Morrison's Bluest Eye Essay: Misdirected Anger Depicted

That healthy relationship didn’t last forever, however. When Cholly and Polly move to Ohio, Polly learns that she doesn’t exactly fit in. Polly discovers that she needs to dress and look like the other woman. Polly starts to bug Cholly for money so she can buy new clothes and make up. This angered Cholly. Polly was giving more attention to her looks than to her husband and all Cholly’s hard earned money was paying for her obsession to look perfect. She soon learns that she is pregnant with a baby, Pecola. After Pecola is born, Cholly learns fast that he is not ready to become a father and does not possess the traits to become one. Looking back on his past, we know that he never had a father figure or even a role model to reach him how to be a parent. The failure of Cholly to be father causes him to turn to alcohol and he becomes a drunk.

As a child, he was not loved by his mother. She prefered her cat to her own son. Junior saw this at an early age and “spent some happy moments watching it suffer” (86). Junior locked Pecola in a room, becoming the perpetrator with the same turn of attitude as Cholly. When he saw that the cat liked Pecola, he threw the cat, killing it, because the thing his mother loved more than himself loved her. Pecola’s wish could be paralleled to the cat. It had blue eyes, and was loved dearly by someone, which could explain the attention she gave to the cat. Junior even said, “Gimme my cat! (90). Up to this point, he wanted nothing to do with the cat and even tortured it, but with it being the only connection to his mother, he called it his own. Pecola’s dream, or having the same attention as the cat, was killed when the cat was killed. Junior was not loved by his mother, only taken care of to live. She did not “allow her baby, Junior, to cry…[she] did not talk to him, coo to him, or indulge him in kissing bouts” (86). This unlove for her family caused Junior to be victimized, and then alter his ways, and become the perpetrator. Pecola is the victim in the rage of Junior, only because his mother did not love him. She wanted someone to be kind to her, and love her, but that was only met with

In the third chapter of The Bluest Eye, entitled "Autumn", Toni Morrison focuses on Pecola's family, the Breedloves. Morrison goes in depth about the family dynamic of the Breedloves and how it affects Pecola and her self-image. The passage starts after one of many arguments between Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove, Pecola's parents, turns violent. Mrs. Breedlove wants Cholly to fetch some coal from the outside shed. Cholly spent the last night drinking and does not want to get out of bed. The passage begins with the children becoming aware of the argument. Mrs. Breedlove starts to hit him with cooking pans while Cholly mostly used his feet and teeth. After the fight is over Mrs. Breedlove just lets Cholly lie on the ground and she goes about her

Pecola was a product of a loveless marriage and suffered because of that. Her father was a violent drunk and her mother tries to emulate white celebrities. One night she even witnesses their lifeless marriage. “Into her eyes came the picture of Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove in bed. He making sounds as though he were in pain, as though something had him by the throat and wouldn't let go. Terrible as his noises were, they were not nearly as bad as the no noise at all from her mother. It was as though she was not even there. Maybe that was love. Choking sounds and silence.” It is clear throughout the book that Pecola is character that never experienced love, which of course explains the lack she has for herself. It gets to a point that Pecola believes with blue eyes, her parents would begin to love her. “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. Her teeth were good, and at least her nose was not big and flat like some of those who were thought so cute. If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and 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.” This quote shows how Pecola feels that being white and “beautiful” would help her home situation along with how her guardians

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.

There are many themes that seem to run throughout this story. Each theme and conflict seems to always involve the character of Pecola Breedlove. There is the theme of finding an identity. There is also the theme of Pecola as a victim. Of all the characters in the story we can definitely sympathize with Pecola because of the many harsh circumstances she has had to go through in her lifetime. Perhaps her rape was the most tragic and dramatic experience Pecola had experiences, but nonetheless she continued her life. She eliminates her sense of ugliness, which lingers in the beginning of the story, and when she sees that she has blue eyes now she changes her perspective on life. She believes that these eyes have been given

People in the African-American community express their self-hatred toward Pecola and degrade her. Pecola’s ugliness has made others feel beautiful, and her suffering has made others feel better about themselves. Pecola is regarded as an ‘ugly little black girl’ who is not worthy of any respect or dignity, and because Pecola continues to live after she becomes insane she serves as a reminder to the town or the ugliness and hatred that they have tried to repress. Claudia’s life is quite different from Pecola’s life. Claudia is a victim of beauty standards, as Pecola is, but Claudia is able to fight back against the standards because she has a stable family life. When Claudia is given a white doll to play with, she despises the doll, and dissects and destroys the doll, and Claudia hates Shirley Temple because Shirley is pretty and white “I hated Shirley. Not because she was cute, but because she danced with Bojangles, who was my friend, my uncle, my daddy, and who ought to have been soft-shoeing it and chuckling with me. Instead he was enjoying, sharing, giving a lovely dance thing with one of those little white girls whose socks never slid down under their heels”(Pg. 19). Claudia is not jaded because when Pecola becomes pregnant with Pecola’s father’s child Claudia tries to come up with a plan to save Pecola’s baby “We have to do it right, now. We’ll bury the money over by her house so we can’t go back and dig it up, and we’ll plant the

Pecola is first introduced as a foster child coming to live with McTeer family after her father burned down the Breedlove house. She arrives with nothing but the clothes on her back, exhibiting a shy demeanor. The effects of years of abuse and neglect are immediately evident through her interactions with Claudia and Frieda. She is compliant with whatever they do, trying her best not to draw attention to herself: “When we discovered that she clearly did not want to dominate us, we liked her. She laughed when I clowned for her, and smiled and gracefully accepted the food gifts my sister gave her” (Morrison 19). As the three girls stay together, Pecola’s insecurities are unveiled. She is aware that others dub her as ‘ugly’, and believes she is

Claudia and Frieda are Pecola’s friends who feel bad for her unlike the rest of the neighborhood when they find out her father impregnated her. They do many sacrifices over the summer believing that that’s what will help Pecola’s baby live. Their sacrifices go to waste when the baby is born and dies prematurely. Cholly rapes Pecola a second time, runs away, and dies in a workhouse. Pecola goes mad, believing her wish has been fulfilled and she has the bluest of blue eyes.

measures up to the years of hurtful mockery. He took away from her the one

Pecola evaluated herself ugly, and wanted to have a pair of blue eyes so that every problem could be solved. Pecola was an African-American and lived in a family with problems. Her father ran away because of crime, her brother left because of their fighting parents, and was discriminated simply because she has dark-skin. Pecola is a passive person. She is almost destroyed because of her violent father, Cholly Breedlove, who raped her own daughter after drinking. Because of this, Pecola kept thinking about her goal- to reach the standard of beauty. However, she was never satisfied with it. Pecola believed once she become beautiful, fighting between her parents would no longer happen, her brother would come back, and her father would no long be a rapist. No problem would exist anymore.

Fulfillment of a wish may be even more tragic than the wish impulse itself, the wish to see things as differently as one wants to be seen. The connection between how one is seen and what one sees has a uniquely tragic outcome for Pecola. She is a symbol of the black community’s self-hatred and belief in their own ugliness. Because she is black she may have a chance at being loved, but because she is a scapegoat and must carry all of their problems, she destroys herself and can redeem no chance at being loved. Her ugliness makes them feel beautiful. Her suffering makes them feel lucky. Her internalization of their self-hatred being forced upon her pushes her to the brink of insanity. Forced furthur and furthur into her fantasy world, which is her only defense against the pain, Pecola uses that pain to escape reality and make herself disappear. She goes mad believing that her wish has been granted and she has blue eyes, but her fate is far worse than death as she is offered no release. Pecola’s wandering at the edge of town haunts the community, reminding them of the ugliness and hatred they’ve tried to

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.

With some background knowledge on Pauline, the mother of Pecola, it’s easier to understand some of Pecola's core traits. There are parallelisms between Pecola and Pauline. They find their reality too harsh to deal with, so they become fixated on one thing that makes them happy, and they ignore everything else. Pecola's desire for blue eyes is more of an inheritance that she received from her mother. One of Pauline’s own obsessions was back when she was fascinated with the world of the big pictures. As long as they can believe in their fantasies, they're willing to sacrifice anything else.

The story begins with the description of Pecola's family:"they live in a storefront because they were poor and black and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly" (Morrison 38). Unfortunately, Pecola's feelings of ugliness are reinforced by her own parents; her father Cholly’s ugliness came from his " despair, dissipation, and violence directed toward pretty things and weak people" (Morrison 38). Pecola's Mother Pauline states that "But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly" (Morrison 126). Pecola was doomed to a life of self-doubt and shame of who she is. Pauline and Cholly love each other