Pecola Chapter 3 Analysis

In the course of The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove has shown signs of low self esteem. She would always be the one to compare herself to something she admires to be beautiful. Perhaps, sometimes problems surround her get a little too much, she has not yet realized the fog will clear up. For example in the autumn chapter, a quote has said “Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would only see what there was to see: the eyes of other people.” There is no such thing as a “Pecola’s point of view”. She lives off of people's judgements and believe physical appearance is all there is to a person. Her desire to be beautiful is not having attractive long black hair and golden skin color, but blonde hair with a white pigmentation. Which causes her to dream and want even more.

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.

She thought that if she had blue eyes, the blue eyes of the accepted white ideal, she would be beautiful and therefore loved. The acquisition of the blue eyes she so fiercely covets signifies Pecola's step into madness. It was a safe place, where she could have her blue eyes, and where she could be accepted.

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 Bluest Eye tells a tragic story of a young girl named Pecola who desperately wishes for beautiful blue eyes. Pecola believes that the only way she will ever be beautiful is if she has blue eyes. This story takes place in the 1970’s, a time where African Americans were second class citizens in society. They were often exploited and dehumanized because of the way they looked, and this will leave a long lasting effect. Americans would often think that the only way to be beautiful is to have white characteristics like pale skin, blue eyes, and to be very feminine. Racism in the 1970 and in the setting of the Bluest Eye caused self hatred in the black community. The effects of self hatred and racism in the

The desire to feel beautiful has never been more in demand, yet so impossible to achieve. In the book “The Bluest Eye”, the author, Toni Morrison, tells the story of two black families that live during the mid-1900’s. Even though slavery is a thing of the past, discrimination and racism are still a big issue at this time. Through the whole book, characters struggle to feel beautiful and battle the curse of being ugly because of their skin color. Throughout the book Pecola feels ugly and does not like who she is because of her back skin. She believes the only thing that can ever make her beautiful is if she got blue eyes. Frieda, Pecola, Claudia, and other black characters have been taught that the key to being beautiful is by having white skin. So by being black, this makes them automatically ugly. In the final chapter of the book, the need to feel beautiful drives Pecola so crazy that she imagines that she has blue eyes. She thinks that people don’t want to look at her because they are jealous of her beauty, but the truth is they don’t look at her because she is pregnant. From the time these black girls are little, the belief that beauty comes from the color of their skin has been hammered into their mind. Mrs. Breedlove and Geraldine are also affected by the standards of beauty and the impossible goal to look and be accepted by white people. Throughout “The Bluest Eye” Toni Morrison uses the motif of beauty to portray its negative effect on characters.

Pecola’s misery is so complete, so deep, that she convinces herself that her only hope for a better life rests in changing her eye color. Even more pathetically, "Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes … Although somewhat discouraged, she was not without hope" (Morrison 46). Pecola was doubly tragic in that she placed all her hope in something which could never really happen and, despite her earnest belief, change nothing if it did.

Pecola Breedlove is young black girl who believes she is ugly and longs for blue eyes. She believes the blue eyes that she adores on Shirley Temple are central to attaining beauty which will bring love and joy to her life. She believes this beauty and love will end the incessant fighting between

Life at the periphery: The Bluest Eye, Vanitha P, mentions how Pecola sat for long hours looking in the mirror, “trying to discover the secret of the ugliness”. Pecola thinks she has did something wrong and sees that everyone in her eyes thinks she ugly. But it comes from her family thinking that they all were ugly. Pecola emotional thinks getting these blue eyes would not just help her look pretty but see a different prospective of what she sees and what people would see in her. With her seating in the mirror for hours trying to find the secret of ugly is to show what the world has treated her like.

The novel The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison is subjected on a young girl, Pecola Breedlove and her experiences growing up in a poor black family. The life depicted is one of poverty, ridicule, and dissatisfaction of self. Pecola feels ugly because of her social status as a poor young black girl and longs to have blue eyes, the pinnacle of beauty and worth. Throughout the book, Morrison touches on controversial subjects, such as the depicting of Pecola's father raping her, Mrs. Breedlove's sexual feelings toward her husband, and Pecola's menstruation. The book's content is controversial on many levels and it has bred conflict among its readers.

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

At the bottom of page 190 of, “The Bluest Eye”, Pecola Breedlove’s pregnancy is pondered by the narrator, Claudia, who is sympathetic to Pecola, because no one around her wants her baby to live. Pecola and her family are deemed ugly by society and her baby is also thought to be ugly before anyone ever gets a chance to see it. In our world, skin color is still a factor in what makes someone beautiful. Darker skin has been seen as undesirable and Pecola struggles throughout the book with this fact. Claudia challenges these preexisting standards of beauty in this excerpt by not only wanting the child to live but by seeing that it is beautiful, despite not meeting the blonde haired, blue-eyed, fair-skinned image that others see as the only image of true beauty.

Throughout The Bluest Eye, Pecola struggles to find acceptance in a community which neglects her due to lack of beauty. Pecola is a young black girl who feels she cannot live up to ideal standards of femininity and faces abuse from her family. Therefore, these injustices begin to peel away at Pecola’s innocence. Her only refuge is within desire to obtain blue eyes, which she feels will defend her from the aforementioned injustices. However, her whims are never completely fulfilled, indicating that although Pecola searches for solace in ‘better’ appearance, she is never able to regain her innocence in the face of injustice.

Whiteness manifests itself in The Bluest Eye as a symbol of desire or the standard of beauty. Symbols like Shirley Temple and blue eyes reflect society’s social acceptability. Likewise, this negatively effects characters like Pecola who then internalizes whiteness as beauty and her own complexion as ugly similar to the “doll test”. Pecola is also cursed out of Geraldine’s home because of her complexion while she reinforces whiteness as this standard of beauty that is unrealistically obtainable for Pecola and her self-worth. Sula’s depiction of whiteness manifests itself as antagonism to blackness.

The social standards of beauty and the idea of the American Dream in The Bluest Eye leads Mrs. Breedlove to feelings of shame, that she later passes on to Pecola. The Breedloves are surrounded by the idea of perfection, and their absence of it makes them misfits. Mrs. Breedlove works for a white family, the fishers. She enjoys the luxury of her work life and inevitably favors her work over her family. This leads to Pecola struggle to find her identity, in a time where perception is everything. Pecola is challenged by the idea that her mother perferis her work life, that they have an outdated house, and that she does not look like the shirley temple doll with blue eyes.