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Summary Of Toni Morisson's The Bluest Eye

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turning point in the development of my psyche which would allow me to love her.” [The Bluest Eye p, 19]. Although she rejects the idea now, Claudia will recognize that whiteness is the standard of beauty at some point. Morrison layers another dimension into the story in the form of Maureen Peal, “a high-yellow dream child.” The rich, white child immediately becomes the hub of the entire school’s admiration, and the MacTeer children’s jealousy. 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!”) lead Claudia to wondering, “What did we lack?” She concludes that, “The Thing to fear was the Thing that made her beautiful and not us.” [The Bluest Eye 73-74]. The reader can deduce that the “Thing” that …show more content…

This family consists of the mother Pauline, the father Cholly, the son Sammy, and the daughter Pecola. The novel’s focal point is the daughter, an eleven-year-old Black girl who is trying to conquer a bout with self-hatred. Everyday she encounters racism, not just from white people, but mostly from her own race. In their eyes she is much too dark, and the darkness of her skin somehow implies that she is inferior, and according to everyone else, her skin makes her even “uglier.” She feels she can overcome this battle of self-hatred by obtaining blue eyes, but not just any blue. She wants the bluest eye. Morrison is able to use her critical eye to reveal to the reader the evil that is caused by a society that is indoctrinated by the inherent goodness and beauty of whiteness and the ugliness of blackness. She uses many different writing tools to depict how “white” beliefs have dominated American and African American

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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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In Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, she validates her theme of how society can corrupt people through the portrayal of a conflicted society of racism to show segregation between the white and nonwhite, symbolic blue eyes to portray what the characters desperately desire in order to have a better life, and an abused

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