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Survival In The Bluest Eye

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Recommended: Analysis of the main character in the bluest eye by toni morrison

Survival tactics are one of the fine threads when Toni Morrison weaves the novel The Bluest Eye. Through Pocola Breedlove, the protagonist delineates how the little girl succumbs to the concept of assimilation to escape the fury of oppression. Relaxing her own individuality as Pecola started assimilating the white beauty ideals and failing to assimilate her black culture. Her longing for the blue eyes and the ideal of white beauty drives the mantra of the black people to the back seat that “Black is Beautiful”. The Bluest Eye is Morrison’s first novel published in 1970. The novel contains various personal components. It is set in the town where Morrison grew up, and it is narrated from the perspective of a nine-year-old, the age Morrison would have been …show more content…

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. Christian Barbara in her book Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers points out that “...The beauty searched for in the book is not just the possession of blue eyes, but the harmony that they symbolize… (25)”. The Characters not just endure part of separation at the hands of White people only, but they are also the victims of their White beauty. They are made to live in misery and trouble from the White people and their beauty standards as

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While the characters go through conflicts because of how they look, they also begin to find themselves and develop in the novel. In The Bluest Eye, the theme of racism plays a big role in the novel. It allows the characters

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A three-hundred-year history of slavery in America led to a psychological oppression of black people in America, which still exists today. Toni Morrison decides not to delineate how white dominance has affected African-Americans culturally yet she challenges American standards of white beauty and how that beauty is socially constructed within our culture. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses society’s image of beauty to demonstrate how the value of black beauty is diminished by racial prejudices and dilemmas through the lives of Pecola Breedlove, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, whose young minds were affected by this internalized idea that the color of your skin determined how perfect or worthy you were seen, not to yourself and on the inside, but

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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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Many of the black characters, including Pecola, Cholly, and Pauline believe that they are indeed “ugly” and “dirty” because it’s what society has wanted people to think since the beginning of time. This idea that they are worth nothing and that there is no beauty or cleanliness in them has become embedded in their memories considering it is all they’ve ever known while growing up. Pecola and her family “did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly” (38). While some of the black characters in The Bluest Eye are very much confident in themselves, there are characters like the Breedloves, who have succumbed to society’s opinion and have started to believe that they are the equivalent of dirtiness.

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It is the aim of this paper to show that racism is not just hatred involving white vs. black, but it can occur in numerous forms. This paper will analyze the effects that racism can have on someone from a young age in life without even comprehending that it is happening. Throughout the novel, it is shown Pecola and Claudia suffer from racist beauty standards. Race, racism, and beauty standard are complicated issues throughout The Bluest Eye. At, the very beginning of chapter one it is shown that Claudia and Frieda were declined because of the color of their skin.

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They constantly encounter the problem of not living up to society’s beauty standards, which results in feelings of self-hatred based on race. These feelings perpetuate racism, as society, and even black people, tend to favor white beauty since it is held up as superior. The problems that Pecola, Pauline, and Claudia face in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are not just figments of the past. Today, millions of women across the country feel some sort of self-loathing stemming from dissatisfaction over how they look. It is important that society tries to free itself from these nonsensical standards and celebrate the unique beauty of each individual

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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.

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Joe Bender 04/22/2016 T.O. Critical Reading Beauty in the eyes of the beholder Confucius once said, “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” In this novel written by Toni Morrison called “The Bluest Eye”, a 11-year-old African American girl named Pecola searches for her beauty and tries to fend off all of the social norms and attitudes of those around her that lead her to believe she is ugly. She is raised in a family that doesn’t show much affection, and in a community that is a bit racist towards African Americans. These racist views of her community blur Pecola’s views of beauty and lead her to believe dark skin makes her automatically ugly, and that every white person with blue eyes is the definition of beautiful.

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The social standards of beauty and the idea of the American Dream in The Bluest Eye leads Mrs. Breedlove to feelings of shame that she later passes on to Pecola. The Breedloves are surrounded by the idea of perfection, and their absence of it makes them misfits. Mrs. Breedlove works for a white family, the Fishers. She enjoys the luxury of her work life and inevitably favors her work over her family. This leads Pecola to struggle to find her identity, in a time where perception is everything.

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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

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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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The main idea in the novel is the domination of blacks by the existing American standards of beauty – blue eyes, blonde hair and white skin. It deals honestly and sensitively with the damaging influence of white standards and values on the lives of black people. It demonstrates how the systems of oppression are spawned and sustained by the white supremacist and exploitative culture. The analysis of the novel brings out the implications of the imposition of white dominant culture on black sensibility. It portrays in poignant terms the tragic conditions of blacks in racist America.

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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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Morrison exposes society’s standards by exploiting how white viewpoints of beauty and race affect girlhood. The Bluest Eye is the epitome of how societal mores can affect the way someone views the world or themselves. The novel set in the period of the 1940s and too no surprise these idealized visuals of beauty were very narrow minded, Morrison wrote “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs-all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pale skinned was what every girl child treasured” (20). It is interesting that she disconnected “older girls” from “adults” because those terms were used to help illustrate a gap in how different ages viewed an issue in addition to their gender. Not only do the adults not realize

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