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The Bluest Eye Analytical Essay

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When asked to describe the ideal American family one would most likely say nuclear, working dad, stay at home mom etc. Depending on your own personal believe, the ideal american family can be described in various ways. But, did one of your descriptions include having white skin? When you google ‘ideal american family’ a particular type of family pops up in the images category dominating the first several image slots. These several images have multiple things in common blonde haired white families. Is this a coincidence or do most people really believe blonde haired white people are ideal? In The Bluest Eye one of many themes in the story is that whiteness is beautiful and black is ugly. This theme is greatly expressed throughout the novel. Past society, present society, and in the book it is found that people have a preference for whiteness over things, or people, of color. This builds up the question of is black girls self-hatred influenced by society or is it just natural.

We learn in Chapter 1 Pecola loves to drink out of the Macteer’s Shirley Temple cup. Pecola is so fascinated with the idea of having blonde hair with blue eyes, which is basically what a perfect, beautiful, …show more content…

Pecola’s own mother treats Polly, a young white girl Mrs.Breedlove works for, better than her own daughter. You could assume that maybe it’s because she works for her, or maybe because she’s white, which is my strongest belief considering the fact that this book deals a lot with white people or lighter skinned get treated better than darker skinned people. Was it a natural reaction that she scolded her black daughter who genuinely made an innocent mistake and comforts the little white girl or was yelling at a black child and praising a white one fixed into her

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Connie from “Where are you going, Where have you been?” by Joyce Carol Oates represents a situation opposite of that which Pecola is subject to. Connie “knew she was pretty and that was everything” (Seagull Reader 337). She had “long dark blonde hair that drew anyone’s eye to it” (337). She lived with her parents and sister in a comfortable home.

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Analysis Of Pecola's Eye, By Toni Morrison

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Later in the book, Toni Morrison uses Pecola’s own conviction of being “ugly” to show that she truly believes that if she changed her physical appearance to match those at the top of the race and beauty hierarchies, her perception of her reality would be ameliorated. Back at home after her parents’ fight, Pecola ponders the unfair way she is treated by teachers compared to her Caucasian classmates at school. When the narrator says, “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. Maybe they’d say, ‘Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes’”

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The Bluest Eye, both authors explore the idea of societal constructs and how they aid in creating one's identity by revealing how racist beliefs can either positively or negatively affect it. In the autobiography The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass there is a consistent showing of how racism exploits slaves' identity and image of themselves, making their

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And the first thing that she notices is Pecola and that she is dark skin. She kicks her out of her house thinking that she killed the cat without even listening to Pecola’s side of the story. Prior to this, Junior’s mother did not allow him to play with kids who were not the same shade of brown or

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What is the significance of Pecola's encounter with the three prostitutes (which begins on page 50)? As a poor, African American girl in the 1940s, Pecola is aware that society has cast her aside. She is inherently ugly, and often times for “long hours she [would sit,] looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised,” (45). Pecola sees herself as ugly in this way because the world has labeled her as such.

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The first piece in my portfolio is a piece of Pecola with blue eyes. One of the overarching ideas presented throughout The Bluest Eye is that white features, specifically blue eyes, is the epitome of physical beauty. Throughout the book, there is vivid visual imagery of blue eyes such as those of “lovely Mary Jane” (Morrison 50). The use of the word lovely further correlates her physical appearance and blue eyes with beauty. This causes Pecola to crave blue eyes so desperately that “every night, without fail, she prayed” in order to gain what she and everyone else unanimously view as beauty (46).

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This can be clearly seen by Claude, “Frieda and she had a loving conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn’t join them in their adoration because I hated Shirley” (Morrison, 13). The hatred shown towards Shirley Temple only further proves the jealousy that both the characters Claudia and Pecola have towards the caucasian and blue eyed people. The idealization of being a white-skinned girl with blue eyes would not have changed if the setting were to be in Europe as Hitler had those in favor if they fulfilled his beauty standards. However, even though there was not an ideal person, there was an ideal character which was presented by Hitler.

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Symbolism In The Bluest Eye

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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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2) The most detrimental case is when Pecola was molested by her own father. Which was a sexual embarrassment not just between Pecola but her father as well. Her father got even more embarrassed because of two racist white men.

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The role Geraldine plays in The Bluest Eye is that of a middle-class ‘thin brown girl’ who lives under the norms of colorism. Geraldine represents the image of the light-skinned blacks or “colored people” who are accepted by the white societal standards. She describes her ‘people’ as “neat and quiet”, whereas the dark-skinned blacks or “niggers” are considered to be “dirty and loud”. Due to this classification, Geraldine avoids contact with the “niggers” and prohibits her son to play with them as she considers it as a threat to their “colored status”. The uneasiness Geraldine feels is marked by the fear of gaining back her blackness, “They hold their behind in for fear of a sway too free; when they wear lipstick, they never cover the entire mouth for fear of lips too thick, and they worry, worry, worry about the edges of their hair” (Morrison, 83).

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The Bluest Eye Beauty Standards Essay

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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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The American Dream In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

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Pecola is challenged by the idea that her mother prefers her work life, that they have an outdated house, and that she does not look like the Shirley Temple doll with blue eyes. Morrison went into great detail when describing the elegance and beauty that was present in the Fisher home, to demonstrate that those who do not fit into the ideal American life often feel shame. The Breedlove family lived a very simple life, and in no way did they fit into what society believed to be correct. Mrs. Breedlove was the only member of the family that truly understood what the American Dream looked like. The work that she did for the Fishers lead her to envy the American Dream.

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The Bluest Eyes open with an anecdote of Dick and Jane to show how racism destroys the mental stability of black people. It equates whites with success and happiness while blacks with poverty and unhappiness. This traumatises the minds of Blacks and they begin to dislike their own heritage and skin colour in the white world of Dick and Jane.

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The Bluest Eye illustrates the damage done to a black child when the way she is defined by white society obliterates all positive definitions of her self-worth. Gurleen Grewal reflects that “individuals collude in their own oppression by internalizing the dominant culture’s values in the face of great material contradictions” (21). Indeed, it is evident in the novel how the community at large has accepted light skin as beautiful, and thus has negated beauty in darker skin. Within this dominant culture, white colonialists are the “all-knowing master” that the narrator refers to – the people responsible for giving Pecola “a cloak of ugliness to wear”, which she had “accepted without question” (37). It is this cloak that hides the knowledge of her own true identity and self-worth which, though she “put it on”, “did not belong to [her]” (36).

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However, they would leave Pecola alone when they see her with Maureen Peal, described with “springtime eyes so wide with interest” (Morrison 66-67). 2) African Americans perceive that white Americans have a better lifestyle. According to the African American’s schema, “a white American ideal of the family unit [is] cohesive, happy, with love enough to spare to pets…it is desirable, but for man, particularly the black man, it is unattainable” (Ogunyemi 354). Pecola feels that if she had blue eyes, she could see the world the way white Americans do.

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