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.

Toni Morrison, the author of The Bluest Eye, centers her novel around two things: beauty and wealth in their relation to race and a brutal rape of a young girl by her father. Morrison explores and exposes these themes in relation to the underlying factors of black society: racism and sexism. Every character has a problem to deal with and it involves racism and/or sexism. Whether the characters are the victim or the aggressor, they can do nothing about their problem or condition, especially when concerning gender and race. Morrison's characters are clearly at the mercy of preconceived notions maintained by society. Because of these preconceived notions, the racism found in The Bluest Eye is not whites against blacks. Morrison writes about

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

Throughout all of history there has been an ideal beauty that most have tried to obtain. But what if that beauty was impossible to grasp because something was holding one back. There was nothing one could do to be ‘beautiful’. Growing up and being convinced that one was ugly, useless, and dirty. For Pecola Breedlove, this state of longing was reality. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and pale white skin was the definition of beauty. Pecola was a black girl with the dream to be beautiful. Toni Morrison takes the reader into the life of a young girl through Morrison’s exceptional novel, The Bluest Eye. The novel displays the battles that Pecola struggles with each and every day. Morrison takes the reader through the themes of whiteness and beauty,

“The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, is a story about the life of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who is growing up during post World War I. She prays for the bluest eyes, which will “make her beautiful” and in turn make her accepted by her family and peers. The major issue in the book, the idea of ugliness, was the belief that “blackness” was not valuable or beautiful. This view, handed down to them at birth, was a cultural hindrance to the black race.

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.

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.

In the novel The Bluest Eye, author Toni Morrison uses the internalization of beauty standards and its effect on characters’ social interactions with the community to reveal society’s assumption that appearance is the decisive factor in determining one’s status and critique its detrimental effect on one’s personal identity.

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.

In Toni Morrison’s novel, “The Bluest Eye”, a character named Pecola Breedlove had always been wishing to have blue eyes, because it was considered as pretty in the novel’s world. Also, a lighter skins African American, Maureen Peal, bullied the Pecola, who have darker skin, because Maureen Peal thinks herself is cute while Pecola is ugly. Similarly, Pecola always thought of herself in a negative way, in which, she calls herself ugly. On the other hand, Maureen Peal, think highly of herself, because she came from a wealthier family and more people like her. Furthermore, Pecola did not have an easy life due to all those hardships that she had to come across through her life. Morrison’s novel shows a contrast between the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant world and the world the characters of the novel live in by showing us how the characters in the novel are not living a good life and they get treated differently because of their skin color, and they are in a lower class than the others. Also, the kids are being neglected by their parents and there are child molestation in the family. I think today’s world is slowing changing but still has some similar divisions, because there is still racism out there. However, people are starting to stand up for themselves and appreciate their own culture and ethnicity more in today’s world.

The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison is a short novel that revolves around a young girl named Pecola Breedlove who is a victim to incest and rape by her own father Cholly. In the town Lorain, Ohio Pecola becomes friends with a young nine year old girl named Claudia MacTeer and her ten year old sister Frieda. The MacTeer family takes in Pecola Breedlove when her father Cholly attempts to burn her house down and hits her mother, Pauline. Pecola is described as a quiet and soft spoken. Her life at home is difficult because of the domestic violence and her father’s abuse of alcohol. Pecola is under the impression that if she were prettier her parents would be nicer to each other. She equalizes beauty with whiteness. She begins to pray for a pair of pretty blue eyes so the world can view her differently and change the way she sees the world. Soon after Pecola returns home she gets raped. The town soon finds out after Pecola becomes pregnant and although everyone in town wants the baby dead, Claudia and Frieda hope the baby lives. Pauline and Pecola pickup and move after Pecola loses the baby and starts to lose her sanity. In the end Pecola sees a psychic to obtain the blue eyes and she really believes he gave her blue eyes. The major theme in this novel outside of incest is how race is perceived in the eyes of young girls and how it is associated with beauty and purity. Among the theme of race are love, sex, innocence, and the roles of black women. Race to Pecola revolved around

Steve Maraboli- a speaker, bestselling author, and Behavioral Science Academic- wrote “there is nothing more rare, nor more beautiful, than a woman being unapologetically herself; comfortable in her perfect imperfection. To me, that is the true essence of beauty.” This is true, however, it exists very rarely in our society. Women are not accepting of their imperfections and glorify them, instead they hide them to unify under society’s standards of beauty. Over the course of our history, women have been victims of society’s ideals. Society forces false images of beauty and love onto women, forcing them to have fictitious notions of what happiness is and how to be happy. This can be seen in both Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

Toni Morrison is known for her prized works exploring themes and issues that are rampant in African American communities. Viewing Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye from a psychoanalytical lens sheds light onto how, as members of a marginalized group, character’s low self-esteem reflect into their actions, desires, and defense mechanisms.

In 1940s America, superiority was deemed on the scale of black/whiteness. Specifically, white people were positioned at the upper part of the hierarchy, whereas, African Americans were inferior. Consequently, white people were able to control and dictate to the standards of beauty. In her novel, ‘The Bluest Eye’, Toni Morrison draws upon symbolism, narrative voice, setting and ideals of the time to expose the effects these standards had on the different characters. With the juxtaposition of Claudia MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove, who naively conforms to the barrier of social classes, we are able to understand how African American’s in 1940’s America, specifically Ohio, had to adapt to the white ideals/standards of beauty, which subsequently caused self-hatred. Morrison’s novel explores an array of African American characters, who encounter these barriers in several different ways. Through these characters, Morrison’s distortion of the popular ‘Dick and Jane’ books and other texts including ‘Playing in the Dark’, also by Toni Morrison, I will verify the large degree of beauty ideals implicated throughout the novel.

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