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Spiritual Space

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Deprival of Spiritual Space In order to highlight the severe consequence the deprival of spiritual space can have on Pecola, it is essential to bring up another factor that determines the extent to which spiritual space matters, since the importance of African spirituality to Pecola is not only defined by her surrounding, but also by her intrinsic desire for spiritual space. Constantly being ignored, discriminated, and mistreated, Pecola didn’t abandon herself to vice, instead, she continues to strive for love. “How do you get somebody to love you?” (Morrison 25) is a profound philosophical question she proposes. It is evident that her tragic childhood experience of growing up in an extremely crippled family doesn’t cause her to lose faith …show more content…

Morrison implies Pecola’s condition of lacking spiritual space by inserting bits and pieces of the “Dick-and-Jane” story at the end of each section of the novel without using any kind of punctuation. The lack of punctuation indicates the dissolve of spiritual space, and the disability to access the spiritual realm makes it impossible for Pecola to have the power of spirits to support her in staying strong and surviving the perils of oppression (Zauditu-Selassie …show more content…

One of the reasons behind the abandonment is a disruption of balance caused by the foreign notion of white supremacy. White supremacy stirs up cultural clashes, for instance, a conflict between the different standards for beauty and ugliness; it stimulates the formation of double-consciousness that leads to a sense of “always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others” (Du Bois 2); it destroys the traditional worldview of African-Americans, and then the people as well (Zauditu-Selassie 3). In the Bluest Eye, Pecola is a victim of the imbalance caused by white supremacy, and her desire for blue eyes serves as evidence of distorted cultural values. Morrison demonstrates the destructive effect an imbalanced society can have on its people through narration of Pecola’s tragic fate. Furthermore, by creating a contradiction between Pecola and other members in the same community such as the MacTeer sisters, Morrison indicates that the imbalance can possibly be restored with the power of spirituality. In comparison to the MacTeer sisters, the one thing Pecola lacks in particular is

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This contrast of handling the problem is the main divide between the two novels. While Pecola takes the path of denial and avoidance, Yolanda actually takes steps to improve herself into her new culture. Pecola believes that the problem is nonexistent and ignores it to try and disprove the existence of it. She avoids confronting the reality of her rape and pregnancy through her blue eyes that she now believes that she has: “After that first day at school when I had my blue eyes… Now I don’t go to school anymore.

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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.

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In the novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Morrison details the life of a young African American girl named Pecola who grows in Lorain, Ohio in the years following the Great Depression. The book’s purpose is to explain how and why Cholly Breedlove, Pecola’s father, came to molest his own daughter. An alcoholic and barbaric, Cholly's baleful and belligerent behavior is a reflection of his troublesome upbringing as a child. While only four days old, Cholly’s parents abandon him, leaving Aunt Jimmy to rescue and adopt him. Shortly after Aunt Jimmy dies, two white men devastate Cholly’s first sexual encounter, who coerce Cholly to continue while they smile contemptuously.

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Inner conflict also causes the characters behavior and thought process to change at some point throughout the three novels. This leads the characters to their condition that is described at the end or the beginning of the novels plots. Toni Morrison shows Pecola’s inner conflict

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When Pecola believes that “if those eyes of her” were “different,” she believes that altering

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Even though Toni Morrison does not provide the reader with an explanation to why Pecola and Cholly end up in such miserable states, the explanation can be found by using Perry’s work. Through picking out the similarities between Perry’s experiences and Pecola’s and Cholly’s stories, the answer to the why can be

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Delicate and sensitive, she passively suffers the abuse of her mother, father, and classmates. She is a symbol of the black community’s self-hatred and belief in its own ugliness. Others in the community, including her mother and father, act out their own self-hatred by expressing hatred towards her. Pecola’s desire for blue eyes comes from her stereotypical perception that as a black female, she needs to look beautiful to be treated beautifully. She believes that being granted the blue eyes that she wishes for would change both how others see her and what she is forced to see.

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They search for fault in her features, and find one: a dog tooth, which they utilize to secretly call Maureen names [62-63]. Peal’s verbal attacks toward Pecola and the MacTeer’s (“I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!”)

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Her physical deformity is her “ugliness”, a perception that is shared by the community and that forms the girl’s own identity. Pecola Breedlove is a young African American girl coming of age during the 1940s. She yearns to be respected and recognised by her own people as well as in a world that discards and diminishes the importance of the members of her own race and outlines magnificence according to an Anglo Saxon traditional touchstone. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola is wanting for beauty and her identity for her survival is through illusionary assimilation into the beauty ideals of the white world. She wants not only to be beautiful but also some kind of an ideal of beauty for other girls.

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Morrison exemplifies Pecola’s obsession with Mary Jane in this quote, “To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane.” (55). The language used in this quote is used to express Pecola’s need to transform herself into someone who is good and someone who is beautiful, because those are the traits she associated Mary Jane with.

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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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Frieda is outspoken, courageous and wise. She is parallel to her mother who has raised two children whom she taught to love themselves unconditionally. Self-appreciation is a valuable instrument that the girls inherited, but Pecola does not realize her own worth throughout the story which contributes to her gradual demise. Eugenia "Skeeter" Phelan becomes another example of a girl who

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Pecola and her mother, Pauline, see themselves as ugly because they hold themselves to beauty standards in which light-skinned people are the ideal. Pecola and her mother have a brutal home life due to the drunken violence of Cholly Breedlove, and the constant pressure of beauty standards only adds to their misfortune. Morrison explains this pressure by asserting that “[i]t was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they

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1356 Words | 6 Pages

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

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1172 Words | 5 Pages

Morrison explains that the master narrative is whatever ideological script is being imposed by the people in authority on everyone else. And in the novel it is evident how Pecola is not the only one who has internalized her ugliness; for instance, we are told that the group of boys who circled and hurled insults at her do so because of “their contempt for their own blackness” and an “exquisitely learned self-hatred”. Moreover, they were ironically bullying her for something they themselves should fully empathize with; something she “had no control [over]: the color of her skin” (63). Even within the black community Pecola finds no solace or support. They all hold whiteness to be the default beauty standard.

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