Autobiographical Elements In The Bluest Eye

This can be seen toward the end of the novel, on page 199, where, in a conversation between Pecola and a figure of her thoughts, Morrison reveals that Pecola may have been raped twice. “You said he tried to do it to you when you were sleeping on the couch. ‘See there! You don’t even know what you’re talking about. It was when I was washing dishes,’” reads the exchange. These lines also tell the reader that even with this information, Pecola is still internally unsure of what happened herself. Through internal dialogue, her personal insecurities are projected. Dialogue is key in presenting major ideas in the novel.

Beyond the “Doll” section of the novel, Toni Morrison shifts from a vivid description of Claudia destroying white baby dolls in order to “find their beauty” to providing a scene in which Pecola’s old family dynamic is brought up to show the desperation of her entire family. The scene in which Pecola’s mother is harassing Cholly to get out of bed and get some coal for the fire clearly shows the mother’s frustration with Cholly, and Cholly’s corresponding indifference. This is a crucial moment, for it shows what sort of relationship the parents have: one of rivalry and apathy, all in one. This combination can be lethal, as it can be transmitted to the children as well as all the actions the parents make. Toni Morrison has a tendency of introducing

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.

Being constantly picked on and not having familial support causes Pecola to begin to want to escape reality. She does this by fantasizing beauty and the idea that to be beautiful she has to be white. Pecola begins to idolize the beauty icon at the time, Shirley Temple, who just so happens to be white. The MacTeers begin to see this obsession, they, “…knew she was fond of the Shirley Temple cup and took every opportunity to drink milk out of it just to handle and see sweet Shirley’s face” (23). Even those around her are beginning to notice Pecola’s strange idolization of Shirley Temple.

Everyone that is as young as her and going through what she is, is very hard. Toni Morrison shows her story in different points of view instead of her own. In the beginning Pecola is very fragile and delicate, she is forced out of her house and made to live with a family friend. Both her mother and father are very abusive around her and the rest of her siblings. As the story progresses, she grows

Finding good qualities in any of the men of The Bluest Eye are hard to come by. There are many factors that come into play that have shaped the personalities of all of these males. The female characters in the novel endured a lot in coping with the males. Toni Morrison does an exceptional job of painting a vivid picture of the social climate of America in the 1960’s and society’s affects on the people of The Bluest Eye. In a variety of ways, the males of The Bluest Eye have many issues in their past that cause them to act very callous, immoral and bring a lot of anguish to those around them.

Her brother use the option of running away from the horrific domestic violence scenes that their mother and father participate in. Pecola doesn’t have this choice because of her age. So instead she begins to believe that she can only change what she sees by changing herself. Moments like this are when she is lying in her bed after her parents have their fight and she begins to imagine that her body is disappearing fully until she is, figuratively, only left with her eyes which in her opinion is the source of her ugliness. There are moments when she succeeds in separating connection between what she sees and how people see her.

At the beginning of the book, it explains why Pecola goes to stay with the MacTeers and the experience they all had from the point-of- view of the MacTeers youngest daughter Claudia. Claudia narrates on how shy Pecola is and how she loved drinking of their Shirley Temple glass because she enjoyed looking at the face of Shirley Temple. The Shirley Temple glass represents everything that is beautiful to her, and longs for but cannot have. Pecola and Frieda, Claudia’s older sister, liked talking about how beautiful Shirley Temple was. Claudia didn’t understand why they enjoyed Shirley Temple so much because she hated white baby dolls she could not find the beauty that everyone else sees in them.

In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, fantasies are the result of a desire to escape poverty and limiting circumstances of the characters social conditions. Elaborate fantasies consume characters and take them away from their struggles, but the standards they attempt to meet set by society are unattainable. Although this common feeling among the characters in the novel is alleviating at first, it is ultimately, in the long run unhealthy. Characters in The Bluest Eye fall victim to the master narratives, forcing them to try and fit these impossible social norms. In the long term, this strive for an artificial life is the downfall of these characters because the standards of beauty, family, and love pushed, are far from real life reflections. More

While reading the book, I have realized how hard times were back in the day. I can see now that black Americans were severely mistreated much worse than what we have heard and read. We see that there is an innocent little girl pecola who wishes that she was white. Therefore, she does not feel ugly or discriminated . The plot matches with the characters and with the Dick and Jane narrative thrown in gives a much higher meaning to the novel. Each person’s role in the book is not unjust and has an important part to play. Without them and their interesting lifestyle the book would have no meaning at all. Cholly, Pecola, Claudia, Pauline, Frieda, Mr Henry all had an important part to

The Bluest Eye, published in 1970, is a novel born from the author’s experience with a little black girl who wanted blue eyes, an effect of “racial self-loathing” (Morrison 210). The novel explores a similar, but much more extreme story: the story of Pecola Breedlove. Pecola is a little black girl living not only in a world that divides itself by race and is prejudiced against black people, but also amidst a family that holds conflict and divisions within itself. Morrison’s novels are known for their themes of racial ideology, beauty standards, and identity (Lister), and The Bluest Eye is no different. Through the subject of its story and the author’s use of language, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye explores the dangers of racially-based beauty

At the beginning of the novel, pecola wants to learn how to get people to love her and when forced to witness her parents fights she simply wants to disappear.pecola

This variability becomes obvious in the rape scene between protagonist Pecola and her father and the following, warmer, scene between Pecola and Soaphead Church, when he grants her blue eyes (163, 176). The narration then returns focus to Claudia as she recounts the remainder of the story in the Summer section. Claudia and Frieda talk about asking God to help Pecola and bury seeds they were selling and the accompanying money in their backyard, an act symbolizing summer (192).

She becomes a reminder of human cruelty and an emblem of human suffering” (Watkins).As much as Morrison concentrates on the aspect of white racism, she includes other aspects of racism that involve black attitudes toward each other as well as white attitudes toward blacks.

Toni Morrison’s novel focuses more on the complex and ultimately profound depiction of the effects of racism by emphasizing how self-loathing destroys the African-American characters, instead of making the storyline about specific events that center around racism and the grave history of slavery alone. One example from the novel is how the narrator describes the Breedlove family as ugly, “You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious and all-knowing master had given each one of them a cloak of ugliness to wear and they had each accepted it without question” (Morrison 39). This excerpt from