The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

Food and appetite is a relatable experience for everyone. Many believe food is strictly just for enjoying while you eat, however within Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eyes” she makes many distinct references to food. Through these means, she creates each individual personality of the characters. She goes on to use this association for most food references within her novel. The result enables the reader to have a more relatable experience with each of her characters regardless of color. Overall, these food and appetites references allow the reader to have a more hands-on approach and bring about a greater understanding of her character 's mentality while helping to disregard racial associations.

Self-hatred is something that can thoroughly destroy an individual. As it was fictitiously evidenced in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, it can lead an individual to insanity. Toni Morrison raises the idea that racism and class can detrimentally influence people’s outlook on themselves.

In the novel, “The Bluest Eye,” by Toni Morrison the unorthodox structure and undermining content inspired and continues to inspire controversy. Morrison’s creative narrative approach addresses many issues of racism and identity. Through the course of the novel some vulgar subjects are also introduced, such as incest and pedophilia. In the book the point of view founded by the characters following their upsetting lives helps portray the theme of battling internal conflicts formed through extended metaphors and horrible societal circumstances.

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses the oppression of blacks and the praising of whites to demonstrate the unjustified power and influence of the dominant individuals. Within American society, the dominant races rise to power and exert their influence by building an environment that worships whiteness and devalues blackness, creating powerless and powerful communities.

In the novel The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison confirms the existence of racism within the African American community. Unbelievably, many African Americans suffer from what is termed internalized racism. Internalized racism produces the same effect as racial racism: feelings of worthlessness, inferiority, and unattractiveness. In addition, the effect can produce the opposite feelings: superiority, hatred, and feelings of self-worth. Pecola, an 11-year-old black girl, desires to have the physical characteristics of a white person, namely blue eyes. Polly, Pecola’s mother, prefers the white culture living rather than her own. The feelings that the black race experience stem from the programming of a racist society to think that the white race is better. As a result, African Americans long to be white or look white. This consumption of whiteness represents internalized racism.

The Bluest Eyes is a masterfully told narrative on the lives of African Americans in the 1940’s; Toni Morrison examines both the social system and mentality of the racism by using both children perspectives and childhood flashbacks to invoke a feeling of sympathy for the characters in the novel. Morrison novel attempts to demystify the underlying culture problems black women face in segregated culture. Instead of attempting to analyze all the facets; instead, Morrison’s uses the simplistic and unbiased perspective of children to elucidate African American culture. Children perceive events through an unclouded lens; this allows the reader a glimpse into a world that they would be isolated from by adult narrator.

Pecola Breedlove is one of the main characters in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eyes. Pecola is a young black girl growing up in the 1940s, in northern Ohio, a dominantly white world. She idolizes the young, white movie actress Shirley Temple and wants to be like her. Pecola never realizes how unattainable this dream is and the hardships she faces makes it even more impossible. Some of the hardships Pecola faces in her life include being bullied at school, an unstable home life, and the feeling of ugliness. Pecola is constantly called ugly by classmates, strangers, and even her own mother. She has been called ugly so much she believes that she is truly ugly but, Pecola thinks if she had blue eyes then all of her problems would be solved. She would be pretty if she had blue eyes. People would not make fun of her and call her ugly if she had blue eyes. Blue eyes may even be able to prevent her parents from fighting so vigorously. She believes blue eyes are the solution to all of her problems. However, blue eyes are metaphor for something much more powerful than a genetic trait, love.

The novel, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, reveals thetragedy of beauty in society and its role in African-American segregation from white culture. Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist of the novel, is an eleven-year-old girl who, like the rest of her black community, has adopted the belief the whiteness was the standard of beauty. In this world contaminated ofdamagingwhite values, Pecola desiresblue eyes, believing that they would bring her beauty, love and social acceptance, and thereby allowing her to transcend her miserable situation of abuse from her family and community. However, Pecola’shopes of achieving this aspiration fall apart when her fatherrapes and impregnates her. This calamity forces her further into an imaginary world that shields

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison brings to light the often unrecognized struggle that many people in the black community face. She exposes the “whitewashing” that has been prevalent in society for decades and the societal imposition of impossible beauty standards. Morrison uses the book to show us the psychological tolls on children and adults that stem from these unattainable goals. Children, like Pecola Breedlove, are so indoctrinated by society and the quest for superficial “perfection” that they lose sight of what truly matters. Those desires for superficial superiority even carry over into adulthood, as seen by Mrs. Breedlove’s “skin deep values.” The Bluest Eye even shows that anyone and everyone is affected by the desire to become perfect; even the Maurine Peals of the world have their own insecurities.

“Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is a novel about racism, yet there are relatively few instances of direct oppression. The Bluest Eye presents a more complicated portrait of racism. The characters are subject to an internalized set of values, which creates its own cycle of victimization. Morrison’s novel highlights how cultural ideals based on skin colour and physical features function as tools of racial oppression. For all races and for all individuals, it is critical to fully understand how society influences our values and beliefs. The focal character, Pecola, is victimized by a society that conditions her to believe that she is ugly and therefore worthless, because she doesn’t epitomize white

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, presents the reader with some of the strong racial imbalances present in the African American communities in the United States. The novel, The Bluest Eye, addresses many themes such as, feminism, rape culture, repetition in rupture, abjection, oppression, racism and the innocence of youth (Morrison 1970). The evident issue in the novel is the way that the African American people oppress not only themselves but others, to the standards of the white American standards of things such as beauty. The characters, Pecola and Pauline, are the major characters in the novel and are, as written by Morrison (1970), the ciphers of the way African Americans treated each-other and themselves in a time of racial oppression

“No one believed that a black African could write a good book” (Satwase). In the Bluest Eye Toni Morrison uses wrong and discomfort to show the crushing consequences that come from racism. In 1950 America, racial discrimination was implied by different skin colors. The Bluest Eye shows ways in which white beauty standards hurt lives of black females, blacks that discriminate on each other and the community’s bias on who you were. Toni Morrison uses the racism of the 1950 's and shows that "It is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes". Characters that faced uncomfortable racism include Claudia MacTeer, Pecola Breedlove, and Geraldine.

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison weaves stories of violation and hardship to examine the ugliness that racism produces. In this novel, the childhood icons of white culture are negative representations instrumental in engendering internalized racism. For the black child in a racist, white culture, these icons are never innocent. Embodying the ideals of white beauty, they expose the basis for Claudia's bewilderment at why she is not attractive and Pecola's desperate desire for beauty. They nourish neither innocent desire, nor the need for acceptance, but denigrate the very idea of blackness. The worship of ideal white beauty, by adults as well as by children, coalesces into a

Unlike so many pieces of American literature that involve and examine the history of slavery and the years of intensely-entrenched racism that ensued, the overall plot of the novel, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, does not necessarily involve slavery directly, but rather examines the aftermath by delving into African-American self-hatred. Nearly all of the main characters in The Bluest Eye who are African American are dominated with the endless culturally-imposed concepts of white beauty and cleanness to an extent where the characters have a destructive way of latently acting out their own feelings of self-hatred on others, especially other African-Americans.

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