In the novel, The Bluest Eye, the author, Toni Morrison, tells the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove. Pecola desires for acceptance, but she is rejected by people around her, including her own parents. The one thing she truly desires is to belong, and to be loved by those around her. However, based on her experiences throughout the novel, Pecola’s idea of love is misguided. The treatment of love in this novel can be described as destructive, conditional, even nonexistent, and contributes to the
Race and Gender in the Bluest Eye In the Bluest Eye, Tony Morrison shows beauty and the value of it from the viewpoint of the black’s and how people in black society impose the white standards onto its people. Pecola Breedlove is an African American girl who longs to be loved and accepted in all communities especially her own. She lives in a world where members of her own race define aesthetic beauty based on white culture. Pecola has an odd transfixion of having the bluest eyes as she sees that it
hair, white skin, and blue eyes made her the most beautiful idolized child. Ultimately, these standards led to the white gaze, looking through the world through a white person’s eyes. Throughout Toni Morrison’s book, The Bluest Eye, we see how Black women can be formed by white beauty standards. 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
In the novel, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison introduces the reader to both mother and daughter; Pauline and Pecola. Both mother and daughter experience abuse and neglect; Pecola prays for a different trait and her mother Pauline selfishly keeps the beauty of her work to herself because of a nickname given to her. With a name, an identity is from, and with eyes, assumptions take form. Christiane Toledo Maria article shows key points of Toni Morrison’s novel and helps connect the reader with what
Pecola is constantly labeled as inferior due to her ugliness and copes with her sorrow by conforming to society’s label. Throughout the novel, Pecola’s fascination with white girls is heavily expressed. It is first shown very early on when Pecola admires the Shirley Temple cup. Claudia narrates, “She was a long time with the milk, and gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temple’s dimpled face” (19). Much later in the book Pecola shows her fascination with Mary Jane. She takes great joy in buying
The narration of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is actually a compilation of many different voices. The novel shifts between Claudia MacTeer's first person narrative and an omniscient narrator. At the end of the novel, the omniscient voice and Claudia's narrative merge, and the reader realizes this is an older Claudia looking back on her childhood (Peach 25). Morrison uses multiple narrators in order to gain greater validity for her story. According to Philip Page, even though the voices are divided
The Representation of Eyes Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye follows a nine year old African American girl, Pecola Breedlove, as she is growing up in the 1940’s in the racially mixed town of Lorain, Ohio. The Breedloves are a poor family. On top of having to live in poverty, Pecola’s father, Cholly, is an abusive alcoholic who beats his wife and rapes his own daughter. Her mother, Pauline, cleans the houses of white people, and idealizes the perfection and cleanliness that she finds in white households
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. In the novel Pecola and
Love Doesn't Last The Bluest Eye is a novel based in Ohio on 1941. One of the narrators from of the novel is Claudia, she is a nine-year-old African-American girl that lives with her mother, father and her ten-year-older sister in an old green house, they didn't have much money but they made up for it with love. The family had so much love they accepted the main character of The Bluest Eyes, Pecola Breedlove in to their house, a 11 year old African American girl that hated the melanin in her skin
Pecola was an Eleven year old black girl who feels as if being white is the true meaning of beauty to society and to herself. The Title of this Novel is ‘The Bluest Eye’ written by Toni Morrison in the African American Literature, The novel's focus, however, was on a young girl named Pecola Breedlove. And Pecola, as we are told in Chapter 11,will be raped by her father around the novel's end. The beginning states the story so that the reader can know about Pecola's story ending tragic. The Breedloves