Blond Hair, Blue Eyed Beauty

Blond hair, blue eyes. In America these are the ideals of a woman’s beauty. This image is drilled into our minds across the lifespan in the media and it conditions people's standards of beauty. We see Black women wish that their skin was lighter. In an episode of "The Tyra Banks Show", a Black girl as young as 6 talks about how she doesn't like her hair and wishes that it was long and straight like a white woman's. Some minorities get surgery to change their facial features, or only date white men. Having been taught to think that white people are more attractive than people of their own ethnicity. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the character of Pecola exemplifies the inferiority felt throughout the black community due to the ideology that white qualities propel you in social status. Pecola’s mother, Pauline Breedlove, said it best when she was introduced to beauty it being the most destructive ideas in the history of human though. From which the envy, insecurity and disillusion have been derived by the ideas of beauty and physical appearance. Pecola’s story is about the consequences of a little black girl growing up in a society dominated by white supremacy. We must not look at beauty as a value rather an oppressive discourse that has taken over our society. Pecola truly believes that if her eyes were blue she would be pretty, virtuous, and loved by everyone around her. Friends would play with her, teachers would treat her better and even her parents might stop their constant fights because, in her heart of hearts, no one would want to “do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.”

Pecola has a deep admiration for Shirley Temple and therefore thinks that she is ugly because she looks nothing like Shirley. All across socie...

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...tain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.” When the society fails to nurture flowers like Pecola, when nourishment of the soul is denied, the fruit of self-love is never realized and it becomes self-hatred, which lead to Pecola’s undesirable fate. She is driven to insanity and the ultimately to the garbage on the outskirts of town.

Works Cited

Sapphire. 1996. Push. New York: Vintage Contemporaries.

Showalter, E. 1989. “The Female Tradition.” The Critical Tradition: Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Ed. David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin’s.

http://203.131.210.88/lartswiki/lib/exe/fetch.php?media=li.pdf

http://www-personal.ksu.edu/~lswilli/socwomenblack.html

http://antiintellect.wordpress.com/2010/11/03/the-pecola-breedlove-in-me/