Woman Is The Nigger Of The Wolrd: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

“‘You are ugly people’” (39). One of the first things that catch the eyes of Morrison’s readers in The Bluest Eye is the classism between her pages. Morrison digs deep into her character’s lives and sets up character flaws that will eventually fall victim to classism. Toni Morrison sets up strong foundations of classism in her book, The Bluest Eye, that shares a harsh truth between the children, adults, and ideas and concepts of beauty.

Oppression is at the root of many of the most serious, enduring conflicts in the world today. Toni Morrison’s short story “Sweetness” articulated her view on oppression more effectively than the song“Alright” by Kendrick Lamar because she used anecdote and metaphor to justify her position.This made the readers aware of the personal issues she went through.“Sweetness” elaborates on her view regarding race because of the personal stories about a mother and the issues she had with her daughter. Morrison’s parents moved to Ohio from the South, hoping to raise their children in an environment friendlier to blacks. This wasn’t the case when she grew up, married her white husband and got a child. In his eyes seeing his daughter was like seeing a lie that was cursed upon him which made it impossible to except her. As a result, Morrison undoubtedly touches on how whites back then didn’t learn empathy or compassion towards the blacks.

From the role it plays in literature to its looming existence in our everyday lives, race has an undeniable influence on many aspects of our lives. Toni Morrison and Peggy McIntosh, a writer and an activist respectively, both have the urge to understand this presence and impact of race in literature and everyday life specifically. Through self-reflection and attempts to see from others’ perspectives, both Morrison and McIntosh manage to answer their own questions regarding race and its role in literature and everyday life while articulating their discoveries and intentions in similar and comparable ways. Both of their pieces, “Playing in the Dark,” and “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to see Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies,” help Morrison and McIntosh, as well as readers, to understand the polar yet interdependent nature of African American and white status in America.

Morrison uses the examples of Shirley Temple, a popular, white child actress during the time period, and popular dolls in the 1940s to show the effect that mass culture had on young black women. It is ironic when Claudia states that unlike older, young black girls around her, her hatred for whiteness has not yet turned to love. As a naive child, Claudia, who doesn’t see the beauty that others see in popular children’s dolls, takes apart her doll to find its beauty, thinking that its beauty must be physically inside of it. She has yet to learn that, in the society she lives in, beauty is dictated by cultural norms, meaning that the doll itself is only beautiful because popular culture views whiteness as superior to everything else. Claudia’s

Throughout Toni Morrison’s Sula, racism and sexism are recurring themes that are deeply explored and illuminated throughout the novel. The novels’ two main characters Nell and Sula are not only women living in a patriarchal world, they are also African American, which further exposes them to mistreatment and pre-determined societal roles. African Americans during the 1920’s were experiencing great social injustices and mistreatment, along with the likes of women who were also experiencing inequality to a lesser degree during this time as well. In her novel Sula, by addressing and shedding light on the many acts of racism and sexism that occurred during the 1920’s, Toni Morrison shows how African

Morrison’s “Black Matters” presents an argument that deconstructs the notions of American literary canon in respect to race. In this deconstruction, Morrison remarks: “Statements to the contrary insisting upon the meaningless of race to American Identity are themselves full of meaning” (Black Matters 216). She elaborates this claim to say that this sends a more direct message as to how it racializes the other which leaves the reader in a position to decipher this the race of a character. In “Recitatif”, Morrison allows her characters to reflect racial ambiguity as to create a distance from the reader and the work itself. By creating a narrative that changes the reader’s perspective on what each character’s race is, Morrison shows readers that racializing a character is defined by arbitrary indicators through the processes of othering.

Nobel Laureate Toni Morrison in her Nobel Prize lecture said, “Tell us what it is to be a women so that we may know what it is to be a man. What moves at the margin? What it is to have no homes in this place? To be set adrift from the one you knew. What it is to live at the edge of towns that cannot bear your company?” (Morrison, Karen, 1993). This potrays tragic conditions of Colored Americans in racist America. African-American primary obstacle is racism and gender bias adds upon to it.

Morrison argues that the definition of whiteness and American identity is a construction made in opposition to that of an Africanist presence in literature. Morrison states that the American identity is based on ideals that can only be applied to whites. Furthermore, she goes on to detail that African Americans cannot identify with the American ideal of freedom as the result of being brought to the country as slaves According to Morrison, “because has been clearly the preserve of white male views, genius, and power, those views, genius, and the power are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the United States” (Morrison 5). Through the use of language and style within literature there are clear determinates to help the reader establish which characters identifies with what race within the composition. Morrison’s meta-critical approach allows her to examine and prove her points on the centralization of race in literature and how it seems to consistency establish and denounce the black existence in comparison to

Toni Morrison teases out the society’s tendency to place racial categories on individual for the praise the American being praised because of the so called equality them posses. He teases people by stating that everyone is a racist at some point. He describes a world free of racists can only happen in dreams and not in reality,

Toni Morrison and Alice Walker use their own struggles with racism and sexism to articulate the prejudice and oppression black women face in an American culture dominated by white men in The Bluest Eye and The Color Purple. Pecola and Celie, both young black women, exemplify this oppression not only through extreme sexual violence but also

Halloween, for many, is the best time of year. For some, it’s because of the free candy. But for people like me, it’s the power to express my creative, childhood imaginations and morph into any character for a day. But why can’t I become someone else forever, especially if it would make me happier? For Sula Peace and Nel Wright, in Sula, defining oneself in a pool of racism and varying moral standards is by no means challenging. Through a vivid and consistent emphasis of color and physical appearance, author Toni Morrison effectively outlines Sula and Nel’s attempts to comprehend and create their personal identities separate from the own mothers’ influences. Based on their situations, it appears that anyone can easily alter their character and self to fit their desires. However, Morrison ultimately emphasizes that one does not have complete control over their identity because of overwhelming familial and sociological barriers.

With one pivotal phrase, Toni Morrison creates an essential schematic for understanding the rest of her novel, Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. She captures the essence of a central issue within American literature when she coins the phrase, “sycophancy of the white identity” (Morrison 19). Through this meticulous selection of words, she conveys the idea that the white identity is a parasite. It bases itself on, often at the expense of, the Africanist identity. The white identity derives its power, freedom, and autonomy from the imagined African identity’s lack of these concepts. Morrison argues that one’s sense of identity requires an other opposite identity off of which one can feed and ultimately reject.

Instead of making the plot of “The Bluest Eye”, center around events of overt racism or such African American issues in order to address the looming specter of slavery and race, the focus of the book and this analysis of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison presents readers with a more complicated and ultimately deeper portrayal of the effects of racism via an emphasis on the way self-hatred plagues the black characters. In the narrator’s description of how the Breedlove family was ugly, it is stated in one of the important quotes from “The Bluest Eye”, “You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that is came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious and all-knowing master had given each one of them a cloak of ugliness to wear and they had each accepted it without question” (39). What Morrison is stating here is that the feeling of low self-worth after years of being put down is still perpetuating and is resulting in an ugliness that is constantly felt, if not directly seen. More importantly, the narrator suggests that they accept this imposed feeling of ugliness and lack of self-worth without questioning its source and it is this accepting of self-hatred, a hatred that comes from outside the family is one of the biggest problem faced by the family. However, it is not just the family that suffers from this feeling of polarity caused by black self-hatred, it is the entire

Morrison takes experiences and characteristics, such as violence, love, family, hatred, race, beauty and ugliness and illustrates them in a way that is clear, but painful. These experiences are not toned down to seem less serious; they are heart breaking parts of life that are illustrated truthfully. To expose the harsh life lived by many, Morrison creates strong relatable characters. These characters create a need for empathy towards them, but the purpose is to take this love to traumatic victims in the real world. Morrison’s use of narrator change and choice of language gives the novel impactful perspective to the lives of african americans in a society where the color of your skin determines who you are.

In his essay “When Home Fails to Nurture the Self: Tragedy of Being Homeless at Home”, Leester Thomas argues that, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, is split into four sections; the first section Thomas titles “Outdoors: The Meaning of Such Wretchedness” (53), which is followed by “The First Eviction: Rejection of Self by Mainstream Society” (53), “ The Second Eviction: Rejection of Self by the Black Community” (54) and lastly, “The Final Eviction Notice: Rejection of self by the biological family” (55). I agree with Thomas’ analysis of The Bluest Eye and Morrison herself, along with the more direct analysis of Pecola herself, I will argue that much like the conditions for marigolds to grow, the conditions that Pecola was immersed in didn’t allow for her to grow, and ultimately lead to her destruction.