Essay about The Bluest Eyes

We can sympathize with Cholly when we look at all the dreadful experiences Cholly went through during his life. He couldn’t be a good husband because he never saw his father show love to his mother or show how to care for her. He couldn’t be a good father because he never had a father to set the example for him. All he learned from his parents was lack of love and the feeling of being neglected, and this became normal. Cholly loved Pecola, but didn’t know how to express it because his parents never expressed it to him. Cholly’s, Polly’s, and Pecola’s

However, she becomes the scapegoat or the sacrificial lamb for all the characters, as they too suffer from insanity. In attempting to retain his masculinity, Cholly Breedlove stains his own blood, his own daughter. He was abandoned by his father, degraded by two white men when he had his first sexual encounter, and got many kicks in life. But when alcohol blots out his senses, it also blots out his humanity switch. Pecola grappled by her father was now in ruins. This was a result from the damages of racism and self-hatred. Leaving Pecola bewildered and silenced, depicting the very idea of how women have less rights and are often oppressed. “Dangerously free. Free to feel whatever he felt- fear, guilt, shame, love, grief, pity. Free to be tender or violent, to whistle or weep. Free to sleep in doorways or between the white sheets of a singing woman.” (Morrison, 159). Cholly crossed all boundaries and does whatever he wishes to do. He can sleep with prostitutes, sleep in doorways, quit jobs, spend time in jail, kill three white men, and knock a women in the head. He feels free of all responsibilities and feels freedom for the first time. Cholly’s self-hatred literally enters Pecola as she bears his child, the symbol of his ugliness and hatred. He looks at his daughter with loathe and tenderness but doesn't pick her up and covers her with a blanket. This season shows that Pecola was the dumping ground for the black community’s fears and feelings of unworthiness. She was fully broken and gave up hope in ever achieving the perfect family life. If the mother did not know how to love herself, or the father did not know how to love himself, then it would be impossible for them to teach Pecola how to love herself. They were doing the best they could with what they had been taught as children. Spring

As a child, he was not loved by his mother. She prefered her cat to her own son. Junior saw this at an early age and “spent some happy moments watching it suffer” (86). Junior locked Pecola in a room, becoming the perpetrator with the same turn of attitude as Cholly. When he saw that the cat liked Pecola, he threw the cat, killing it, because the thing his mother loved more than himself loved her. Pecola’s wish could be paralleled to the cat. It had blue eyes, and was loved dearly by someone, which could explain the attention she gave to the cat. Junior even said, “Gimme my cat! (90). Up to this point, he wanted nothing to do with the cat and even tortured it, but with it being the only connection to his mother, he called it his own. Pecola’s dream, or having the same attention as the cat, was killed when the cat was killed. Junior was not loved by his mother, only taken care of to live. She did not “allow her baby, Junior, to cry…[she] did not talk to him, coo to him, or indulge him in kissing bouts” (86). This unlove for her family caused Junior to be victimized, and then alter his ways, and become the perpetrator. Pecola is the victim in the rage of Junior, only because his mother did not love him. She wanted someone to be kind to her, and love her, but that was only met with

In the third chapter of The Bluest Eye, entitled "Autumn", Toni Morrison focuses on Pecola's family, the Breedloves. Morrison goes in depth about the family dynamic of the Breedloves and how it affects Pecola and her self-image. The passage starts after one of many arguments between Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove, Pecola's parents, turns violent. Mrs. Breedlove wants Cholly to fetch some coal from the outside shed. Cholly spent the last night drinking and does not want to get out of bed. The passage begins with the children becoming aware of the argument. Mrs. Breedlove starts to hit him with cooking pans while Cholly mostly used his feet and teeth. After the fight is over Mrs. Breedlove just lets Cholly lie on the ground and she goes about her

Cholly held on to this trauma for years. He was not able to cope with the humiliation of the interruption of his first sexual enter course. He felt powerless in the situation. Vickroy states that, “Traumatized children themselves, they continue the trauma by denying their own weakness in their abuse of parental power, by installing their own fears of impotence, and by calling upon their children to fulfill their own unmet needs” (Vickroy 2). Cholly reflects how he feels on Pecola and ends up abusing her and then raping her. The trauma he faced made him weak in certain situations where he doesn’t have any self-control. Vickroy explains that, “Pecola’s sadness and helplessness and his own inability to make her happy provoke a repetition of the

This can be seen toward the end of the novel, on page 199, where, in a conversation between Pecola and a figure of her thoughts, Morrison reveals that Pecola may have been raped twice. “You said he tried to do it to you when you were sleeping on the couch. ‘See there! You don’t even know what you’re talking about. It was when I was washing dishes,’” reads the exchange. These lines also tell the reader that even with this information, Pecola is still internally unsure of what happened herself. Through internal dialogue, her personal insecurities are projected. Dialogue is key in presenting major ideas in the novel.

When she hears that Pecola has killed her cat, she calls her a “nasty little black bitch” (92) and throws her out of the house. Geraldine never bothers to get the whole story, so does not know that Junior killed the cat and Pecola was innocent. Despite the injustice, Geraldine does not care about what actually happen, but rather jumps at the opportunity to abuse Pecola. As an ugly, poor, black girl. Pecola epitomizes everything that Geraldine hates about herself. Like Soaphead, Geraldine hates everything about being black and she constantly tries to make herself feel more white. Because of this, she “cleans” herself on Pecola by screaming at her and throwing her out. Geraldine divides the population into people like herself and people like Pecola, then, by putting people like Pecola down, she boosts her ego and feels less like a black person.

In the novel “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, Morrison details the life of a young African American girl named Pecola who grows in Lorain, Ohio in the years following the Great Depression. The goal of the book is to explain how and why Cholly Breedlove, Pecola’s father, came to molest his own daughter. An alcoholic and abuser, Cholly's violent and aggressive behavior is a reflection of his troublesome upbringing as a child. While only four days old, Cholyl is abandoned by his parents, leaving him to be brought up by his aunt, Jimmy. Shortly after Aunt Jimmy dies, Cholly's first sexual encounter, at age 14, is ruined when it is interrupted by two white men, who force Cholly to continue while they mockingly watch. Cholly’s gestures of violence

Pecola is first introduced as a foster child coming to live with McTeer family after her father burned down the Breedlove house. She arrives with nothing but the clothes on her back, exhibiting a shy demeanor. The effects of years of abuse and neglect are immediately evident through her interactions with Claudia and Frieda. She is compliant with whatever they do, trying her best not to draw attention to herself: “When we discovered that she clearly did not want to dominate us, we liked her. She laughed when I clowned for her, and smiled and gracefully accepted the food gifts my sister gave her” (Morrison 19). As the three girls stay together, Pecola’s insecurities are unveiled. She is aware that others dub her as ‘ugly’, and believes she is

“Again, the hatred mixed with tenderness. The hatred would not let him pick her up, the tenderness forced him to cover her.” [This quote represents the emotions that flood through Pecola’s father’s head after he rapes her. Prior to and during raping Pecola, Pecola’s father is enraged with many emotions. These emotions include anger, tenderness and l0ve towards Pecola. This is a significant quote in the novel because this is one of the few parts of where Pecola’s father, Cholly’s, character is shown. This quote reveals Cholly’s character because it shows that the events that happened in his

Pecola evaluated herself ugly, and wanted to have a pair of blue eyes so that every problem could be solved. Pecola was an African-American and lived in a family with problems. Her father ran away because of crime, her brother left because of their fighting parents, and was discriminated simply because she has dark-skin. Pecola is a passive person. She is almost destroyed because of her violent father, Cholly Breedlove, who raped her own daughter after drinking. Because of this, Pecola kept thinking about her goal- to reach the standard of beauty. However, she was never satisfied with it. Pecola believed once she become beautiful, fighting between her parents would no longer happen, her brother would come back, and her father would no long be a rapist. No problem would exist anymore.

Pauline eventually meets Cholly, who is Pecola’s biological father, and they fall in love. "He seemed to relish her company and even to enjoy her country ways and lack of knowledge about city things. He talked with her about her foot and asked, when they walked through the town or in the fields, if she were tired. Instead of ignoring her infirmity, pretending it was not there, he made it seem like something special and endearing. For the first time Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset. And he did touch her, firmly but gently, just as she had dreamed. But minus the gloom of setting suns and lonely river banks. She was secure and grateful; he was kind and lively. She had not known there was so much laughter in the world." (Morrison, p. 115)

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 many ways, Cholly is deserving of this treatment and hatred towards him. Considering how drunk he was when he found Pecola in the kitchen, his actions could not have been completely his own, which is more than enough to convict him of villainy. However, Cholly had endured what was arguably the most senseless psychological abuse present in the novel. The hunters in the woods had ingrained bristled, thorny weeds into Cholly’s mind that deeply emasculated him and would later “stir him into flights of depravity that surprised himself” (32). In addition to this, Cholly had only known one person who could be seen as a father figure type, Blue, and this figure had been drinking too often and too much to have been any help to Cholly, which may have later influenced Cholly to do the same (119). Due to Cholly’s upbringing and his lack of a stable, healthy relationship between himself and someone else, he did not possess the knowledge to be able to raise children of his own, let alone have “felt a stable connection between himself and [his] children” (127). This had led Cholly to “react” to his children, and these reactions were stemmed from “what he felt at the moment” (127). While it is apparent that Morrison is showing some of the ugliness of sexual abuse with Cholly and Pecola, and how unjustifiable it is, she is also showing that sexual abuse has its origins deeply

"The Bluest Eyes." is one of the most prevalent concerns role appearance novel in society, Pecola Breedlove is described herself as ugly not because she necessarily is, but because all the Breedloves see themselves as ugly; this is the role they see themselves playing in society because they have darker skin.