The Bluest Eye - Morrison's Attempt to Induce White Guilt
I've heard the fable before, three times in fact. Originally, the oracle in question was always an old man, an Asian philosopher and blind. The boys carried in a live bird, not a dead bird as she described as a "small bundle of life sacrificed" or the absence of bird altogether. The boys asked the same question. If the philosopher answered dead, they would let it fly away, but if he answered alive, they would kill it and drop it at his feet, proving him wrong with either answer. When the old, wise, blind man was presented with the question, he pondered it a bit and deduced their scheme. He answered, "The fate of that bird is in your hands."
Toni Morrison altered the fable in her Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, offering her perception of it, which is understandable as she is a writer and is building an analogy to it. Writers often focus on perception in stories and some writers need to as in the case of Morrison and The Bluest Eye. The perception and point of view in which the story is told to the reader is essential for Morrison to build her case. She needs to suck the reader into her framework of thinking using stories of abuse and neglect to create compassion and sympathy for the characters of her story. The catch is, she's not telling a story so much as selling a product.
When a good salesman pushes an item, the first step is to have the audience succumb to his way of thinking. Morrison's product here is a philosophy, an idea that is the theme of her book. That idea is that physical beauty is "probably the most destructive idea in the history of human thought." She pushes this idea right through the reader's brain. It is the ruin of the black girls. If only they were pretty. If only they had pretty blue eyes.
We might be able to think of beauty as the bird. True beauty, in Morrison's ideology, would be the absence of the bird. Lacking in physical attributes, but representative of all things free and without boundaries. If the bird is present, whether alive or dead, the physical intrusiveness of it then defines its beauty.
A Reflection on Mark My Words: Letters of a Businessman to his Son by G Kingsley Ward
Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye provides social commentary on a lesser known portion of black society in America. The protagonist Pecola is a young black girl who desperately wants to feel beautiful and gain the “bluest eyes” as the title references. The book seeks to define beauty and love in this twisted perverse society, dragging the reader through Morrison’s emotional manipulations. Her father Cholly Breedlove steals the reader’s emotional attention from Pecola as he enters the story. In fact, Toni Morrison’s depiction of Cholly wrongfully evokes sympathy from the reader.
Self-hatred is something that can thoroughly destroy an individual. As it was fictitiously evidenced in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, it can lead an individual to insanity. Toni Morrison raises the idea that racism and class can detrimentally influence people’s outlook on themselves.
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
The Bluest Eye (1970), Toni Morrison’s first novel, is written during her teaching at Howard University, focuses on the oppression of the Black female characters Pauline, Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda. The American concept of beauty becomes necessary for black African- American in order to mingle into the mainstream. Pecola suffers an inferiority complex since from her childhood because she is ugly and black and nobody loves her as Pecola comes from a poor family, cut off from the normal life of a community and faces final humiliation and betrayal from her own father. Cholly rapes Pecola. Pecola’s move to the company of the whores shows the signals of her utter sense of loneliness. Pecola Breedlove in the novel is oppressed not only due to racism but also due to classism and sexism. Ugliness, poverty and violence are the reasons of her humiliation. Sufferings are the friend of Pecola and her hunger for love and respect leads her to the world of fantasy.
The three main competencies for the Facilitator Role are "team membership, participative decision making, and managing conflicts" (Hesketh et al 1997 pp 3). The author used this role to encourage his students to participate in clinical rotations and be team members. Allowing the students to participate in clinical rotations and recognize their roles helped them understand how to build and be a part of a team. High school students are not always willing to participate due to peer pressure; this was very challenging for the author. This is something that the author learned took a great deal of work with some students.
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The tone of the excerpt of The Bluest Eye is a very depressed and serious piece. Toni Morrison develops this tone using diction and figurative language. The excerpt is about a doll and how Toni thinks that dolls are not beautiful and that they are not lovable. The piece gives a very sad tone to the reader facing the real truth about dolls.
Both Toni Morrison's novel about an African American family in Ohio during the 1930s and 1940s, The Bluest Eye and Louise Erdrich;s novel about the Anishinabe tribe in the 1920s in North Dakota, Tracks are, in part, about seeing. Both novels examine the effects of a kind of seeing that is refracted through the lens of racism by subjects of racism themselves. Erdrich's Pauline Puyat and Morrison's Pecola Breedlove are crazy from their dealings with racism and themselves suffer from an internalized racism that is upheld and maintained by social and cultural structures within which they live. Pauline and Pecola become the embodiment of world sickness, of social pathologies as they become increasingly alienated from their bodies.
Being a mentor has taught me many things such as how to deal with different problems in life, help others, keep conversations going, being in charge of a group and being a role model. All these things have helped me in not only school but also my social life. They helped me with life problems because when I get stuck in a sticky situation and I don't know what to do I think of the advise I would give others and rely on my own decisions not anyone else’s. Mentoring helped me become more responsible and be more confident in my own decisions. If I wouldn’t have been apart of the mentor program this year I don’t think I would be half as mature as I am now. I appreciate all the opportunities the program gave me like making new friends, building more relationships with different people and helping me become more accepting. I now am able to keep a conversation in a group going when things seem to get awkward or quite. I feel like this is an important trait to have because depending on
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