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The Bluest Eye Comparison Essay

757 Words4 Pages

Despite the differences between these novels, they both explore how people respond to difficult--and potentially damaging--circumstances. Although the conflicts in The Bluest Eye are of the same serious nature, the context is quite different. In The Bluest Eye, fall of 1941, just after the Great Depression, in Lorain, Ohio. Nine-year-old Claudia and her 10-year-old sister, Frieda, live with their parents in an "old, cold and green" house ,what they lack in money they make up for in love. The MacTeers decide to take in a boarder named Mr. Henry, and also at the same time, they also take in young Pecola Breedlove, quiet, awkward girl who loves Shirley Temple, believing that whiteness is beautiful and that her own blackness is inherently ugly. Pecola's home life is …show more content…

He gets taken in by his great aunt, Jimmy, who raises him until her death. The day of Jimmy's funeral, Cholly has his first sexual experience with a local girl. While they are having sex in a field, two white men approach them and shine a flashlight on them, they laugh at the pair and force them to continue having sex while they watch and laugh. Cholly and Darlene are humiliated, and Cholly, unable to direct his anger at the white men, turns it onto Darlene instead. He spends the next few years moving from city to city and from woman to woman, until he meets and weds Pauline in Kentucky and the couple moves to Lorain, Ohio. Back to reality, Cholly comes home drunk one day to find Pecola washing dishes, Cholly rapes her, when it's over, he covers her with a quilt. Pauline finds Pecola unconscious on the floor, when Pecola tells her that Cholly raped her, she doesn't believe it and hits her. Cholly rapes Pecola again at some point after this, although it's unclear exactly when. Pecola then becomes pregnant with her father's child, She visits Soaphead’s Church, a quack psychic and healer, and asks him to give her blue

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