Toni Morrison's “The Bluest Eye” set in post-WWI, Lorain, Ohio, narrates the lives surrounding Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl who wishes to be beautiful. Influenced greatly by her relationship with her mother, Pauline, Pecola adapts to a world of unworthiness and unattainable expectations beauty. Their mother/daughter relationship is just one of many examples throughout the novel further pinpoint its related themes of self worth and ugliness, both physically and mentally. An analysis of the relationship between Pauline and Pecola Breedloves—their contributions and conflicts—is used to highlight the theme of which the author is trying to express.
A relationship, such as one between a mother and daughter, should be the last thing to be described as hateful, disconnected, or troubled—only in the case of Pauline and Pecola Breedlove, it was just that. The two were as distant as could be achieved while living under the same roof, “adults do not talk to us—they give us directions. They issue orders without providing information” (10). Pecola was merely a maid in her own house, expected to preform the daily chores whilst her mother was at work. The distance was a creation of Pauline's, even long before the birth of her children. Several unfortunate events in Pauline's life lead her to immerse herself in a fictitious world where she strove to be part of the most beautiful race around—white. Pauline frequently visited picture shows that portrayed only white actors and actresses (not uncommon for the 1930's). “White men taking such good care of they woman, and they all dressed up in big clean houses with the bathtubs right in the same room with the toilet. Them pictures gave me a lot of pleasure, but it made coming home hard, and lo...
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...y allowed her to believe that she was finally beautiful.
In summation, the relationship between Pauline and Pecola Breedlove in Toni Morrison's “The Bluest Eye” is filled with angst, hate, and disapproval. As one of the most prominent relationships in the novel, it is simple to determine the influence Pauline had over Pecola. Pecola's mental downfall, caused by her mother's constant neglect, highlights the theme of nature of beauty. It is this subjective beauty that the novel focuses on. Pecola Breedlove's constant alienation and ridicule from the people around her slowly broke her down further. Her lack of Pauline as a mother figure and the reflection of her mother's own self-hatred, spirals Pecola into insanity. From Toni Morrison, it can be gathered that beauty, mentally and physically, is carefully critiqued in the world and is the basis for judgment of others.
Nornally a mother would not want her daughter to be in such situations yet Pauline names her daughter Pecola and embraces the beauty ideals and Maureen’s mother embraces the film. Maybe in someway she felt a kinship[ with Pecola because she would understand her position.
To give some suggestion of a background to this piece, The Bluest Eye is told from the perspectives of two reflective women, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, as they reminisce about their childhood, and the images of their friend, Pecola Breedlove as they all grew up through the years at hand in this book. Is this a coming of age story? Quite literally, but it is a dissonant one, apart from so many others-- and serves to further the message as stated above. If only to compliment it, then, puberty and growing into sexual prowess are developed by the same things that make up one’s moral sophistication– parents, one’s school environment, and their social environment. Pecola’s parents, her home life; none of it is the least bit welcoming, the least bit inviting. She cannot express herself as she grows into her body because she will be beaten for it. Her mother thinks her a liar, and her father is too plagued by his own mental images to care much for anyone apart from himself. He takes out his stresses on Pecola, as the reader will see in the last leg of the book; Spring respectively. This environment that Pecola grows up in is indefinitely “not the right way.” She is denied too much of herself, and this is why she goes insane, partially.
Beauty is something that a lot of people in life strive for , because everyone has fitted in their mind what exactly beauty is. People know that it can help you out in life. But what most people don’t know is that, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Meaning that beauty should not be characterized by what people are told it is, beauty is different for everyone, what is beautiful for you may be ugly to someone else. The characters in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are confronted with the ideal of beauty and strive for it whether they know it or not. The two characters that I think were followed the ideal of beauty in Toni Morrison’s story are Pauline and Pecola.
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.”
A main theme in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is the quest for individual identity and the influences of the family and community in that quest. This theme is present throughout the novel and evident in many of the characters. Pecola Breedlove, Cholly Breedlove, and Pauline Breedlove and are all embodiments of this quest for identity, as well as symbols of the quest of many of the many Black people that were moving to the north in search of greater opportunities.
The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison tells the story of several African Americans living in the rural south from 1910 to 1941. One of the main characters in the book happens to be Pecola Breedlove. Throughout the book Pecola encounters many hardships. Her problems range from home, school, extracurricular activities; even if she is walking down the street she has a problem with someone. It is very obvious that during this time period, white people are not that fond of African Americans and you would think that Pecola has the most trouble with. When in all actuality, many of the problems she encountered where her own people so to speak. The people who bullied her felt that because she was a darker skin tone that she was a target.
In the novel “The Bluest Eyes”, by Toni Morrison, Racial self-loathing and hatred is a major theme through the text, and is even evident in the title. Instead of making the plot center around events over racism, the book shows a deeper portrayal of racism, emphasizing on the way racial self-hatred and loathing plagues the black characters. The novel shows an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards distort the lives of the black characters. The author shows this by having African Americans who have lighter features, Maureen Peal, Geraldine and Soaphead Church, and characters with darker features, Pecola and her Parents Cholly, and Pauline Breedlove. Through them we are able to see racial self-loathing, there
Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye fully embodies the distinct characteristics of African American Literature by artistically blending the elements of African Spirituality, Cosmology, and Christianity, providing readers with a new dimension to interpret the tragic story of Pecola. A closer look at the context shows that the motif of “silence” is evident in this novel, strongly related to those three elements mentioned before. To be clear, the “silence” discussed in this essay is defined in two ways: firstly as in the sacred silence often employed in religious practices, and secondly as in a strategy to isolate someone
The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison is an African American writer, who believes in fighting discrimation and segregation with a mental preparation. Tony focuses on many black Americans to the white American culture and concludes that blacks are exploited because racism regarding white skin color within the black community. The bluest eye is a story about a young black girl named Pecola, who grew up in Ohio. Pecola adores blonde haired blue eyes girls and boys. She thinks white skin meant beauty and freedom and that thought was not a subject at this time in history. This book is really about the impact on a child’s state of mind. Tony Morrison has divided her book into four seasons: autumn, winter, spring, and summer. The main characters in this book are three girls, Claudia and Frieds McTeer, and Pecola Breedlove. Why was Pecola considered a case? Pecola was a poor girl who had no place to go. The county placed her in the McTeer’shouse for a few days until they could decide what to do until the family was reunited. Pecola stayed at the McTeer’s house because she was being abuse at her house and Cholly had burned up his house. The first event that happens in the book was that her menstrual cycle had started. She didn’t know what to do; she thought she was bleeding to death. When the girls were in the bed, Pecola asked, “If it was true that she can have a baby now?” So now the only concern is if she is raped again she could possibly get pregnant. Pecola thought if she had blue eyes and was beautiful, that her parents would stop fighting and become a happy family.In nursery books, the ideal girl would have blonde hair and blue eyes. There is a lot of commercial ads have all showed the same ideal look just like the nursery book has. Pecola assumes she has this beautiful and becomes temporary happy, but not satisfied. Now, Pecola wants to be even more beautiful because she isn’t satisfied with what she has. The fact is that a standard of beautyis established, the community is pressured to play the game. Black people and the black culture is judged as being out of place and filthy. Beauty, in heart is having blond hair, blue eyes, and a perfect family. Beauty is then applied to everyone as a kind of level of class.
A reader might easily conclude that the most prominent social issue presented in The Bluest Eye is that of racism, but more important issues lie beneath the surface. Pecola experiences damage from her abusive and negligent parents. The reader is told that even Pecola's mother thought she was ugly from the time of birth. Pecola's negativity may have initially been caused by her family's failure to provide her with identity, love, security, and socialization, ail which are essential for any child's development (Samuels 13). Pecola's parents are able only to give her a childhood of limited possibilities. She struggles to find herself in infertile soil, leading to the analysis of a life of sterility (13). Like the marigolds planted that year, Pecola never grew.
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 the mass media contribute to the status at which young African American girls find themselves early on and throughout their lives.
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 the racism of lighter colored blacks against darker colored blacks and rich blacks against poor blacks. Along with racism within the black community, sexism is exemplified both against women and against men. As Morrison investigates the racism and sexism of the community of Lorain, Ohio, she gives the reader more perspective as to why certain characters do or say certain things.
Throughout The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison includes a number of background stories for minor characters along with the main plotline in order to add dimension to the novel and further convey the intense racial prejudice felt by almost all African Americans. Her main story tells of the outrageous landslide of wounding events that Pecola Breedlove experiences, a young black girl constantly patronized by her peers, and the things that eventually make her go crazy. The struggle for a deep black skinned person can be significantly different from what a lighter skinned black person feels, and Toni Morrison adds secondary story lines to stress that difference, and the extremes that racism can force people into. The back-story of Geraldine expresses the desire to be white supported by social circumstances, the comparison of how much easier whiter life could be on Pecola and her family, but also the poor results that can come from shying away from one’s own nature and history.
She believes that if she could have blue eyes, their beauty would inspire kind behavior from others. Blues eyes in Pecola’s definition, is the pure definition of beauty. But beauty in the sense that if she had them she would see things differently. But within the world that Pecola lives in the color of one’s eye, and skin heavily influences their treatment. So her desperation for wanting to change her appearance on the account of her environment and culture seems child-like but it is logical. If Pecola could alter her appearance she would alter her influence and treatment toward and from others. In this Morrison uses Marxism as a way to justify Pecola’s change in reality depending on her appearance. The white ideologies reflected upon Pecola’s internal and external conflicts which allowed her to imagine herself a different life. The impacts of one’s social class also impacts one’s perspective of their race. The vulnerability created by the low social class allows racism to protrude in society and have a detrimental effect for the young black girls in “The Bluest Eye” (Tinsley).The quotes explained above express the social and economic aspect of the Marxist theory. The theory that centers around the separation of social classes and the relationship surrounding them not one’s internalization of oneself
She did not believe black is beautiful. Idealization such as these have dominated American culture since the 18th century. In order to appease society, a person will have to achieve specific physical attribute, obtain a particular career and habituate in a particular neighborhood. In The Bluest Eye, characters associate beauty and fulfillment with being white. The African American characters have grown up in a society that does not deem them beautiful because of the color of their skin. Pecola Breedlove is constantly being referred to as ugly. She longs to be what society considers beautiful—blue eyes and blond hair. Pecola’s belief that blue eyes will make her beautiful shows specific effects of racism on young African American girls, which is the envy of white