When Adults Fail, Children Change Essay

Jeannette is very insecure about her past life of poverty, and although she has now dug herself out of the rut of destitution, her parents’ continued homelessness is always a reminder of

Jeannette always admired her parents despite the way that they chose to live. Even though both parents were both intelligently capable, they chose to live homeless. They both chose their own welfare over their children. With parents like hers, Jeannette took what good she could from her

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

This affects how Jeannette views her life, and as a result, she wants to have a better life than

However, with her alcoholic dad who rarely kept a job and her mother who suffered mood swings, they had to find food from her school garbage or eat expired food they had previously when they had the slightest bit of money. In addition, when bills and mortgage piled up, they would pack their bags and look for a new home to live in, if they could even call it a stable home, since they would be on the move so often. Jeanette needed a dad who wouldn’t disappear for days at a time, and a mom that was emotionally stable, but because she didn’t have that, she grew up in an environment where she would get teased or harassed for it. Jeanette suffered so much, that even at one point, she tried convincing her mother to leave her father because of the trouble he had caused the family already. A child should be able to depend on their parents for food and to be there for them when they need it, and when that part of a child’s security is taken away, it leaves them lost and on their own, free and confused about what to do next.

Unlike her father and sister Jeanette shows us that it is capable to reach your full potential regardless of what you have gone through. Even through the hardships of her childhood Jeanette is set on moving to New York with Lori and becoming a reporter. By putting her past aside she is able to achieve this and finally reaches her full potential. “I still went into the office in the city once a week, but this was where John and I lived and worked, our home—the first house I’d ever owned. Mom and Lori admired the wide planked floorboards, the big fireplaces, and the ceiling beams made from locust posts, with gouge marks from the ax that had felled them.” Unlike any of the houses she lived in as a child, her current home goes above and beyond. If you compare Jeannette to her sister Maureen it’s clear that becoming all that you can be depends solely on yourself. Maureen went through the same experiences as Jeanette, yet Jeanette is the one who decides to do something with her life, while Maureen continues to let her life be the same as it always was.

Imagine being born into a family that has no love and doesn’t care much for their children. That's how it was for Jeanette Walls and her siblings. Her parents did love her but didn’t show it much. They were not very helpful and were not great parents. Her father Rex and mother Rosemary didn’t have a great parenting style, but their children still grew up to be good people.

The Bluest Eyes is a masterfully told narrative on the lives of African Americans in the 1940’s; Toni Morrison examines both the social system and mentality of the racism by using both children perspectives and childhood flashbacks to invoke a feeling of sympathy for the characters in the novel. Morrison novel attempts to demystify the underlying culture problems black women face in segregated culture. Instead of attempting to analyze all the facets; instead, Morrison’s uses the simplistic and unbiased perspective of children to elucidate African American culture. Children perceive events through an unclouded lens; this allows the reader a glimpse into a world that they would be isolated from by adult narrator.

Recently divorced and caring for two sons, she worked vigorously on expanding the story she began in the writing group. That story would soon become Toni Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye. The Bluest Eye was set in Lorain, Ohio during the era of the Great Depression. The story told of an adolescent black girl by the name of Pecola who felt as if her skin tone and eye color was not as beautiful. She longed to have blue eyes and after she was a victim of rape, plus the death of the baby, did she fall into insanity and believe her own lie of having blue eyes. The story featured the themes of jealously, society and race much like the other stories discussed in class. Pecola felt disgusted in her appearance and wished to have blue eyes much like the white people, who in society during those times were seen as higher class, pure individuals. Although the novel received mixed reviews, many libraries attempted to ban the book from their inventory due to the content of rape, incest, molestation, racism and

Unlike other books on the subject of racism that were published at the time of Toni Morrison, Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” is exceptional because of the manner in which it addresses the persistent effects of slavery, mainly self-hatred, instead of the most apparent problems of isolation. In this book, black characters are infatuated with the idea of what white represents. Being that this book highlights the problems of racism and segregation, the author employs a number of symbols to illustrate his point. One of these symbols used by Toni Morrison is the blue eyes. In the book, the characters are obsessed about the blue eyes and what it represents to each of them.

In The bluest Eye by Toni Morrison the main character is a young girl named Pecola Breedlove, growing up in Lorain, Ohio, after the great depression. Nine year old Claudia MacTeer and her ten year old sister Frieda are also main characters. The MacTeers take in Pecola, and the young girls build a relationship with one another. Pecola had a difficult life at home with her own family, and even at school she is teased. She is a loner not by choice, but because children think she is ugly because of the color of her skin,

“The Bluest Eyes” by Toni Morrison centers on a character name Pecola Breedlove. Pecola is an eleven year old black girl whom the story revolves. Pecola role is the protagonist. she is abused by almost everyone in the novel and eventually suffers two traumatic rapes.Pecola is a fragile and delicate child when the novel begins, and by the novel’s end, she has been almost completely destroyed by violence. I pick Pecola because I can relate to her. Through Pecola Breedlove’s lonely,sensitive,and imaginative she is a symbol of the black community’s self- hatred and belief in its own ugliness.

“No one believed that a black African could write a good book” (Satwase). In the Bluest Eye Toni Morrison uses wrong and discomfort to show the crushing consequences that come from racism. In 1950 America, racial discrimination was implied by different skin colors. The Bluest Eye shows ways in which white beauty standards hurt lives of black females, blacks that discriminate on each other and the community’s bias on who you were. Toni Morrison uses the racism of the 1950 's and shows that "It is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes". Characters that faced uncomfortable racism include Claudia MacTeer, Pecola Breedlove, and Geraldine.

Unlike so many pieces of American literature that involve and examine the history of slavery and the years of intensely-entrenched racism that ensued, the overall plot of the novel, The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, does not necessarily involve slavery directly, but rather examines the aftermath by delving into African-American self-hatred. Nearly all of the main characters in The Bluest Eye who are African American are dominated with the endless culturally-imposed concepts of white beauty and cleanness to an extent where the characters have a destructive way of latently acting out their own feelings of self-hatred on others, especially other African-Americans.

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison shows that one’s family determines a character’s feeling of self-worth. According to Morrison, the world is teaching little black girls that they are not beautiful and unworthy of love. The world teaches this by depicting white people and objects that resemble them, as symbols of beauty. In this world, to be worthy of love you must be beautiful. Morrison shows that if a little black girl believes what the world is telling her, her self-esteem can develop low self-esteem and they may yearn to be white. Even in the absence of economic and racial privilege, Morrison suggests that a little black girl can look to her family to build up her self-esteem. For Morrison, having a family is