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Whiteness In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

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All through all of history there has been a perfect wonder that most have attempted to get. In any case, imagine a scenario in which that excellence was difficult to get a handle on in light of the fact that something was keeping one down. There was nothing one could do to be 'delightful'. Growing up and being persuaded that one was monstrous, pointless, and messy. For Pecola Breedlove, this condition of aching was reality. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and pale white skin was the meaning of magnificence. Pecola was a dark young lady with the fantasy to be lovely. Toni Morrison brings the peruser into the life of a young lady through Morrison's uncommon novel, The Bluest Eye. The novel shows the fights that Pecola battles with every single day. Morrison takes the peruser through the subjects of …show more content…

This is critical in light of the fact that a white infant doll is one of Morrison's most convincing images. Morrison utilizes the child doll to send the message that whiteness is prevalent in their general public. The association amongst magnificence and whiteness confines the idea of excellence just to the individual's outside. The characters are always subjected to pictures and images of whiteness through motion pictures, books, confection, magazines, child dolls and promotions. Another case of the pictures and images in the novel is the point at which the dark hero, Pecola, devours a 'Mary Jane' sweet.

"She recollects the Mary Janes. Each light yellow rapper has a photo on it. A photo of little Mary Jane, for whom the treat is named. Grinning white face. Blonde hair in delicate confuse, blue eyes taking a gander at her out of a universe of clean solace. The eyes are touchy, fiendish. To Pecola they are basically beautiful. She eats the treat, and its sweetness is great. To eat the sweet is by one means or another to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane," (Morrison,

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(46), Morrison suggests that Pecola believes that her identity is based on her eyes and that attaining beauty would be the solution for gaining acceptance from others. The “pictures” and the “sights” the narrator refers to are her memories or experiences. “Those eyes” are what allow people to see the world and are often referred to as symbols of truth and “the windows to the soul.” Pecola’s desire to change her eyes means that she wants to alter the truth: her race, her self-imposed “ugliness,” her experiences, her identity—everything that makes her who she is. In this quote, Pecola believes that the word “different” means to be “beautiful.”

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Notwithstanding, Toni Morrison entwines the emotional, physical, and psychological impacts of self-hatred through her characterization of the female characters in the novel. Morrison depicts Pecola Breedlove as the protagonist in The Bluest Eye, though she doesn’t particularly do anything heroic, it is clear she endured countless battles and hardships and appeals to the reader’s emotions of sympathy. On page 46, the narrator reveals Pecola’s thoughts, “If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they’d say ‘Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.’”

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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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In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, there is a girl named, Pecola, and she is constantly teased and ridiculed by characters in the book. For example, Pecola meets a light-skinned boy named, Junior, and one day he invites Pecola to his home and play with his kittens. “Some kittens. We got some kittens. You can have one if you want.”

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A hidden view of Mrs. Breedlove calling her baby ugly reflects right back to her. Pecola is an image of her mother and when she sees the ugly baby it further confirms all of Mrs. Breedlove’s hatred. She turns to other people’s lives to try and get over herself. She begins to care more about other families instead of her own. She treats her own

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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.

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Morrison explains that the master narrative is whatever ideological script is being imposed by the people in authority on everyone else. And in the novel it is evident how Pecola is not the only one who has internalized her ugliness; for instance, we are told that the group of boys who circled and hurled insults at her do so because of “their contempt for their own blackness” and an “exquisitely learned self-hatred”. Moreover, they were ironically bullying her for something they themselves should fully empathize with; something she “had no control [over]: the color of her skin” (63). Even within the black community Pecola finds no solace or support. They all hold whiteness to be the default beauty standard.

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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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The Bluest Eye Research Paper

1260 Words | 6 Pages

1) Society has change the way Pecola perceives herself and she has the idea in her mind that her life would be less miserable if she has blue eyes. She is always thinking that “if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (Morrison 46). Pecola has gotten the impression of her life being complete if only she has blue eyes. She would see the eyes of others and become envious of their blue eyes. The boys at school would always pick on her and call her an ugly black girl.

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