Essay on Bluest eye

At an early age, Cholly learns that his life would be extremely difficult. When he was four years old his parents abandoned him. The two people that were supposed to love him unconditionally and teach him life lessons had turned their back on him and created emotional damage. This marks the beginning of Cholly’s problematic life. Aunt Jimmy created a glimmer of hope for the future when she took on the role of his guardian.

Race often plays an important role in how an individual is viewed based on societal standards and quality of life. A vast majority of the characters in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye attribute the difficulties they face and the outcome of their lives to being African American in an era when people with dark pigmentations of skin were viewed as second class citizens. Morrison’s novel focuses on the different spectives of African Americans, both male and female, who differ in the standard by which they live their lives based on their experiences with racism following the depression era of the twentieth century. The issue of race and class is essential in understanding the mindset and actions of characters such as those in The Bluest Eye, the lengths the characters were willing to go to in order to conform to society, and how consequential decisions they made in order to endure and to survive had a lasting impact on the quality of their lives. Race and class defined how characters throughout the novel dealt with elements such as beauty, self awareness, ethnic identity, morality and the idea of society’s opinions.

Cholly Breedlove grew up in a loveless environment where he was abandoned and left on a junk heap by his own mother. As a child he never knew his father, meeting him only when he was fourteen. His father never cared about him. Cholly was raised by a great aunt who loved him but, he did not respect her. Cholly quit school and went to work at a grain store where he met Blue, a kindly older man who was a father figure to him. For the first time in his life, Cholly felt the love of a father. Soon after his great aunt died just as Cholly was coming into puberty. At her funeral he met a young woman named Darlene, whom he had his first sexual experience. However it wasn't a pleasurable experience because two white men found them and forced them to

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison shows that anger is healthy and that it is not something to be feared; those who are not able to get angry are the ones who suffer the most.  She criticizes Cholly, Polly, Claudia, Soaphead Church, the Mobile Girls, and Pecola because these blacks in her story wrongly place their anger on themselves, their own race, their family, or even God, instead of being angry at those they should have been angry at: whites.

After his great aunt's death, he is humiliated by two white men while having his first sexual encounter with Darlene. They force him to continue having sex with her while they watch and laugh. He couldn't strike back at the white men because, "such an emotion would have destroyed him" (150), he bottled up his emotions and transferred them to his hatred of women in general. The reader could feel and understand Cholly's description of the emotions running through his head when he describes the incident a day after. He could not save Darlene from the taunting and laughs of the white men, and therefore was resigned to loathing her, hating "the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence" (151).

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison narrates the lives of two families, the MacTeer family and the Breedlove family. The novel digs into the themes of love, envy, and weakness, while maintaining a thick and interesting plotline. These themes are conveyed thoroughly through Morrison’s literary style. Toni Morrison’s powerful writing and structural techniques add depth to the novel, enhancing certain emotions while developing a riveting plot.

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.

Parents are the first role models that children are exposed to, making them immensely influential in the development of a child’s personality. The diverse group of parents in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, demonstrate the consequences of bad parenting on a child. Being set in 1940’s America, the black community in the book is still not fully accepted by society, and racism plays a significant role in the character’s lives. Here, readers are introduced to the Breedloves, a dysfunctional black family that is outcast from their community. Throughout the book, the parenting experienced by the Breedloves alters their perception of love, setting them up for failure as a

The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison that reveals many lessons and conflicts between young and adult characters of color. The setting takes place during the 1940s in Lorain, Ohio. The dominant speaker of this book is a nine year old girl named Claudia MacTeer who gets to know many of her neighbors. As a result of this, Claudia learns numerous lessons from her experience with the citizens of Lorain. Besides Claudia, The Bluest Eye is also told through many characters for readers to understand the connection between each of the adults and children. Many parents in the novel like Geraldine and Pauline Breedlove clearly show readers how adults change their own children. Furthermore, other adult characters like Cholly Breedlove

Cholly was abandoned when he was only four days old, and was raised up by his great Aunt Jimmy. When he was young, he had his first sexual encounter with a girl and was caught by two white men when he was in the middle of the sexual act. Instead of getting angry at him, the two men urged Cholly to keep going. Cholly felt powerless when the white men came and told him to keep going, so he took his anger out on the girl because she was more vulnerable than him. “Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white armed me. He was small, black, helpless.” (p. 150) Cholly had little control in his life because of the society he lives in, and he tries to take his anger out on anyone he can who is weaker than him. Cholly also never had actual parents because his father left before he was born and his mother abandoned him when he was only a baby. Society’s white standards of having a stable nuclear family never happened in Cholly’s family. “Having no idea of how to raise children, and having never watched any parent raise himself, he could not even comprehend what such a relationship should be.” (p. 160) Cholly never felt the affections of a parent so he did not know how to show affection to his children. As a

“Cholly was free. Dangerously Free. Feel to free whatever he felt---fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free to knock her [a woman] in the head…free to live his fantasies, and free even to die…Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites, and they alone interested him.” [This quote shows the catharsis Cholly Breedlove’s peers and the readers have towards him. Although Cholly is an impulsive character who is abusive towards his wife and daughter, the people surrounding him and the readers would have a difficult time hating him because of his past. Cholly has been through numerous situations in his life where he has been tormented, so for that reason, every harsh thing he has done in his life is acceptable and his tragic past is the one to be blamed for.] (159)

This happens because she has a character strong enough to fight back. This shows that Cholly in a way is acting like Stanley with his wife. But he isn’t verbally aggressive with the women he knows but also with all the weakest he encounters. Stanley is violent with the woman he loves and with her sister because he feels like she is a threat but Cholly perceives everyone as a threat and that’s why he is always on the defensive trying to protect himself. Therefore it demonstrates that Cholly is afraid and insecure. He uses the only thing he master: violence. He doesn’t know about anything else than hatred which shows how broken he is too. This is because he has been forced to be watched having sex for the first time with his girlfriend by two white men. It destroyed him and made him what he is now: an insecure and violent man too afraid that he prefers to avenge himself on the

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.

The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, depicts characters desperately seeking to attain love through a predetermined standard of beauty established and substantiated by society. Morrison intertwines the histories of several characters portraying the delusions of the ‘perfect’ family and what motivates their quest for love and beauty. Ultimately, this pursuit for love and beauty has overwhelming effects on their relationships and their identity.

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison shows that one’s family determines a character’s feeling of self-worth. According to Morrison, the world is teaching little black girls that they are not beautiful and unworthy of love. The world teaches this by depicting white people and objects that resemble them, as symbols of beauty. In this world, to be worthy of love you must be beautiful. Morrison shows that if a little black girl believes what the world is telling her, her self-esteem can develop low self-esteem and they may yearn to be white. Even in the absence of economic and racial privilege, Morrison suggests that a little black girl can look to her family to build up her self-esteem. For Morrison, having a family is