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Sexism In The Bluest Eye

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The biggest contribution to the African-American literature rests in that the novel speaks openly about the racist nature of white mass culture and explores the ways in which class division based on skin color affects black girls’ growing-up and their personality-forming. One of the famous novel writer Toni Morrison, the novel The Bluest Eye (1970) is the first novel written by Toni Morrison, an African-American writer who has become one of the top black female writers in the United States. The Bluest Eye can be characterized as addressing the timeless problem of white racial dominance in the U.S.A. and pointing to the impact it has on the life of a black girl growing up in the 1930s.
The main constituent parts of black women’s self-esteem …show more content…

The racism and sexism have diminished African-America women’s role in the society and have influenced their self-understanding. When struggling against these, African-American women writers consider it imperative to change the implications of negative images attributed to black women during the times of slavery and beyond. These represent an obstacle in their way towards equality and many African-American and women have considered the creation of more adequate images of black womanhood crucial. The way to start the fight is to pay attention to the issues that make African-American and women’s life experience different from the rest of the society. Authors have contributed to notion of self-esteem by looking for their character’s identity and by elevating the blackness and femaleness as the very basis of their existence, and most importantly by loving and respecting themselves. Critics recognize the relevance of Toni Morrison’s writing for the African-American community and its women. As Darlene Clark Hine suggests in Black Women in America encyclopaedia,
“In her works, [Toni Morrison] strips away the idols of whiteness and of Blackness that have prevented Blacks in the United States from knowing themselves and gives them their own true, mythical, remembered words to live by”[1].
SKIN COLOR AND RACIAL

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Developing who she was around the time of the Great Depression, Toni Morrison had inspiring stories that reflected her childhood. During her life there has been some hardships and times where she has had to be strong. Toni Morrison was a highly educated women whose stories Beloved and The Bluest Eye are two of her most controversial stories. She made adjustments but stood up for what she believed in. Growing up as an African-American female during the US civil rights movement, Toni Morrison became a controversial author because she shares her life experiences that generates intense critical reaction.

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The world is filled with labels, some negative and some positive. When it comes to negative labeling, a person’s sense of beauty in themselves and in the world is impacted. In The Bluest Eye, author Toni Morrison uses her characters such as Pecola to illustrate how another’s labeling can alter the way one internalizes his or her own beauty; Morrison poses an overall negative storyline filled with labels and discrimination that in turn allows the reader to identify the highlighted and deeper beauty that is not always visible to the naked eye. Pecola, a young girl during a time of extreme racism and discrimination, is raised in an abusive and unstable home. The effects of the abuse on Pecola has a large impact on her views of the world and

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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.

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What is the most pressing issue facing society today? In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison argues that it is beauty standards, even calling physical beauty “the most destructive idea[] in the history of human thought” (122). While this may seem outrageous in a world of terrorism, global warming, homelessness, and hunger, beauty standards and the feelings of inferiority that stem from them affect everybody. In severe cases, these feelings can even manifest themselves deeply inside of a person and lead to eating disorders, depression, anxiety, self-hatred, and even suicide. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses the insecurities of the female characters to demonstrate that beauty standards are a danger to society, as they perpetuate racism and self-hatred.

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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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Morrison challenges Western standards of beauty and demonstrates that the idea of beauty is socially constructed. Toni Morrison shows how when one race is used as the standard of beauty, the value of the other races is diminished. The standard

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Root, Identity and Community have always been the underlying theme of Toni Morrison. Through the accounts of her novels, Toni Morrison shows several ways in which slavery, which was the most oppressive period in the black history, has affected the identity of African American. In Bluest Eye, Morrison shows that a black woman who searches for her true identity feels frustrated by her blackness and yearns to be white because of the constant fear of being rejected in her surroundings. Thus Morrison tries to locate post colonial black identity in the socio-political ground where cultures are hybridized, powers are negotiated and individuals are reproduced as resistant agents. She not only writes about claiming the superiority by the white but also

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