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The Bluest Eye Essay

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In Toni Morrison’s 1970 Novel The Bluest Eye, we witness a year in the life of a young African American girl by the name of Pecola who, by way of abuse and scapegoating by the black community she finds herself in, developes deep mental issues in her search for blue eyes and light skin. The story takes place in the town of Lorain, Ohio during the 1940’s, a time of pervasive racism that not only oppresses people of African descent, but corrupts cultural perceptions on what is and isn’t beautiful. These false notions of beauty and innocence alongside how it plays against the interests of the black community featured in the novel are integral to this paper. While Morrison did take a look at “why” Pecola’s community treated her they way the did, I think there is a deeper theme at work that is hinted at. There is a strong motif of contrast between what is right but rejected and what is wrong and embraced, like the beauty of …show more content…

The final part of the novel in which Claudia looks back at the past is filled with scorn for the black community and how they sacrificed Pecola on the altar of self-hatred. She sees Pecola walking between "the tire rims and the sunflowers, between Coke bottles and milkweed, among all the waste and beauty of the world--which is what she herself was" (p. 205). These images of “waste and beauty” and the contrast between them help to cement the blame placed on both parties, both white and black, for their actions. Morrison sees life as one should: As a complex messy thing where both the beautiful and vile are mixed, must like the trash and flowers. In the case of Pecola, the beauty is hers and hers alone. All of her purity, weakness and potential; her waste is not hers, but it is the ugliness projected onto her by the black community and white standards, thereby displacing her redeemable

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Inner conflict also causes the characters behavior and thought process to change at some point throughout the three novels. This leads the characters to their condition that is described at the end or the beginning of the novels plots. Toni Morrison shows Pecola’s inner conflict

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These influences lead to even her parents discriminating against her calling her ugly, abusing her, and her father even raping her. Making her life filled with no love and nothing coming her way but discrimination. "But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly" (p. 126).

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Likewise, Morrison also uses symbolism for the duration of the novel to establish how people can judge a person based on their economic standing. For instance, symbolism is represented through the blue eyes that is repeatedly mentioned in the novel. The blue eyes represent the idealistic white middle class life that Pecola dreams of having since white people commonly have blue eyes. The reader can infer this suggestion because whenever Pecola is experiencing bad things she wishes to have blue eyes. Morrison writes, "If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different and Mrs. Breedlove too…Each night, without fail, she prayed for the blue eyes…

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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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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 Breedloves live in a small home with only two rooms, and their life is one that is filled with many hardships because “they were poor and black” which during this time period is quite realistic. However, many black families hope for something more in life, for the same privileges that white people have, yet the Breedloves don’t expect much more than what they have since “they believed they were ugly.” Pecola and her family are aware of the “dirty” connotation that follows them and instead of fighting this dirtiness, they’ve come to accept that this is the way society sees them and there is nothing they can do to change that. Morrison, herself argues, “You need a whole community— everybody —to raise a child,” yet in society, this statement only truly stands for white families. For a black family, however, this is as almost as impossible when the only thing the community sees you as is “dirt” and “ugly”.

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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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In addition, Morrison went even further and pointed out that this idea was blindly, without question, accepted in both worlds of the racially divided society. It appears that Claudia, probably the alter ego of the author herself is to some extent staying in opposition to the admiration of Temple. The question is, whether Claudia as one of the characters, was able to recognize intuitively that her identity as an African-American person was based on the color of her skin and labelled as the less pretty one or Morrison used her as a tool to illustrate how white privileged society was keeping the feelings of inferiority among the suppressed. The contrast between Claudia’s rebellion and Pecola’s obsession with Temple is a strong device supporting the idea of pushing unconscious sense of lower class status. Within the book, there is a significant growth of Pecola’s obsession with Temple and the blue eyes, which became the centre of her dreams.

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But it is not only the race and the colour of their skin what makes them unable to change their situation, but also poverty. Race and wealth are intertwined, and Pecola is the fundamental victim of this relationship, for she is a young black girl suffering from this ideology that determines her life. The dominant class imposes its values upon the other, for they think they are the best ones, reducing thus the personality of the people belonging to other classes, and at the same time, making them unable to change their oppressed situation, for they do not have the chance. They just accept their current position, and thus they will always be

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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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For her ugliness was not inherently hers – it was handed to her and imposed upon her: when the master tells her she is ugly, “[she] had looked about [herself] and saw nothing to contradict the statement; saw, in fact, support for it leaning at [her] from every billboard, every movie, every glance” (37). She has entirely internalized the values of a society that strives to uphold its white supremacy by

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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 is among the pioneer of those contemporary black writers who have redefined African- American writings in more ways than one. This assignment will focus on the aspects of gender bias and double consciousness in The Bluest Eye. The Bluest Eye works at different layers of the lives of black people. At one level it accounts for the racial discrimination faced by Afro-Americans throughout their life time.

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1) Society has change the way Pecola perceives herself and she has the idea in her mind that her life would be less miserable if she has blue eyes. She is always thinking that “if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (Morrison 46). Pecola has gotten the impression of her life being complete if only she has blue eyes. She would see the eyes of others and become envious of their blue eyes. The boys at school would always pick on her and call her an ugly black girl.

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