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Racism in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
Racism in the bluest eyes by toni morrison
Racism in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
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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.
Segregation in America used to be the standard. Even in times where segregation was outlawed, racial tensions still existed between individual races, especially white and black populations. In the play Fences, the main character, Troy, is a previous baseball player for the Negor League. He believes that if he was white, his life would be completely different; also, he would be different if he had a better childhood. Similarly in The Bluest Eye, Cholly is a man who is a drunk and rapes his daughter; however, he had a severley traumatic childhood that shaped him to be susceptible to these actions.
Rhetorical Analysis Essay The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison takes place in Ohio in the 1940s. The novel is written from the perspective of African Americans and how they view themselves. Focusing on identity, Morrison uses rhetorical devices such as imagery, dictation, and symbolism to help stress her point of view on identity. In the novel the author argues that society influences an individual 's perception on beauty, which she supports through characters like Pecola and Mrs. Breedlove.
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,
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
There are multiple symbols that Morrison uses to symbolize this white beauty standard and different desires to obtain it such as milk, and Pecola’s obsession with specifically drinking milk from the Shirley Temple cup. During Pecola’s stay with Frieda and Claudia, this white beauty standard is seen furthermore when Claudia’s view on beauty is juxtaposed with Pecola’s. Unlike Pecola she wasn’t obsessed with drinking milk or playing with white dolls but white beauty standards still affected her. When it came to the baby dolls, Claudia “wanted to dismember them in order to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, and the desirability” for them. Claudia stated that “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink skinned doll was what every girl child treasured” (Morrison 20).
The beginning of Toni Morrison career was not everything she had hope for. Her writing was not the best in the industry which is proven in her first book “The Bluest Eye”. The Bluest Eye was published in 1970, when the color of your skin still had a great effect on your life. “The Bluest Eye” is the story of an eleven year old colored girl, Pecola Breedlove, who had trouble seeing herself as beautiful because of her physical features and society’s thoughts of beauty. This novel did not sell well when first published but later made Morrison a Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1993.
Both readings take part in a time where racism is at its peak, and children are the ones who receive the harshest affections due to its severity. It will become obvious to see how a caring individual (not always a parent) can become an influential role in a youth’s life by causing them to find love within themselves despite societal views. In The Bluest Eye, the main character Pecola Breedlove comes from a very broken home. Pecola’s role in society is differentiated by Frieda MacTeers, another little girl in the book.
The Bluest Eye is a satire that criticizes the American society in 1940. The black characters are interested in their own affairs abandoning other characters issues. As a matter of fact, the idea of neighborhood is a brilliant one as well as it shows the destruction of the African American society. To exemplify this, the neighborhood is fully aware of the miserable conditions of the Breedloves; the father, Cholly, is drunk and unemployment, the mother, Pauline, is brutal against her children and the daughter, Pecola, is victimized and lost. Although this full awareness of this horrible circumstances, no one gives them his hand even when they know that Cholly raped his daughter.
In the novel, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, the author Toni Morrison uses the characters and their actions to portray social norms. Her writing challenges the very essence of what beauty is through the main characters Pecola, Cholly, Pauline Breedlove, Freida, Claudia, and Mrs.MacTeer. The main character Pecola is thought of by many as ugly and this idea influences her own actions, thoughts, and feelings. The author uses the standards of beauty motif to demonstrate the concept that everyone is criticized and a person’s support system determines how different people deal with it. Additionally, some readers may explore their own biases as they read the book.
The portrayal of racism on the African-American culture is prominent throughout Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes. Morrison presents the belief behind the internalized prejudice that black communities and people suffered in the 1940’s. The Bluest Eye speaks the story of how racism was embedded in communities and targeted Africans. After the Lincoln era, whites verbally abused and mistreated African-American citizens by inflicting cruel acts.
But it is not only the race and the colour of their skin what makes them unable to change their situation, but also poverty. Race and wealth are intertwined, and Pecola is the fundamental victim of this relationship, for she is a young black girl suffering from this ideology that determines her life. The dominant class imposes its values upon the other, for they think they are the best ones, reducing thus the personality of the people belonging to other classes, and at the same time, making them unable to change their oppressed situation, for they do not have the chance. They just accept their current position, and thus they will always be
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
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.
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
