The Bluest Eye

Women. When hearing that word alone, you think of weakness, their insignificance, and how lowly they are viewed in society. Females can be seen as unworthy or nothing without a man if they are not advocating them and are constantly being treated differently from men. However, in the book, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, they live up to their reputations for how they view themselves. Specifically, being focused on women like Pecola, and Claudia. They are often questioning their worth from society’s judgement of beauty. Though one character, Frieda embraces it despite being black. With having everything temporary, the desire of grasping and having something permanent increases. The women desires to be of

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

“Cholly was free. Dangerously Free. Feel to free whatever he felt---fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free to knock her [a woman] in the head…free to live his fantasies, and free even to die…Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose. He was alone with his own perceptions and appetites, and they alone interested him.” [This quote shows the catharsis Cholly Breedlove’s peers and the readers have towards him. Although Cholly is an impulsive character who is abusive towards his wife and daughter, the people surrounding him and the readers would have a difficult time hating him because of his past. Cholly has been through numerous situations in his life where he has been tormented, so for that reason, every harsh thing he has done in his life is acceptable and his tragic past is the one to be blamed for.] (159)

After she meets Pecola, her concerns go to Pecola. She explains about each and every incident that occurs to Pecola and the reasons behind leading to those incidents. According to Claudia, the narrator of the story, not just Pecola but it was the Breedlove family members who treated themselves the uglier rather than the society. Only the difference is that they make a different mindset deal with it. The narrator vividly mentions by saying, “Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction/And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it” (Morrison 39). This explains more of what they were dealing with. It is impossible to make them believe that they aren’t relentlessly and aggressively ugly (38). Being young, vulnerable and more importantly, female, Pecola is the one who gets abused frequently and endures the damage in greater

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.

Racist ideology is institutionalized when how people’s interactions reflects on an understanding that they share the same beliefs. However, in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, the topic of racism is approached in a very unique way. The characters within the novel are subjected to internalizing a set of beliefs that are extremely fragmented. In accepting white standards of beauty, the community compromises their children’s upbringing, their economic means, and social standings. Proving furthermore that the novel has more to do with these factors than actual ethnicity at all.

Johnny and Dally grew up with abusive parents who play little to no attention to them. Johnny’s father has abused him his whole life and his mother payed little attention to him;“his father was always beating him up,and his mother ignored him except when she was hacked off at something, and then you could hear her yelling at him clear down at are house.” (. Perhaps, if Johnny’s parents payed attention to him he would not be living on the streets and get in trouble so much. Similarly Dally’s father payed little attention to him. Dally tells Johnny “‘ shoot, my old man don’t give a hang whether, I’m in jail dead in a car wreck, or drunk in the gutter.”’(88). If Dally's parents cared or payed attention to him he

Despite Kingston not even knowing her aunt’s name, she feels she has a connection to her. Kingston thinks about her aunt’s life and how she became pregnant. At first, Kingston blames the pregnancy on the aunt. She explains that the aunt took time when getting ready and cared about her appearance, which was unusual for Chinese women after they have been married. Kingston describes, “Once my aunt found a freckle on her chin… She dug it out with a hot needle and washed the wound with peroxide” (Kingston 328). This leads Kingston to believe that the aunt had an affair. However, Kingston later believes that her aunt was possibly raped. When describing her aunt’s marriage Kingston writes, “ When the family found a young man in the next village to be her husband, she stood tractable beside the best rooster, his proxy, and promised before they met that she would his forever” (Kingston 326). Chinese women were obedient. Kingston thinks that there could not be the possibility that her aunt cheated on her husband because she was a dutiful wife. Sympathizing with the aunt, Kingston writes, “ I want her fear to have lasted as long as rape lasted so that the fear could have been contained” (Kingston 326). She reflects on how horrible it must have been living in such a small community with her rapist.

Johnny and Dally are both brought up with abusive and neglectful parents. At the age of ten, Dally is arrested in New York. It is inferred that Dally despises his parents based on the fact that he never mentions his mother, and only mentions

The suspense in this story is the death of the narrator’s daughter, Gracie. That is why she becomes the reason to remember how family ties are important. The central character of the story is the narrator. The conflict of the story is that the narrator’s brother, Sonny, is in jail for taking and selling heroin (Baldwin, 489). The narrator displays his brother Sonny, who is also antagonist of the

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.

After his great aunt's death, he is humiliated by two white men while having his first sexual encounter with Darlene. They force him to continue having sex with her while they watch and laugh. He couldn't strike back at the white men because, "such an emotion would have destroyed him" (150), he bottled up his emotions and transferred them to his hatred of women in general. The reader could feel and understand Cholly's description of the emotions running through his head when he describes the incident a day after. He could not save Darlene from the taunting and laughs of the white men, and therefore was resigned to loathing her, hating "the one who had created the situation, the one who bore witness to his failure, his impotence" (151).

Cholly Breedlove grew up in a loveless environment where he was abandoned and left on a junk heap by his own mother. As a child he never knew his father, meeting him only when he was fourteen. His father never cared about him. Cholly was raised by a great aunt who loved him but, he did not respect her. Cholly quit school and went to work at a grain store where he met Blue, a kindly older man who was a father figure to him. For the first time in his life, Cholly felt the love of a father. Soon after his great aunt died just as Cholly was coming into puberty. At her funeral he met a young woman named Darlene, whom he had his first sexual experience. However it wasn't a pleasurable experience because two white men found them and forced them to

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 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.