Allusion In The Bluest Eye

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 Breedlove, Pecola's mother, experiences racism within the black community when she moves to Lorain, Ohio. Being a dark-skinned black woman from the south, she does not understand why "northern colored folk was different... [and why they were] no better than whites for meanness" (117). She recognizes the hierarchy, or the "difference between colored people and niggers" within the black community, especially from the light-skinned women she encounters (87). One of these light-skinned black women is Geraldine, Junior's mother, who believes "colored people were neat and quiet; niggers were dirty and loud" (87). She even tells her son

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 this quotation, Morrison uses the Mary Jane candy to represent white beauty. When Pecola explains the sweetness, simplicity, and love that is identified with the Mary Jane candy, she is actually explaining the attributes of the white culture. The quotation also emphasizes Pecola’s desire to be white rather than black when she ends with, “Be Mary Jane”, which highlights the theme of beauty and how it affects the young black girls.

From a young age, Mrs. Breedlove has struggled to feel beautiful. From a nail through her foot to the judgment she received when she moved north, she has always been put down for who she is. As a young child she impaled her foot with a nail and it “left her with a crooked, archless foot that flopped when she walked” (Morrison 110). The first thing that began the curse of Mrs. Breedlove not being beautiful (besides her skin color), was as a child and got a nail right through her foot. The lack of medical knowledge and care left her with a limp that she was going to have for the rest of her life. From this one injury, she blames the rest of her misfortune in life off of it. She thinks her family does not like her because of it, and blames her foot for her

These books talk about a white family that has a dog and lives in a house with their friends and neighbors. Morrison would allude to this book as it describes Pecola’s desires to be white with blue eyes in order to become beautiful and have a loving family. As the paragraph progresses, Morrison violates the rules of syntax, removing punctuation, grammar, and spacing, leading to a jumbled mess of letters and words. This describes Pecola’s loss of innocence, which is an event that happens at the end of the book.

By contrasting the homes of Claudia and Pecola throughout the entire novel, Morrison stresses the importance of home in defending against a predatory, racist society. In Claudia’s home, her parents truly care for her and her sister. In one instance, her father took out a gun to fend off a tenant that touched Freida’s breast. This completely contrasts with Pecola’s home, where her parents are both hateful and self-hating, and her father actually raped her. Even though both households are

Her self worth is defined by the color of her eyes and the color of her skin, this delusion is a product of the effect that this idea has had on Pecola’s life. There is a constant pattern in the book where characters admire others as though they were hoping to one day attain their characteristics. Characters in the story develop an unrealistic and unhealthy admiration for white personas that further make them believe that they are worth less. For example, Pecola and her friend Frieda are mesmerized and almost hypnotized by Shirley Temples perceived beauty (put page number here). Similarly to Pecola, Mrs. Breedlove, consumes her days in an unrealistic world where she admires actresses and prefers to stay at work cleaning for what she believes to be the superior class than to go home and spend time with her family (put page number here).

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

In each case, the daughter is ruined in the eyes of their society. The women in Malaefou are “constantly whispering about her [Lili]” (10). Pecola is also a victim of shunning after her miscarriage. Morrison’s narrator notes, “We honed our egos on her, padded our characters with her frailty, and yawned in the fantasy of our strength” (203). Morrison defines Pecola as outcast, driving her mad and sending her to wander among the “coke bottles and milkweed” (203).

“Ugly,” “dirty” —both words with the intention of nothing more than an attack—are the primary characteristics members of society see within her. Being forcefully raped by her father and having a still-birth from it as well as being physically unattractive are circumstances that were the ball and chain around Pecola’s ankle that enabled her to sink in the ocean of hatred. The whites or the “leaders” within society also bring her down to a level of pity by excessively making cruel comments towards both her uncontrolled circumstances of being raped and unattractive—Bay Boy and the gang of boys that grouped around Pecola and insulted her is a prime example—. When people hear of the story of Pecola and her father Cholly’s inhumane deed, they do not frown upon her misfortune, but rather shake their heads in disgust at the bother of them—she is not deemed to be the victim of abuse, but rather a convict. Toni Morrison’s outlook on the “outcast” in society is filled with melancholy emotions and pity that saddens the eye making them blue with

Despite the vulgarity of Cholly’s actions, Morrison avoided demonizing Pecola’s antagonist; so as to emphasize the flaws of society rather then his particular character. She focused more on the tragedy of his childhood experience and only hastily depicts his experience as an adult aggressor. For the same reason, she chose the vignette structure (in order to stagger the upsetting episodes that occurred). The audience is thereby forced to reassemble the story; causing them to not immediately pity Pecola and criminalize her oppressors. The turmoil that African American males experienced in the novel imposed an inferiority complex in their psyche that drove them to persecute individuals weaker than themselves, namely, children. Morrison purposely avoids portraying

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

While Pecola chooses conformity into her society’s standards for beauty, Claudia chooses to maintain her own natural beauty despite the disadvantages it will cause. Although Morrison depicts both of these opposite characters in a critical light, she never offers a solution to escape these two extreme cases of handling racism. Moreover, in the “Afterword” of the book, Morrison states, “The novel tried to hit the raw nerve of racial self-contempt, expose it, and then soothe it [emphasis added]…” (Morrison 211) But Morrison does not “soothe” the issue at all; she leaves the reader to decide the better option to resist racial self-hatred. The opposition between Pecola and Claudia’s reactions to racism demonstrates that Morrison did not have a solution or a middle ground within the text; rather, she hoped for readers to make their own conclusions based on the events of the

In another episode in the novel, when Pecola is on her way to buy her Mary Janes, the reader is able to realize the extent of the impact this idealization had (and still has) on African-American as well as many other cultures. Morrison makes a point to emphasize the fact that this affected everyone in the novel, whether the character admired or despised this ideal. Mrs. Breedlove "passed on" to Pecola the insecurity she had "acquired" throughout her life. Her insecurity and self-hate had been in her since her childhood but it was made worse by her emulating the movie actresses.