The Bluest Eye: Pecola's Father Burns Their House Down
In Lorain, Ohio, 9-year-old Claudia MacTeer and her 10-year-old sister Frieda live with their parents, who take two other people into their home: Mr. Henry, a tenant, and Pecola Breedlove, a temporary foster child whose house was burned down by her wildly unstable father, Cholly: a man widely gossiped about in the community. Pecola is a quiet, passive young girl with a hard life, whose parents are constantly fighting, both verbally and physically. Pecola is continually reminded of what an "ugly" girl she is, fueling her desire to be white with blue eyes. Most chapters ' titles are extracts from the Dick and Jane paragraph in the novel 's prologue, presenting a white family that may be contrasted with Pecola 's; perhaps to incite discomfort, the chapter titles contain much sudden repetition of words or phrases, many cut-off words, and no interword separations.
She miscarries and that was the straw that broke the camel’s back. Pecola retreats into a fantasy world where she is a bird and can fly away from all the pain she has endured, and she is unable to escape the delusion. Another little girl named Claudia blames herself and her sister’s fear of interacting with Pecola as the reason for Pecola’s mental break, but it wasn’t them; it was the adults that surrounded
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
The character of Pecola Shows
Pecola wanted to have blue eyes because things may have been easy for her and her life may be better. Pauline messed up foot and fallen teeth made her feel so ugly and she did not wanted to fit in with society was of beauty she didn’t love herself. Cholly had always been neglected by her parents society and he had never learned how to love it affected him in the long run and a traumatic event in his life had scared him as a result. It is why beauty is undeserved for those who are called ugly according to
Delicate and sensitive, she passively suffers the abuse of her mother, father, and classmates. She is a symbol of the black community’s self-hatred and belief in its own ugliness. Others in the community, including her mother and father, act out their own self-hatred by expressing hatred towards her. Pecola’s desire for blue eyes comes from her stereotypical perception that as a black female, she needs to look beautiful to be treated beautifully. She believes that being granted the blue eyes that she wishes for would change both how others see her and what she is forced to see.
Around the house and yard was a white picket fence that many people now a day’s want. In the house a family that consisted of a mother, father, brother Sammy, a pet cat, and the main character Pecola Breedlove. Pecola is a nine year old light skinned colored girl who was growing up in the well known Great Depression. She yearns for attention and unconditional love but what she receives is nothing like that. Her family lives in a run-down house with no food and they have hardly any heat in the winter.
Tarek Dia Professor Rose Mass Media & Society 25 September 2015 The Bluest Eye The bluest eye is the first novel written by Howard University professor Toni Morrison. It is set in the years following the great depression and depicts the life of a misunderstood and mistreated young black girl name Pecola Breedlove. Pecola is let in by the MacTeer’s as a temporary foster child after her unsound father, Cholly, burned down their family home.
The Bluest Eye tells a compelling story of how trauma affects a young girl through precise imagery and many different characters and perspectives. Pecola's mother, Polly breedlove, is very negligent of Pecola and never gives her a mothers love and support. She even favors the little white girl who takes care of her own
The social standards of beauty and the idea of the American Dream in The Bluest Eye leads Mrs. Breedlove to feelings of shame that she later passes on to Pecola. The Breedloves are surrounded by the idea of perfection, and their absence of it makes them misfits. Mrs. Breedlove works for a white family, the Fishers. She enjoys the luxury of her work life and inevitably favors her work over her family. This leads Pecola to struggle to find her identity, in a time where perception is everything.
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
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
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.
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
The Bluest Eye is a novel about a black girl named Pecola Breedlove who wishes for beauty in order to attain a better life. She faces emotional and physical conflicts throughout her childhood. At eleven years old, Pecola is raped by her alcoholic father and becomes pregnant. Unlike anyone else, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, tries to help her through the pregnancy. However, Pecola’s baby ends up dying because it is premature.
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