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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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