrison’s novel, but also the way it continues to affect women of color today. The Bluest Eye effectively criticizes the way white society pressures and molds the personalities and self-value of African-American women directly and through the use of American pop culture and media. In the foreword to The Bluest Eye, Morrison speaks about why she began writing the novel, the root of prejudice, and how to understand and combat the self-loathing effects it has on minority female youth.

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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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A common thread Pecola saw in people regarded as beautiful by the media and the people surrounding her were blue eyes, causing her to align the concept of beauty with visible features. Beauty, which is defined by the Merriam Webster Dictionary as “the quality or aggregate of qualities in a person or thing that gives pleasure to the senses or pleasurably exalts the mind or spirit” is an abstract concept; a concept that cannot simply be grasped or seen. But in The Bluest Eye, beauty manifest into a tangible object. A young girl, Claudia, narrated “You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction.

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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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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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At another level, it is a clear narration of how internalized concepts of beauty works in the minds of blacks and they themselves become their oppressors. All through the novel we can find numerous instances where “whiteness” is the measure for beauty. This is evident in all the characters in the novel who degrade themselves for not being fair and lovely like the whites. The novel is narrated through the eyes of a ten-year old girl Claudia McTeer who witnesses white hegemony around her as well as this superiority being unquestioningly accepted by the blacks. Sexism is one

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However, they would leave Pecola alone when they see her with Maureen Peal, described with “springtime eyes so wide with interest” (Morrison 66-67). 2) African Americans perceive that white Americans have a better lifestyle. According to the African American’s schema, “a white American ideal of the family unit [is] cohesive, happy, with love enough to spare to pets…it is desirable, but for man, particularly the black man, it is unattainable” (Ogunyemi 354). Pecola feels that if she had blue eyes, she could see the world the way white Americans do.

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