The Bluest Eye Essay

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

Throughout Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye, she captures, with vivid insight, the plight of a young African American girl and what she would be subjected to in a media contrived society that places its ideal of beauty on the e quintessential blue-eyed, blonde woman. The idea of what is beautiful has been stereotyped in the mass media since the beginning and creates a mental and emotional damage to self and soul. This oppression to the soul creates a socio-economic displacement causing a cycle of dysfunction and abuses. Morrison takes us through the agonizing story of just such a young girl, Pecola Breedlove, and her aching desire to have what is considered beautiful - blue eyes. Racial stereotypes of beauty contrived and nourished by

Throughout all of history there has been an ideal beauty that most have tried to obtain. But what if that beauty was impossible to grasp because something was holding one back. There was nothing one could do to be ‘beautiful’. Growing up and being convinced that one was ugly, useless, and dirty. For Pecola Breedlove, this state of longing was reality. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and pale white skin was the definition of beauty. Pecola was a black girl with the dream to be beautiful. Toni Morrison takes the reader into the life of a young girl through Morrison’s exceptional novel, The Bluest Eye. The novel displays the battles that Pecola struggles with each and every day. Morrison takes the reader through the themes of whiteness and beauty,

“The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, is a story about the life of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who is growing up during post World War I. She prays for the bluest eyes, which will “make her beautiful” and in turn make her accepted by her family and peers. The major issue in the book, the idea of ugliness, was the belief that “blackness” was not valuable or beautiful. This view, handed down to them at birth, was a cultural hindrance to the black race.

The desire to feel beautiful has never been more in demand, yet so impossible to achieve. In the book “The Bluest Eye”, the author, Toni Morrison, tells the story of two black families that live during the mid-1900’s. Even though slavery is a thing of the past, discrimination and racism are still a big issue at this time. Through the whole book, characters struggle to feel beautiful and battle the curse of being ugly because of their skin color. Throughout the book Pecola feels ugly and does not like who she is because of her back skin. She believes the only thing that can ever make her beautiful is if she got blue eyes. Frieda, Pecola, Claudia, and other black characters have been taught that the key to being beautiful is by having white skin. So by being black, this makes them automatically ugly. In the final chapter of the book, the need to feel beautiful drives Pecola so crazy that she imagines that she has blue eyes. She thinks that people don’t want to look at her because they are jealous of her beauty, but the truth is they don’t look at her because she is pregnant. From the time these black girls are little, the belief that beauty comes from the color of their skin has been hammered into their mind. Mrs. Breedlove and Geraldine are also affected by the standards of beauty and the impossible goal to look and be accepted by white people. Throughout “The Bluest Eye” Toni Morrison uses the motif of beauty to portray its negative effect on characters.

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.

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

Cholly, not only wants to vandalize their house and the dreams of Pecola. But, he also manages to vandalize and damages Pecola when he rapes her twice in the second Act. Once when she was trying to wash dishes and once more while she was laying on the couch. The symbolism here shows when Pecola is washing the dishes. The water from the tap is her thoughts about rebirth and becoming a new person, cleansed of any bad, with pure, blue, eyes. This is once again squashed by Cholly as he rapes her, taking her innocence, her childhood, and damaging the one thing that was her own and that she could control: her virginity. Later on, when Pecola's mother, Pauline, doesn't believe her when she tells her about the rape, furthermore proving the dysfunctional and unloving environment Pecola has to trudge through.

Toni Morrison tells us why it’s important to stay with your family and not to leave and how a family can change one thing in life. Toni Morrison’s progress of the differences between the main characters’ families, houses, and attitudes toward society’s belief in a white standard of beauty reveals what allows Claudia to grow and survive and inhibits Pecola from doing the same. It is a novel of initiation concerning a victimized adolescent Black girl Pecola Breedlove, who is obsessed by the White standard of beauty and longing fora pair of blue eyes. Why does she long for blue eyes?

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.

The novel The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison is subjected on a young girl, Pecola Breedlove and her experiences growing up in a poor black family. The life depicted is one of poverty, ridicule, and dissatisfaction of self. Pecola feels ugly because of her social status as a poor young black girl and longs to have blue eyes, the pinnacle of beauty and worth. Throughout the book, Morrison touches on controversial subjects, such as the depicting of Pecola's father raping her, Mrs. Breedlove's sexual feelings toward her husband, and Pecola's menstruation. The book's content is controversial on many levels and it has bred conflict among its readers.

The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison in 1970. It was the first novel she ever wrote while she was a teacher at Howard University. This book was written different since it consists of different seasons instead of chapter to represent every time period despite the short space of time. The Bluest Eye is interesting because it shows the life of a young girl that wants really bad to be something she is not. The purpose of the book is to show how an African American girl wanted to be a white person back in the early days.

Cholly and Pauline Breedlove, Pecola’s parents, also contribute to the girl’s destruction. Rather than providing a loving home environment where Pecola might have been able to thrive despite the rejection of the white-dominant society, like Claudia and Frieda do, Cholly and Pauline instead abuse their children and fight with each other constantly. Both Cholly and Pauline have been mistreated by white people in their lives, and both of them vent the resulting hatred for those who wronged them on both their children and each other. Cholly, as a young boy, was caught, laughed at, and humiliated by two white men while having sex with a girl named Darlene. Rather than showing hatred towards the white men, Cholly instead hates Darlene, and thinking about the incident both “stir[s] him into flights of depravity” (Morrison 43) and stunts his sexual development (Wall 797). Because of this incident and

The rape is told through Cholly’s perspective and we only get to hear the way he feels and acts. We are neglected Pecola’s point of view and reaction, which shows how male oppression has the ability to mute women. In addition to violence the women and girls experience, the women in this novel engage in horizontal hostility. Horizontal hostility occurs when “individuals direct the resentment and anger they have about their situation onto those who are of equal or lesser status” (WVFV 63). The women in the novel are oppressed by the men, and instead of responding to the real threat of their oppression, they respond and create oppression against those of the same or lower status—in this case, other women and children. The women gossip about one another and put each other down for characteristics they deem undesirable. Mrs. Breedlove experiences this shortly after moving to Lorain, Ohio with Cholly. Mrs. Breedlove did not seem to fit in with the other black women she met, and they treated her poorly with “their goading glances and private snickers at her way of talking (saying “chil’ren) and dressing” (Morrison 118). In this situation, the women are engaging in oppressive acts against each other. When it comes to their children, the women dominate and oppress them through the use of physical force, such as when Mrs. Breedlove yells at Pecola and slaps her for spilling the pie, or when Mrs. MacTeer whips Claudia, Frieda and Pecola for “playing nasty.” From these