Racism In The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

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In a society dominated by white supremacy, racial oppression, and segregation between divergent races, a myriad of people tend to solely centralize the issues of white privilege rather than addressing the alternative problems associated with this type of society. Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye”, published in 1970, provides an alternate perception of the problem that broaches the issues, and consequences of internalized racism. This is what will primarily be discussed in the analysis. The storyline follows the life of Pecola Breedlove, a young, black girl who resides in Ohio in the 1940s, and her plethoric obsession with white beauty standards, predominantly, blue eyes. The way Morrison constructs the book is utterly …show more content…

The chapters that are narrated by the omniscient narrator open with snippets of the primer that serve as an introduction to what the chapter will revolve around. The primer symbolises the white narrative; happy white people living happy lives, and is juxtaposed with the content of the chapters to emphasise the colourful diversity between the stereotypical life of white people, and the reality that black people have to endure. That ingenious structural technique evinces that Morrison’s target is language, particularly narrative, and how that can contribute to a distribution of pervasive ideas and utopias. Through these narratives, Morrison exhibits how language is a violent agency rife with pernicious …show more content…

The more “ugly” incidents she is subjected to, the more extreme and abundant do her desires evolve to be. The climax is when Pecola is raped by the antagonist of the novel, her own father, Cholly Breedlove. Eventually, she loses her sanity and reaches out to Soaphead to ask for blue eyes. Disgusted with the molestation, people find another reason to despise Pecola and to ignore her. Becoming delusional, Pecola surmises that people ignore her because they are jealous; “Everybody’s jealous. Every time I look at somebody, they look off” (p. 193). Pecola consequently creates an imaginary friend (p. 191) to talk to as a defence mechanism to deal with the pain of being raped, and neglected by her own

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