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She wrote that her inspiration for the story was a conversation she had had when she was little with another little black girl who had a fascination with blue eyes, much like her character Pecola Breedlove. Morrison is known for her stories that circle around how racism and misogyny affect black women. For The Bluest Eye, a little girl named Pecola Breedlove goes insane from the inhumane treatment she faces as an eleven-year-old african american girl in the Great Depression. There are many points in the book where she is dehumanized and treated less than dirt, even by her own parents. Her father in a bid to feel in control despite how much white men have controlled him, rapes his daughter and she becomes pregnant with his child.
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
The song represents a journey to self-acceptance of not only one’s hair, but as well as self-acceptance of yourself as an African American Woman. In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Pecola, a young African-American in the 1960’s experiences the same shame that comes with being black in a White America. The song, uncovers this for
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…
However, as the incidents go on, Pecola is turned instead into a mad little girl. Being raped by her father and becoming pregnant has destroyed all her hopes of becoming beautiful in the eyes of her society. She is totally ruined after this accident that she has become crazy. Thus, this is the life of a little black girl who is the victim of a white-dominated culture that has set the standards of beauty regardless of anything. Cholly Breedlove is one of the major characters who helps to bring about the dilemma in The Bluest Eye.
Reading Response Tony Morrison’s The Bluest Eye’s is a story residing in Lorain, Ohio during the 1940s, narrated by eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove and nine-year-old Claudia MacTeer: the story tells of the encounters of Pecola and what it is like to grow up as a black girl, in a society who views whiteness as the standard of beauty. Throughout the reading it is repeatedly hinted at that whites are superior, and furthermore the beauty of white women and children is something that blacks could never compare to. The first hint at white superiority can be found just by looking at the books title “The Bluest Eyes,” as most African Americans, such as the one on the cover photo are not born to have blue eyes.
The Bluest Eye was written by Toni Morrison, and published in the year 1970. The novel details the complex life of one black girl growing up in Ohio in the 1940s. In this world, a part of our past, there existed a strong social stratification that separated people by race, by gender and by class. While most people think of the Deep South as the territory where racism and poverty thrived, the truth is that the North wasn’t as good as people think. Racism was a strong force that controlled the lives of everyone, from every creed and color and this book artfully shows the consequences of this Racism.
In the New York Times article about Toni Morrison’s radical vision, she projects her mission in all of her novels to write about the unthinkable minorities. Her works, “become less of a history novel and more of a liturgy, to capture and historicize,” explaining that she wants her readers to feel how her culture was victimized by race (Ghansah). Her novels including The Bluest Eye, has allowed Morrison to take chances and display the constant empower meant over the black society. In the article she explains that her writing and texts are much more different than, “the regular, quotidian black life, that doesn’t sell out concerts or stadiums,” she says that her writing speaks volume of what really takes place in the lives of African-Americans
What is the most pressing issue facing society today? In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison argues that it is beauty standards, even calling physical beauty “the most destructive idea[] in the history of human thought” (122). While this may seem outrageous in a world of terrorism, global warming, homelessness, and hunger, beauty standards and the feelings of inferiority that stem from them affect everybody. In severe cases, these feelings can even manifest themselves deeply inside of a person and lead to eating disorders, depression, anxiety, self-hatred, and even suicide. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses the insecurities of the female characters to demonstrate that beauty standards are a danger to society, as they perpetuate racism and self-hatred.
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.
Toni Morrison´s The Bluest Eye (1970) conveys the Marxist idealism that social and economic realities are the factors that determine the culture and consciousness of a particular group. The struggle within the context of the Civil Rights Movement, as well as the rejection of African American people is displayed in Morrison´s work, showing the author´s consciousness. Thus, in this paper I will try to show the author´s belief that human self-realisation is determined and delimited by the dominant class at every level. For this purpose I will focus on the relation between wealth and social class, on how the dominant class, in this case the white one, imposes its values over the black community, reducing its personality and leading its members to lose their identity. I will also try to show how the victims of the capitalist system see themselves trapped in an order from which it is very difficult to escape, and find themselves forced to give up and accept their current condition.
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, 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.
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
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