Research Paper On Pecola

“The Bluest Eye” is taking place around 1940 in Lorain, Ohio. During the year of 1940, discrimination, especially toward African Americans, was still a serious problem. People believe that whiteness is the standard of beauty. The main character, Pecola, who was a nine-years-old African-American, was influenced by how people view beauty. Pecola suffered and felt that she is inferior to others. Pecola believed that having a pair of blue eyes would made people think she is pretty, and would be the key resolving all the problems.

Pauline Breedlove, Pecola's mother, experiences racism within the black community when she moves to Lorain, Ohio. Being a dark-skinned black woman from the south, she does not understand why "northern colored folk was different... [and why they were] no better than whites for meanness" (117). She recognizes the hierarchy, or the "difference between colored people and niggers" within the black community, especially from the light-skinned women she encounters (87). One of these light-skinned black women is Geraldine, Junior's mother, who believes "colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud" (87). She even tells her son

Throughout Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye, she captures, with vivid insight, the plight of a young African American girl and what she would be subjected to in a media contrived society that places its ideal of beauty on the e quintessential blue-eyed, blonde woman. The idea of what is beautiful has been stereotyped in the mass media since the beginning and creates a mental and emotional damage to self and soul. This oppression to the soul creates a socio-economic displacement causing a cycle of dysfunction and abuses. Morrison takes us through the agonizing story of just such a young girl, Pecola Breedlove, and her aching desire to have what is considered beautiful - blue eyes. Racial stereotypes of beauty contrived and nourished by

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.

Women now and from the past are a part of one of the most tedious battles that needs to end with the use of common sense. Some males have the tendency to think that they have unlimited power and that nothing is going to stop them from trying to harass their partners, or other women. An example of this harsh reality goes to the written book by Toni Morrison, dubbed ‘The Bluest Eye’, following behind its movie counterpart. The MacTeer family took Mr.Henry (a boarder) and a young girl named Pecola under their wing after the suffering of the Great Depression. The two sisters – Frieda and Claudia – met with Pecola’s admiration of Shirley Temple, whom she believed Shirley’s whiteness is considered captivating while her black skin tone is considered a disgrace. Pecola confesses of her home life being rather difficult since her father, Cholly, abuses the use of alcohol and constantly fights with his wife.

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.

Through the character of Pecola Breedlove, Toni Morrison illustrates that society has caused black people to lose their self-esteem and feel inferior to white people. All her life, Pecola is vulnerable to the messages society carries about black people because of who she is: a black girl in her youth. The narrator, Claudia (as an adult) described Pecola as the person that everyone compared themselves to in order to feel better about themselves. “Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor.” (p. 205) Society had made black people feel less superior than white people, and as a result, the people in Pecola’s life used Pecola as a scapegoat. And

Breedlove so mad that she backhands her and knocks Pecola down to the floor. They told her about Marie in which Pecola defended her. While Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia were talking, a young white girl appears and seems startled to see them. She asked for “Polly” and that made Claudia mad because no one calls her by that name since Pecola must call her mother Mrs. Breedlove. As Pecola and Mrs. MacTeer exits the house in shame they heard the white girl crying and Mrs. Breedlove complaining. Mrs. Breedlove told the little pink-and-yellow girl, “Hush, don’t worry none” (109) because she doesn’t need to know what’s going on in finding out how abusive she really is. Pecola being Pauline biological daughter is being treated rough and bitter because she can’t forgive her for being pregnant by her husband. She is more

In the song Runaway love explains the lies and struggles young black females encounter every day. In the bluest eye Toni Morrison details on how Pecola always held in her problems with her father because of the misleading of her own mother, “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.” She made herself believe of having those blue eyes would have changed her life for better, but because she was gifted with blue eye because she is black, Pecola says she is nothing but ugly. Claudia grapples with the hate for Shirley Temple. “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.” To others it would be no big deal, it was his job to dance with Temple, not to Claudia though. And poor insecure Frieda demanded to fill like she had to play everyone’s mother because she was the oldest of both, Pecola and Claudia. Always trying to give off love and embraces the girls to feel beautiful, for she thought of her self as a ugly black girl as

Toni Morrison, the author of The Bluest Eye writes about the wealth and beauty of the young girls and how racism and brutal rape happens to Pecola. The racism that is shown in the book, isn't whites against blacks, it’s light colored blacks against dark colored ones. White people with blue eyes were classified as beauty and the girls were ugly because they didn’t have blue eyes. Pecola Breedlove moved in with the MacTeers due to her father trying to burn the house that they lived in down. The house wasn’t really even a house it was more like a store that they were living in, big enough for the Breedlove family.

In The Bluest Eye, Morrison explores the vitriolic relationship between the protagonist, Pecola Breedlove and her mother, Pauline Breedlove. Due to Pauline’s belief of white superiority, Pecola’s susceptibility to hatred and malice is expressed through her ‘blackness’ and ‘ugliness’. Pauline’s opinion of her daughter is shown when she says ‘Head full of pretty hair but Lord she was ugly.’ The utilisation of antithesis emphasises Mrs Breedlove’s honest judgement of her daughter. Despite, Pauline’s uncaring nature towards her daughter, she is capable of nurturing and loving a child, demonstrated through her kindness towards the white Fisher child, ‘we could hear Mrs Breedlove hushing and soothing the tears of the little pink-and-yellow girl.’

In the novel, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison introduces the reader to both mother and daughter; Pauline and Pecola. Both mother and daughter experience abuse and neglect; Pecola prays for a different trait and her mother Pauline selfishly keeps the beauty of her work to herself because of a nickname given to her. With a name, an identity is from, and with eyes, assumptions take form. Christiane Toledo Maria article shows key points of Toni Morrison’s novel and helps connect the reader with what is going on in the novel and Constance Whites article explains how Toni Morrison’s novel is a universal topic. Toni Morrison starts us with a pessimistic opening of the novel, but once the reader delves into the pages, the feeling of pessimism turns

Even though it has been more than half a century since the time setting of The Bluest Eye, children like Claudia are still to some degree forced to deal with the constant pressure of white culture – its beauty standards, lack of representation, and its bigoted norms dictating whiteness as something to be desired even by people of colour. It is no wonder that some like Pecola Breedlove might even crumble under such an enormous pressure. Claudia however, has not yet reached the age of succumbing to the indoctrination of the white beauty myth; she has not yet accepted its truths as her own and for now, she is still just a curious child not understanding what all the fuss is about. Why was she expected to love and care for such an alien ugly thing? Why was she supposed to treasure this unwanted Christmas gift?

Pecola Breedlove is a young girl growing up black and poor in the early 1940s. She is repeatedly called "ugly" by nearly everyone in her life, from the mean kids at school to her own mother. This constant criticism, the relentless bullying she gets at school, and her rough family life (her parents are always fighting, both verbally and physically) lead Pecola to seek escape from her misery by fantasizing about becoming more beautiful. Pecola begins to believe that if she could just achieve physical beauty, her life would automatically improve. This false belief turns out to be utterly destructive to Pecola, consuming her whole life and, eventually, her sanity. Pecola is a young African American girl, born to Cholly and Pauline Breedlove. She has a brother and her family lives in a small house on the edge of town. Pecola's father was an alcoholic and he abused his wife and Pecola, both physically and sexually. Pecola is not beautiful and she wishes for nothing more than blond hair and blue eyes. She prays everyday to God to make her beautiful. The character's inner struggle is self-confidence because she believes she is ugly. Pecola is quiet, shy, and introverted due to her low self-esteem level. There’s something that I am not in accordance with Pecola and that is that she lets the negativity from other people get to her. The idea of her thinking that she is ugly creates results from her isolation from friends, the community, and even her family. There are three stages

This novel also demonstrates how centuries of cultural mutilation of Black people in America leads to a psychological oppression and subjugation. Self-proclaimed inferiority operated in the Blacks of America and they could not break their minds free from the shackles of racial inferiority. It became a culturally imposed racism for them. Their blackness implied their inferiority to the Whites in America. Similarly, the Breedlove family also accepts the hollow notion of whiteness and consequently experiences its damaging outcomes. In Pecola, there operates a growing self-loathing. Through her character, Morrison attempts to paint a more complicated and deeper portrayal of the effects of racism via how self-loathing eclipses the minds of Black people. Breedlove family was said to be ugly –