Bluest Eye Essay

In this scene we get a deeper look in the workings of Pecola's mind when Morrison writes, "A picture of Mary Jane...Smiling white face. Blond hair... blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort...To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane"(50). The words in this scene are so powerful in reflecting Pecola's obsession to have blue eyes. She eats the candy and to her that is "somehow to eat the eyes" if Pecola eats Mary Jane, she can be Mary Jane or in a way beautiful. The candy's wrapper also helps to reassure her that being white is to be better by saying "blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort". Mary Jane is staring from a world of clean comfort, while Pecola is looking back from a world ravened by poverty and racism. Mary janes world looks full of love and Pecola's is full of

Russell M. Nelson once said, “We were born to die and we die to live.” Toni Morrison correlates to Nelson’s quote in her Nobel Lecture of 1993, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” In Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, she uses language to examine the concepts of racism, lack of self-identity, gender roles, and socioeconomic hardships as they factor into a misinterpretation of the American Dream. Morrison illustrates problems that these issues provoke through the struggles of an African American community during the1940s. Through the characters’ challenges of being accepted by society, the reader can blatantly see corruption not only in America, but also throughout the entire world. Morrison uniquely applies multiple points of view to tell the story of a young black girl who desires blue eyes in order to be socially “beautiful”. The reason the book is so effective is that Morrison bases the themes on personal experiences. By the end of the novel, we do not directly gain a sense of hope, change and progress for the future, but instead raises awareness of racism, sexism and self-identity. To convey the importance of personal experiences vis á vis social issues, Morrison parallels crucial times in history to the novel. The author demonstrates how history affects her characters and how the characters’ lives in microcosm represent what was occurring globally at the time. The Bluest Eye offers the possibility for

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.

Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, presents the lives of several impoverished black families in the 1940’s in a rather unconventional and painful manner. Ms. Morrison leads the reader through the lives of select children and adults, describing a few powerful incidents, thoughts and experiences that lend insight into the motivation and. behavior of these characters. In a somewhat unconventional manner, the young lives of Pauline Williams Breedlove and Charles (Cholly) Breedlove are presented to the reader. Through these descriptions, the reader comes to understand how they become the kind of adults they are. Background information is given not necessarily to incur sympathy but to lend understanding.

The rape of Pecola is a tragic occurrence. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison focuses heavily on the topic of her rape. Morrison shows how the rape has affected Pecola by creating a powerful and compelling tale, allowing the reader to connect with Pecola and better empathize with her. Morrison’s stylistic choices and use of powerful language make her story even more commanding and eye-catching and further the reader’s understanding of Pecola’s misery and their sympathy towards her.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s uses her critique of racism so that white readers can imagine or understand what it feels like to be the on the other side of what is not considered beauty as Pecola, Claudia, and Freida suffer from the stigma of ugliness and being African-American (Bump). Through Morrison’s ability to convey the truth to readers about how beauty is socially structured, she uses Claudia, the narrator, to signify the search for the truth, “..the edge, the curl, the thrust of their emotions is always clear to Frieda and me. We do not, cannot, know the mean-ings of all the words, for we are nine and ten years old. So we watch their faces, their hands, their feet, and listen for truth in timbre” (Morrison). We all were the ages of

In the 1960s a second wave of feminism rushed through America; focused on dismantling barriers in the workplace and changing the image of the ‘ideal woman.’ However, many women of color were not included in the feminist movement. Toni Morrison recognizes the feminist issues concerning black women and “interrogates and deconstructs the long-held stereotypical images of black women” through characters in her book (Chick). Her portraits are complex and revealing in the way they go beyond the simple patriarchy. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses historical context to represent the ideals of beauty and the psychological effect it has on the adolescent mind. Growing up

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, sets forth the story of three young black girls living in the town of Lorain, Ohio during the 1940’s. The story primarily focuses on the life of Pecola Breedlove, which is narrated through the eyes Claudia, who also reflects upon the events through the course of a year. These girls face challenges in their everyday lives concerning fitting into society regarding their skin color and status as minorities. Morrison illustrates extreme situations and plants her characters in these situations to bring forth the seemingly submerge fragile issues of colorism, eluding to a slight context of beauty and racism that are still prevalent today.

The Bluest Eye concentrates on the key contemporary American issues: racial and sexual politics. More distinctly, the novel centres on the impact that socially constructed views of race have on gender relations within the black community. As Butler-Evans highlights, “race rather than gender had become the overriding sign for the oppression of black people” and Morrison’s novel responds to this political issue by focusing on this in correlation with the Eurocentric society setting of the novel. The racial oppression suffered by the black community shape ideas of black masculinity based on male feelings of inferiority and consequent sexual oppression of black females. Morrison systematically explores the relationship between the racial oppression of black males and sexual oppression of black females. The main focus of this essay will be an exploration of how racial oppression experienced by black males, specifically Cholly and Junior, relate to the sexual oppression they enforce on black females.

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye follows Pecola Breedlove’s “journey” to obtain beauty in the form of the titular blue eyes. Not only is it told in Claudia’s perspective, but the readers witnesses several backstories, namely Geraldine, Pauline, Cholly, and Soaphead Church’s, which is in a third-person perspective. This might be seen as odd at first, but after taking a deeper look into their pasts, there is something that stands out: something “beautiful” in the eyes of these people. These “beautiful” things are as unobtainable as Pecola’s wish for blue eyes, and yet they are an important aspect of The Bluest Eye, as are the “beauty” standards during that time. This “beauty” standard is what most African-Americans yearned (some even able to

In the following text of Toni Morrison “The Bluest Eye” and the movie “The Color Purple”, blacks are portrayed as being ugly and less than compared to the white society. Writers Morrison and Walker depict the everyday issues that young African girls would face during that particular time period. In regards to this, protagonists Celie and Pecola are viewed struggling with the dominance of men, beauty, and identity. Throughout this paper I will discuss these themes in an effort to illustrate how each of these issues overlap and influence one another, resulting in the findings of either self-identity or madness for both protagonists.

The presence of discrimination in the form of racial and sexual prejudices due to differences in cultural values crucially influence an individual’s acceptance in society. In The Bluest Eye, America’s history is unequivocally displayed as racially segregated, overtly disfavouring the black skinned race. Morrison conveys this through the manipulation of the portrayal of an interaction between opposing characters and intensifies a white shop-owner’s revulsion towards Pecola, a meek black girl. The

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 considerable attention from literary critics—though not to the same degree as Morrison’s later works. With its sensitive portrait of African American female identity and its astute critique of the internalized racism bred by American cultural definitions of beauty, ‘ The Bluest Eye’ has been widely seen as a literary watershed, inspiring a proliferation of literature written by African American women about their identity and experience as women of

In the novel, The Bluest Eye, author Toni Morrison integrates many social and structural forces and themes throughout the story that are central to understanding the character’s experiences. Varying forms of oppression, and issues surrounding gender, race and social class are prevalent in the book, affecting each character in their own way. As the story progresses we gain more insight into the lives of the characters which helps complete the picture of the intersection of the forces of gender, race and class. Each character in the story experiences an interaction between these forces, rather than only experiencing one or the other. Therefore, it is important to note that even though I will be breaking down each

Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye is a harsh look on past and present aspects of racism in a time that many people now do not recall. It touches on subjects such as the public humiliation that being black seemingly deserved, not only from children, but the ridicule and judgement that black people faced from adults who should have known better. Comparatively, The Bluest Eye also emphasizes the mindset that the lighter someone’s skin is, the more beautiful they are, which is shown though the way mixed people in the novel are more accepted and loved by others, simply for their lighter skin, even by the narrators. Because of this harsh discrimination and the European beauty standards that are still in place today, Pecola’s fate was destined from the beginning. Pecola Breedlove is simply a little girl who wants to be beautiful in a world that refuses to see her as such and treats her with the utmost disrespect, the physical and mental abuse driving her to the point of insanity. Through the various technical facets of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Morrison attempts to not only humanize her characters in the eyes of her readers through the use of switching perspective, but to allow her audience to truly empathize with them by shifting the narration from third to first person, and putting a twist on the literary symbolism that seasons have been used for in past works.