Toni Morrison's Identity And Identity

Toni Morrison’s first novel successfully depicted the life of young girls from Afro-American families who are facing racism and violence while they are searching for an identity in the primarily white world. Morrison touched many points concerning racial and social problems that were on the stake during the period after the Great Depression and maybe could even have some meaning nowadays. It is possible for young girls to be able of building self-confidence, - even when they are exposed every day to different feminine beauty ideals as standards which they do not meet due to their ethnicity. Morrison drafted two characters –Claudia and Pecola- who reacted differently to this situation. Claudia went to the opposition and resistance while Pecola

Morrison was trying to point out that little black girls do not exist in the perfect world of the white middle class, which was typically illustrated in literature for pupils. According to Rosenberg, young black girls, as Morrison herself, had a problem to find their identity because of the lack of portraits of Afro-American characters and their real life. School children were getting a glimpse of a distant Anglo-Saxon’s middle class life that was so perfect and hostile towards them at the same time. It seems that this basic-school reader could symbolize the clash of the perception of the Afro-American girls with the cold distant world of white people. Klotman explored the three versions of the “Dick and Jane” in her analysis of “The bluest Eye”:

The first is clearly that of the aliened white world (represented by the Fisher family) which impinges upon the lives of the black children and their families while at the same time excluding them. The second one is a lifestyle of the two black McTeer children, Claudia and Frieda, shaped by poor but loving parents trying desperately to survive the poverty, the Northern cold and Northern style of racism they encounter in Ohio. The Breedloves’ life, however, are like the third- the distorted run-on – version of “Dick and

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. It was also the way of an escape from the many pains she was exposed to, for example, bullying, mother’s beating and rape by her father. Reading the book, it was quite clear that Pauline, Pecola’s mother, rejected her own children and paid the attention to the Fisher’s house as if it was her own home, which was reflected by her maintaining this