The Bluest Eye Identity Essay

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison strongly ties the contents of her novel to its structure and style through the presentation of chapter titles, dialogue, and the use of changing narrators. These structural assets highlight details and themes of the novel while eliciting strong responses and interpretations from readers. The structure of the novel also allows for creative and powerful presentations of information. Morrison is clever in her style, forcing readers to think deeply about the novel’s heavy content without using the structure to allow for vagueness.

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.

In the book "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison in chapter one "Autumn" it demonstrates how the character Claudia loathes a specific kind of dolls. In this chapter I will concentrate in on Christmas. Claudia did not ask what she needed as a present for Christmas. She was given a doll as a christmas present. Claudia detests the white doll that is given to her.

She believes that the “ideal” woman is a great wife and mother, can cook, clean and still has time to exercise while she maintains her beautiful appearance, is young, and is not crippled. As she compares the lives, she views many flaws with hers. Due to MS, her body image has changed which drives her at times to hate herself. While glancing in a mirror she is repulsed by her "abnormal" gait. However, as she has aged, she regrets thinking about how her appearance is not ideal and came to a conclusion that "the self-loathing I feel is neither physically nor intellectually substantial.

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,

In the novel, The Bluest Eyes, the author Toni Morrison informs us of the many things that are going on in the time period of the 1940's. The novel describes various things such as; race, abuse, self hatred, rape, etc. The story The Bluest eyes is a novel, with the setting of the time period of the ending of The Great Depression. These were hard times for African Americans. In this analysis I will be going more in dept of self hatred of one of the main characters by the name of Pecola.

Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eyes is about a young adolescent girl named Pecola who made no attempt to fight back against those who mocked her or damaged her body and mentality. Pecola’s peculiarness caused the people around her to become aware of her difference, which made them hate her for the ugliness that reflected in themselves. My opinion of this novel is that Morrison inserted a society where they used Pecola as a punching bag, and a scapegoat to illuminate the superficialness of perceived beauty in the novel. I think Morrison was trying to highlight how beauty and love can go hand-in-hand; but the two factors can be destructive as well if one has neither of them. If someone is beautiful, then they will be loved more than a less beautiful person---Pecola is considered “ugly” and she wants to look like talented and beautiful Shirley Temple who is an idol among society. Pecola’s life was also lacking love as it did beauty---her household had no time for affection, and her parents were bitter and engrossed in their own reality. The lack of love and lack of beauty hurt Pecola along with the mockery and damage she received from society caused her to isolate herself by becoming insane so she could not be hurt ever again.

In Toni Morrison’s, The Bluest Eye Pecola Breedlove’s life is told through the perspectives of her peers and acquaintances which portray her as a poor, unfortunate, and ugly black child. She goes about her life being beaten down at every opportunity, almost literally, and her singular wish for blue eyes signifies her silent plea for a life better than the one she’s currently living. Pecola exists in her life like a doormat, to be stepped on, soiled and lost in the demented world that criticizes and dehumanizes her. Pecola Breedlove’s search for justice begins and ends with her singular wish for eyes she believed would make the world view her differently, a wish that represents her innocence as well as her knowledge of the cold reality of social

Rosemary was a relatively short 14 year old. She wasn’t the smallest in her class, but she definitely was not the tallest. Her bright blue eyes matched perfectly with her long, flowing brown hair. She had the tips of her hair dyed dirty blonde two and a half years ago and since then she could not go back. Rosemary loved her hair. Her favorite outfit to wear is a ocean blue t-shirt with a line of aztec patterns on the bottom with a black simple pair of leggings. Her least favorite part of her outfit was her braces on all of her teeth, she had adapted to this problem of her by smiling without showing her teeth. Nevertheless, Rosemary was a truly beautiful girl.

Do you know what she came for? Blue eyes. New, blue eyes, She said. Like she was buying shoes. "I'd like a pair of new blue eyes." (Morrison) What would you expect from a girl trying to fit it in a society that has inconsiderable beauty standards most of which she does not poses? Toni Morrison tells a tragic tale of a black girl Pecola Breedlove living in a white-dominated society in the period after the great depression. Pecola innocently longs to be accepted in this world. However, she is subject to scrutiny on every possible instance even from her own family. The poor girl has to cope with verbal and physical abuse both at home and in school. Often, she was the center of rude jokes concerning her dark skin among her peers. Worse still, her father molested her severally and impregnated her. Despite the intense rejection, Pecola believed that a pair of blue eyes would change her destiny. This paper will draw a literary analysis to examine how the Toni Morrison uses themes, motif, and symbols to enhance the plot and build on the perception of race and beauty in the book "The Bluest Eyes."

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

On the one hand, if an individual, and by extent, its community is influenced by these discourses, the community will loose its identity, its self-acceptance and, as a consequence, it will hate itself for not having the characteristics that the discourses defend. However, on the other hand, if an individual, and by extent, its community, is able to overtake those discourses, its identity will not be modified by those discourses, and therefore, the individual as the community will love, accept and acknowledge their true self. With this novel, Morrison tries to make aware the reader that stereotypes and racial discourses do not give space for multiplicity nor ethnicity; and as they are social constructions, they can be deconstructed. To sum up, the novel is an example of the African American community’s quest to fully overthrow the oppressive discourses that do not allow the acknowledgment and realization of their

A Search For A Self Finding a self-identity is often a sign of maturing and growing up. This becomes the main issue in novel The Bluest Eyes. Pecola Breedlove, Cholly Breedlove, and Pauline Breedlove are the characters that search for their identity through others that has influenced them and by the lifestyles that they have. First, Pecola Breedlove struggles to get accepted into society dued to the beauty factor that the normal people have. Cholly Breedlove, her father, is a drunk who has problems that he takes out of Pecola sexually and Pauline physically. Pauline is Cholly’s wife that is never there for her daughters.

In The Bluest Eye, adult Black women and children have learned to dislike their blackness. The person who experiences the most from white beauty standards is Pecola. Mrs. Breedlove is convinced that her own daughter, Pecola, is ugly and she is not afraid to share this thought especially with Pecola. When Pecola was born Mrs. Breedlove (Pauline) describes her as ugly, so Pecola was bound to have these feeling. Pecola’s mother brought her own sense of ugliness onto Pecola. Pecola believes that if she possessed blue eyes, she will gain respect and affection. In the article, “Tragedy of the self-splitting—A psychological reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye”by Yang Ding and Xiangguo Kong, they state, “[s]he [Pecola] is more of a victim to the dominant white mainstream culture. During her short life, she never has any opportunity to have a taste of

     In the novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison incorporates various techniques, such as her use of metaphors, the ironic use of names, and the visual images that she uses. The theme of The Bluest Eye, revolves around African Americans’ conformity to white standards. A woman may whiten her skin, straighten her hair and change its color, but she can not change the color of her eyes. The desire to transform one’s identity, itself becomes an inverted desire, becomes the desire for blues eye, which is the symptom of Pecola’s instability.