In the novel, The Bluest Eye, we learn about the lives of black, middle school aged girls. The novel takes place in 1941, during a time where racial and prejudice situations are prevalent in the lives of African Americans. The children experience a childhood full of racialism, great pain, and subordination,
The children who we come to learn so much about are two sisters, Claudia and Frieda, Pecola, who is their foster sister now. Claudia gives a brief look into the setting of the story in describing her home as well. "Our house is old, cold, and green". She explains where she lives and how cold the house is and how it looks. She introduces us to, Mr. Henry a friend of the family that comes to visit them occasionally. The children sit and hear grown folks talking in the kitchen. They hear how the grown folks talk about each other bad, there is not much good to usually say. "Well, somebody asked him why he left a nice good churchwoman like Della for that heifer" (13). This shows how African Americans are negative about each other and rarely have any nice encouraging words to say about one another.
Pecola is now in the home due a fire at home by Cholly Breedlove, her father. She has been on a long journey of great pain and confused about what kind of identity she wants to have. She is now in the home with Claudia and Frieda since the event has taken place. She has a cup with Shirley Temple embedded on the front, a very popular white girl that little girls of all races idolize.
Claudia, another character who goes through a similar situation compared to Pecola. She is a young girl who came out from a loving family and is intrusive, yet sensitive.
“The Bluest Eye” is taking place around 1940 in Lorain, Ohio. During the year of 1940, discrimination, especially toward African Americans, was still a serious problem. People believe that whiteness is the standard of beauty. The main character, Pecola, who was a nine-years-old African-American, was influenced by how people view beauty. Pecola suffered and felt that she is inferior to others. Pecola believed that having a pair of blue eyes would made people think she is pretty, and would be the key resolving all the problems.
Pauline Breedlove, Pecola's mother, experiences racism within the black community when she moves to Lorain, Ohio. Being a dark-skinned black woman from the south, she does not understand why "northern colored folk was different... [and why they were] no better than whites for meanness" (117). She recognizes the hierarchy, or the "difference between colored people and niggers" within the black community, especially from the light-skinned women she encounters (87). One of these light-skinned black women is Geraldine, Junior's mother, who believes "colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud" (87). She even tells her son
Pecola and the caged bird range in the use of coping strategies, from singing to having virtually none, in order to manage their situations. Like the caged bird, Pecola also “stands on the grave of dreams,” symbolizing the hopelessness that has come over the two. After being kept in a cage for so long, the bird as well as Pecola, long “of things unknown” that are simply unattainable; freedom for the bird and acceptance in the form of blue eyes for Pecola. Throughout the Bluest Eye, Pecola is deeply infatuated with having blue eyes. She is convinced that beauty is directly associated with whiteness, specifically blue eyes. She believes that if she somehow gets blue eyes she will suddenly be beautiful in the eyes of those around her, and therefore lovable. After her father rapes her and her innocence dies, Pecola’s last shred of hope, her baby, also
As stated before, it is based or should one say inspired by the life of the slave Margaret Garner, who was an African American slave . She attempts to escape in 1856 Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, which was a free state. A mob of slave owners, planters and overseers arrived to repossess her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue
In The Bluest Eye, characters experience a variety of oppressive , that give rise to the never ending cycle of victimization in both the families and neighborhood. Throughout the novel, the black community accepts white beauty ideals, for example, judging Maureen’s light skin to be highly attractive in comparison to Pecola’s darker features. Racism is also apparent in other indirect ways. There is a general sense of worthlessness that certain colored characters subconsciously integrate into their daily lives, even without the constant reminder of their apparent “ugliness”. For example, “the Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly.
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye explores the impact of home on childhood, the formative years of any human. Throughout the book, she describes the childhoods of both adults, namely Polly Breedlove and Cholly Breedlove, and children, specifically Pecola, Claudia, and “Junior,” and leaves the reader to figure out how their childhoods shaped who they are. In the novel. Morrison argues that the totality of one’s childhood, including one’s home and experiences, is key in forming one’s disposition and character later in life. In doing so, Morrison wants the reader to see that the best defense against a predatory, racist society is the home.
In the book The Bluest Eye Mrs. Breedlove talks about who was her motivation, who gave her drive to start dressing up nice and refashioning herself. She started using celebrities as role models or a mirror to help her find ways for her to get the same physical attractiveness they have. In the book Mrs. Breedlove mentions that,”I went to see Clark Gable and Jean Harlow. I fixed my hair up like I’d seen hers on a magazine. A part on the side, with one little curl on my forehead. It looked just like her… There I was, five months pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front tooth gone. Everything went then. Look like I just didn 't care no more after that. I let my hair go, plaited it
In the afterword of “The Bluest Eye”, Morrison describes the narrator of the story as “the sayer, the one who knows…a child speaking, mimicking the adult black women on the porch or in the backyard” (Morrison 213), in essence, a child acting as the narrator and imitating black women when speaking, possessing intimate secrets waiting to be divulged to the reader. By having a child act as the narrator and introduce emotionally taxing topics to the reader, the weight of these topics would be cushioned by creating skepticism about the truth behind a child’s statements in providing lots of seemingly “trivial information” (Morrison 213) and thereby “altering the priority an adult would assign the information” (Morrison 213). But rather than just being an arbitrary character in the story, Claudia can be justified as being the very embodiment
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison strongly ties the contents of her novel to its structure and style through the presentation of chapter titles, dialogue, and the use of changing narrators. These structural assets highlight details and themes of the novel while eliciting strong responses and interpretations from readers. The structure of the novel also allows for creative and powerful presentations of information. Morrison is clever in her style, forcing readers to think deeply about the novel’s heavy content without using the structure to allow for vagueness.
In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison the reader sees a very racially segregated America. There are many scenarios where we see race or innocents play a role in something bad happening to that person.
Toni Morrison is a truly extraordinary woman. She is the first African-American woman writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is considered as one of the greatest modern female writers to exert a major influence on African American literature. Especially, she has created black female characters through a unique writing style and various symbols in her novels. Through Morrison’s works, she describes black women in America have been victimized by race, gender and class. They are ignored by not only white men, but also their own husband or same race. The Bluest eye (1970) is the one of the most outstanding novels to express inferiority complex of black women about the standard of beauty made by white and destructive effect of losing their identity in Black community. This paper is going to analyze two female
The MacTeer sisters, Frieda and Claudia are friends of the troubled 11-year-old Pecola. They often tried to protect her from fights and bullying from other kids at school, chanting about her blackness and abused mentally and physically. She suffered from her father who slept naked at night, which added insult to injury.
Topic Sentence: there can not be anyone who does not know what it feels like to be disliked ,evern rejected,momentary or far a sustained prtiod of time. But ,if you have support from family and friends the damage is reduced or erased.
The Bluest Eye opens with a Dick and Jane paragraph, a white American Myth far removed from the realities illustrated in the novel. Thereafter, the black narrator Claudia MacTeer relates much of the story, and the reminder, which concerns events that Claudia could not have witnessed, is narrated mostly by an unidentified voice. Claudia’s narrative reveals the guilt that for a long time plagued her and her sister in connection with another girl’s miscarriage. The girl, Pecola Breedlove, was pregnant with her own father’s child