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The Bluest Eye Beauty

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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. Through her
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In both The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me a main theme is image. Morrison uses Claudia, an African American child, to show a distinct hatred for the beauty standard. She had such a strong disdain for Shirley Temple and the white doll she was given as a gift. Her detest for these things was because she could never have those things, the beauty was unattainable.

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Rhetorical Analysis Essay The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison takes place in Ohio in the 1940s. The novel is written from the perspective of African Americans and how they view themselves. Focusing on identity, Morrison uses rhetorical devices such as imagery, dictation, and symbolism to help stress her point of view on identity. In the novel the author argues that society influences an individual 's perception on beauty, which she supports through characters like Pecola and Mrs. Breedlove.

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In Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, the long-lasting effects of slavery have taken a toll on Janie Crawford. Janie’s grandmother was raped by her master and had a child named Leafy. Leafy, although not born into slavery, endured a similar fate, which led her to run away, leaving her mother to raise her child, Janie. Janie’s appearance, showing strong European features, was both praised and shamed by society. This double standard was created by racism and was able to remain present due to segregation.

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In today’s society, we have fallen under the curse that allows us to project our own problems and insecurities onto those who aren’t strong enough to have faith in themselves. We tend to use these people to cleanse ourselves from our own precarious self-images. The life of Pecola Breedlove is an example of this. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, twelve-year-old Pecola’s weakness reflects her maltreatment in society.  This is noticeable by exposing the societal standards of beauty,and how they detrimentally affected Pecola.

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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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The beginning of Toni Morrison career was not everything she had hope for. Her writing was not the best in the industry which is proven in her first book “The Bluest Eye”. The Bluest Eye was published in 1970, when the color of your skin still had a great effect on your life. “The Bluest Eye” is the story of an eleven year old colored girl, Pecola Breedlove, who had trouble seeing herself as beautiful because of her physical features and society’s thoughts of beauty. This novel did not sell well when first published but later made Morrison a Nobel Prize winner for literature in 1993.

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In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the way Pecola values herself directly correlates with what white society considered beautiful at the time. The impact white society has on the self-assurance of minorities, especially minority women, is not only evident in Morrison’s novel, but also the way it continues to affect women of color today. The Bluest Eye effectively criticizes the way white society pressures and molds the personalities and self-value of African-American women directly and through the use of American pop culture and media. In the foreword to The Bluest Eye, Morrison speaks about why she began writing the novel, the root of prejudice, and how to understand and combat the self-loathing effects it has on minority female youth.

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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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The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison in 1970, consists of multiple interlocking stories, denoting a most powerful being, Cholly Breedlove, Pecola’s father. Cholly Breedlove is a man who has suffered through abhorrent bearings, degradation, condescension, abuse, and isolation. Isolated in a society defined by racism, economic inequality, and fanaticism, he was not only shunned but was considered barbarous. Left desolated by racism and violence, he spiraled into madness and violence. His daughter Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl growing up in the town of Lorain, Ohio, similarly, was born into a society characterized by racism.

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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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Destructive Nature of Racialised Beauty Toni Morrison published her first book, The Bluest Eye, in 1970. In this novel, Toni Morrison shows how societies racist and false beliefs on beauty can be seriously destructive if believed and taken to heart. Toni Morrison displays the destructive nature of racialised beauty through the character in the novel named Pecola Breedlove. Pecola lacks self esteem and believes that she is the blackest and ugliest girl, and she believes that white is the only beautiful race.

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Toni Morrison, in numerous interviews, has said that her reason for writing The Bluest Eye was that she realized there was a book she wanted very much to read that had not been written yet. She set out to construct that book – one that she says was about her, or somebody like her. For until then, nobody had taken a little black girl—the most vulnerable kind of person in the world—seriously in literature; black female children have never held centre stage in anything. Thus with the arrival of the character Pecola Breedlove, a little hurt black girl is put to the centre of the story. Pecola’s quest is to acquire “Shirley Temple beauty” and blue eyes – ideals of beauty sponsored by the white world.

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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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