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Stereotypes In Toni Morrison's Eye By Alice Walker

1133 Words5 Pages

Life teaches you that you can’t please everyone. You can’t become a puppet whose strings are pulled left and right. To truly live you have snap those strings holding you captive in cell bars. One society, the majority, millions don’t understand you in the way that you do. There's always an ideal, a stereotype, a way something shouldn’t be. There are many obstacles thrown your way and you can only overcome them yourself. Alice Walker uses specific details to reel the reader into the story but also to send a cryptic message of what she wants you to convey and understand. From perspectives of a child to a woman she tells her story of her scars and how beauty itself was found “ the people who are thought to be dumb and backward but who were the ones who first taught me to see beauty”. (Walker …show more content…

Her parents take her to see an eye doctor who says “eyes are sympathetic”, “If one is blind, the other will likely become blind too”. (Walker 44) This seems to have a double sided meaning. One, that she should have went earlier rather than hide the fact of what happened. Two, since one of her eyes is the main cause of her nonbeauty she is blind to see that outer beauty is not everything and also blinds her ability to process how her life changed without her so called beauty. She says that she is scared of the doctors words but rather worry over her eye “it is really how I look that bothers me the most.” showing her insecurity about her looks. (Walker 43) At this time she is twelve years old “I do not pray for sight. I pray for beauty” (Walker 45) she would rather gain beauty over health and eyesight because she believes it’s more important. And at this age girls are more aware of social standards and how they should look and be a certain

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