ipl-logo

Racism In The Bluest Eye And Home

845 Words4 Pages

Toni Morrison in Operation: Spread the Effect of Racism Racism has been an ongoing issue in America since the 1600’s. While it continues to exist, the incidence and severity of oppressive racist behavior has been significantly reduced and continues to do so. There are many books, articles, TV shows, songs, and activist groups that highlight the damaging effects of racism; they emphasize how seemingly privileged the white majority have mistreated their fellow African-American countrymen. In two pieces that portray racism, The Bluest Eye and Home, writer Toni Morrison shows how the struggles of character’s past events, society’s standards and racial discrimination negatively influence the African-American community. Morrison does this in order …show more content…

Followed by her Bachelor’s degree at Howard University, Morrison completed her master’s degree, also from Howard University, and began her teaching career at Texas Southern University. After 6 years of a troubled marriage, her husband left her, and she took the responsibility of raising her children. The added demands on her time and energy, did not detract her from her love for writing. She took time to write while working as an editor at the Random House. The Bluest Eye was her first novel and did not receive immediate recognition but was eventually awarded a nobel peace prize. Throughout her life she encountered difficult obstacles due to her race and she made parallels to it in her novels. Morrison had many themes and strands based on racism, that contributed to her success and elevated her status to an influential African American writer. One major theme Morrison uses consistently across her books is how the past events of characters affect their daily life and consciousness. In The Bluest Eye, the main protagonist, Pecola Breedlove, has parents whose present life was the way it was

Show More
Related
368 Words | 2 Pages

“Toni Morrison has written several novels known for their epic themes and vivid dialogue.” Some of the novels include “The Bluest Eye” and “Song of Solomon”. In both novels, Morrison references the ongoing issue of racism. Morrison uses the settings and the goal that each main character strives to achieve as similarities.

Read More
743 Words | 3 Pages

They also felt as if Morrison 's concerns were only on her race and not that of the whites. Morrison had no hesitation in showing how she felt about her childhood past. Her book The Bluest Eye was also tossed around with controversy. In 2015, The Bluest Eye was ranked fourth on the ALA’s banned books list. The reasons for being banned are for the way it heavily talks about racism, incest, poverty and violence.

Read More
576 Words | 3 Pages

This novel talks about different topics. However, the main idea that is trying to be told throughout this book is no matter what you look like, you will never reach society’s idea of beauty. In the Bluest Eye by Tori Morrison, their idea of being perfect would be to have white or light skin with blue eyes. One of the little girls in the story, Claudia, receives a white baby doll who had bright blue eyes. All of the adults thought that she would enjoy the “beautiful” doll, in fact she hated the doll and tore it apart.

Read More
723 Words | 3 Pages

“The Bluest Eyes” was written in the year 1970. While Toni Morrison was growing up she met a young black girl. The young girl told Toni that she dreamed about being beautiful by having blues and curly brown hair like the well known character Shirley Temple. Talking to this young girl led to the subject and inspiration

Read More
1506 Words | 7 Pages

Love is something that many people desire. In “The Bluest Eye,” Toni Morrison describes Love and Hate, referring to the people in the early 1941. This novel through flashbacks describes Love and Hate and its consequences on self-esteem. There are different ways Morrison describes Love and Hate in the novel: First, love for white features. Second, hatred for black features.

Read More
768 Words | 4 Pages

Toni Morrison’s gothic writing surrounds the cold-blooded essence of the south post civil- war. She uses striking vocabulary to reveal the hardships of African Americans in the deep south. Her writing unapologetically real. Morrison has and is continuing to set the path for all southern gothic writers. Toni Morrison is a southern gothic, literary icon who has won countless awards for her work such as Beloved and The Bluest Eye; not only is she revolutionary for women but she is also for all African Americans.

Read More
2065 Words | 9 Pages

Toni Morrison sees black females as victims of violence in all relationships. The focus now is on the sad plight of black girls being maltreated and sexually exploited at home. It is natural to expect that the female children will be spared such violent experiences even when their grown-up sisters are subjected to the severest affliction. Cushioning the adverse effects of racism is usually undertaken within the family network. But if the child is abused within her own home, it becomes almost impossible for her to disclose it to the outside world.

Read More
452 Words | 2 Pages

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison tells the personal story of young, African-American girls who suffer monstrous amounts of oppression and doubt from their community during a time where African Americans were viewed as second class citizens. Throughout the book, we begin to understand the amount of discredit, oppression, and neglect minorities face in society. Claudia, Freida, and Pecola all face oppression due to their age, skin color, and sex. This quotation from Claudia does a phenomenal job of displaying the ethos of the MacTeer girls, while the diction also shows the evolution of Claudia from a young girl to a mature, independent woman.

Read More
1326 Words | 6 Pages

Toni Morrison’s creative rigour, her intellectual and critical depth and her prophetic vision of the role of literature in interpreting the African American experience in the United States are unsurpassed. With her androgynous literary voice she narrates the dark truths about black life. The anthropologist in her formatted her creative writings in a progressive sequence depicting the complexity of black life in multicolors. Black people are aggressive, innovative and creative, said Morrison in one of her interviews. Carrying the same legacy she is explorative and sometimes even radical in her characterization and thus, emerged her atypical women characters.

Read More
2333 Words | 10 Pages

From her parents Morrison learned how to face racism. She uses her novel to describe and show the suffrage of the black people. Morrison's novel highlights and shows the result of the migration from the rural south to the urban north from 1930s to 1950s. The migrants lost their sense of community and identity. The central theme of Morrison's novel is the black American experience, in an unjust society her characters struggle to find themselves and their culture

Read More
1542 Words | 7 Pages

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.

Read More
614 Words | 3 Pages

she had lovely blue eyes in reality, Pecola envisions, individuals would not have any love to do good things before her or to her. The view of this understanding is confirmed by her experience of being teased by others in her school. “The Bluest Eye were familiar with images of an ugly Jesus perhaps they could imagine even Pecola as a Christ figure” (Jerome bump) in a way this can be true as the way she has blue eyes she wishes this change the way people see her and wish it could change other. Morrison said her writing "should try deliberately to make you ... feel something profoundly in the same way that a Black preacher requires his congregation ... to expand on the sermon that is being delivered" (Jerome) I think the way Morrison writes she writes to set a message and I believe the message is not to judge someone of because of the color of there skin.

Read More
989 Words | 4 Pages

The ecofeminist stimulates the global activities in appreciating feminism is also dealed . Toni Morrison’s novels, The Bluest Eye and Beloved is the lights of black feminism, racism, realism and naturalism. It is an attempt to reflect the powerlessness, cruelty and pains that women of color went through. The Bluest Eye and Beloved is to identify problems that women face in the society.

Read More
985 Words | 4 Pages

Symbolism and authors style and its effect on the plot In literature, authors will often utilize symbolism in order to develop characters and plot. In The Bluest Eye, the author, Toni Morrison portrays an African American girl named Pecola, who is stricken with longing for a better life. As she muddles through her difficult childhood, her once innocent interpretation of race and beauty are deformed by the beauty standards that dominated the mid-20th century society. She believes that beauty is dependent upon love, and her self-image, in particular, her eyes, plays a big role in the novel. She consistently attributes her struggles and failures to her lack of blue eyes, and believes that by having blue eyes, her struggle will go away.

Read More
1859 Words | 8 Pages

Toni Morrison , the first African – American writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature , has published six novels to date; The Bluest Eye (1970) , Sula (1973 ) , Song of Solomon (1977 ) , Tar Baby (1981 ) , Beloved (1987 ) and Jazz (1992 ). Toni Morrison’s novel have attracted both popular and critical attention for their inventive blend of realism and fantasy , unsparing social analysis , and passionate philosophical concerns . The combination of social observation with broadening and allusive commentary gives her fictions the symbolic quality of myth , and in fact the search for a myth adequate to experience is one of Morrison’s central themes. As her world and characters are inescapably involved with problems of perception , definitions

Read More

More about Racism In The Bluest Eye And Home

Open Document