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What Is Fo Pecola's Obsession With The Word Beauty

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What Is The Concept With The Word Beauty In “The Bluest Eyes” ?

Nowadays everything has its own definition. People see and thinks differently in a lot of things. They can change a meaning to a word and make it their own meaning. Which makes their own meaning to a word effect somebody in a negative or positive way. Beauty can affect a person physically, mentally, and emotionally. In this case this is what happen in “The Bluest Eyes” by Toni Morrison with the word beauty. The way Toni Morrison use the defines the word beauty in “The Bluest Eyes,” it effect Pecola in a negative way by desiring and having a obsession with blue eyes thinking that it will make her beautiful and see the world in a different way. What does beauty means to you? There are thousands of ways to define words such as the word beauty. Everybody sees/defines beauty in a different concept than others. …show more content…

Pecola does not only desire blue eyes so she would be considered beautiful but as well as see the world differently. Pecola was the one who has been teased a lot out of her other friends Claudia and Frieda. For instance, she was surrounded by a group of boys and they were calling her names and harassed her. Stated in Winter, chapter 4, “ Black e mo. Black e mo. Yadaddysleepsnekked. Black e mo black e mo ya daddy sleeps nekked. Black e mo...” Then Maureen tells Pecola about a girl name just like her in Imitation of Life, and says “... Where this mulatto girl hates her mother cause she is black and ugly...” Those are some of things Pecola witnesses. Although, Toni Morrison talks about how she is being mistreated because of her skin and not her eyes, Pecola believes the cruelty she is experiences is connected to how she is seen. Furthermore, if she has blue eyes people would not teased or mistreated

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1483 Words | 6 Pages

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.

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996 Words | 4 Pages

Believing blue eyes could save her from her world of ugliness and tragedy, Pecola wished for them for so long. She thought that if she had something that was considered beautiful, people would stop treating her poorly. “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights---if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (Morrison 46). Through this book Morrison wanted to show that anyone could be beautiful, because beauty is something that goes beyond one’s appearance. “Beauty was not simply something to behold; it was something one could do” (Morrison

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1257 Words | 6 Pages

Pecola Breedlove is conditioned to believe that she is ugly by her parents from a young age and “[hides] behind [her ugliness]” because she does not know any better (Morrison 38). She closes herself off to the world, thinking that her “ugliness” is a burden to those around her. Pecola’s brokenness forces her to idolize the images of something that she will never be; a Shirley Temple duplicate with curly blonde hair and rosy red cheeks. But, what Pecola yearns for the most is for Temple’s blue eyes—more specifically, she yearns for the bluest eye. In the words of Jacqueline de Weever, Pecola’s dream for blue eyes shows that “[she] wants, in fact to be white” (de Weever 5).

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Rhetorical Analysis Essay The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison takes place in Ohio in the 1940s. The novel is written from the perspective of African Americans and how they view themselves. Focusing on identity, Morrison uses rhetorical devices such as imagery, dictation, and symbolism to help stress her point of view on identity. In the novel the author argues that society influences an individual 's perception on beauty, which she supports through characters like Pecola and Mrs. Breedlove.

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The literal meaning behind Beauty is “a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight.” Most people view the features that white people obtain as the general thing you need to be beautiful. Morrison and Lamar emphasize how African American view themselves when it comes to beauty. However, Lamar hails African American to see the beauty they’ve they been blinded to see “Beauty is what you make it, I used to be so mistaken / By different shades of faces” (Complexion (A Zulu Love))

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807 Words | 4 Pages

The first piece in my portfolio is a piece of Pecola with blue eyes. One of the overarching ideas presented throughout The Bluest Eye is that white features, specifically blue eyes, is the epitome of physical beauty. Throughout the book, there is vivid visual imagery of blue eyes such as those of “lovely Mary Jane” (Morrison 50). The use of the word lovely further correlates her physical appearance and blue eyes with beauty. This causes Pecola to crave blue eyes so desperately that “every night, without fail, she prayed” in order to gain what she and everyone else unanimously view as beauty (46).

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They constantly encounter the problem of not living up to society’s beauty standards, which results in feelings of self-hatred based on race. These feelings perpetuate racism, as society, and even black people, tend to favor white beauty since it is held up as superior. The problems that Pecola, Pauline, and Claudia face in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are not just figments of the past. Today, millions of women across the country feel some sort of self-loathing stemming from dissatisfaction over how they look. It is important that society tries to free itself from these nonsensical standards and celebrate the unique beauty of each individual

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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

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The Bluest Eyes open with an anecdote of Dick and Jane to show how racism destroys the mental stability of black people. It equates whites with success and happiness while blacks with poverty and unhappiness. This traumatises the minds of Blacks and they begin to dislike their own heritage and skin colour in the white world of Dick and Jane.

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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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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.

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515 Words | 3 Pages

Many try to fulfill the society’s standards of being beautiful. In this case, a little, black girl, who lives in a white society, attempts to reach this standard. Her desire for external beauty results in insanity. In Toni Morrison’s, The Bluest Eye, the use of symbolism presents itself through the allusion of a “Dick and Jane” story, blue eyes, and physical beauty. One use of symbolism that is presented in the novel is the allusion of a “Dick and Jane” series.

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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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955 Words | 4 Pages

Beauty is defined as a combination of qualities, such as shape, color, or form, that pleases the aesthetic senses, especially the sight. Shakespeare expressed a similar sentiment in Love's Labours Lost, 1588: “Good Lord Boyet, my beauty, though but mean, Needs not the painted flourish of your praise: Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye, Not utter'd by base sale of chapmen's tongues.” Benjamin Franklin, in Poor Richard's Almanack, 1741, wrote: “Beauty, like supreme dominion Is but supported by opinion.” David Hume's Essays, Moral and Political, 1742, include: "Beauty in things exists merely in the mind which contemplates them." These phrases show that the idiom Beauty is in the Eye of the Beholder is somewhat true, but does not answer why women do so much to be considered beautiful.

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1260 Words | 6 Pages

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

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