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The impact of beauty standards
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The bluest eye critical analysis
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My report is on a wonderful story called 'The Bluest Eye' written by Toni Morrison and published by the Penguin Group. This book was originally published in 1970.
'The Bluest Eye' was Toni Morrison's first novel that takes place in the 1940's and is set in the author's girlhood hometown of Lorain, Ohio. This story is about a young girl named Pecola Breedlove who is about 11 years old and would give anything to have the bluest eyes. "Pecola is a delicate, sensitive and abused child when the story begins, and by the time the story ends, she has been just about completely destroyed by violence, and pain."
At the beginning of the story, Pecola desires two things that form her emotional life. First, she wants to learn how to get people to love her. Then when forced to witness her parents? terrible fights, she just wants to disappear. ?Neither wish is granted, and Pecola is forced further and further into her fantasy world, which is her only option of escaping the pain of her reality?.
Have you ever seen those porcelain dolls back in the day, which are just so pretty? Pecola found a beautiful porcelain doll that had blonde hair and blue eyes. The doll was so pretty. She was white because they have not yet came out with African American dolls until about the late 1980?s. Everyone that had blue eyes was known as the ?Beautiful One?s?. Pecola would give anything to be as beautiful as the porcelain doll that she found or the other girls at school.
Pecola believes that being granted the blue eyes that she wishes for would change both how others see her, and they would love her. She is forced to see beauty instead of ugliness. ?At the story?s end, she believes that her wish has been granted, but only at the cost of her san...
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...u feel? How do you think that Pecola feels?
Towards the end of the story, Pecola feels like she has gotten what she wanted. She does not have blue eyes but she feels beautiful like the porcelain dolls.
What does it cost her besides her sanity? Feeling beautiful and having people telling Pecola that she is beautiful has also cost her, her dignity. Because Pecola would do just abut anything for anyone as long as they made her feel beautiful. What a way to live, doing anything to have others making you feel and tell you, you are beautiful. The only voice telling Pecola that she is beautiful is her own.
It really shouldn?t matter what you look like on the outside because everyone is beautiful and that is what Pecola needs to realize. Even the people who do not have the bluest eyes, they are still beautiful. They just have to believe it before anyone else can.
The second stage of Pecola coming to think of herself as ugly simply compounds on the fact that she has no backup when her friends tell her that she is ugly and isn't worth a damn.
Throughout the novel, Pecola is easily manipulated into believing what society tells her, and soon becomes fixated in achieving “beauty”. Due to certain events, Pecola comes to believe that beauty is the panacea to her life’s problems and the key to happiness, demonstrating how manipulating the Master Narrative can be. One of the more subtle events that affect Pecola’s mindset is when she goes to purchase a Mary Jane candy bar. When Pecola goes up to Mr. Yacobowski with her money, he barely acknowledges her: “At some fixed point in time and space he senses that he need not waste the effort of a glance. He does not see her, because for him there is nothing to see” (48). To Mr. Yacobowski, Pecola is so far from the socially acceptable standards: she is a black, poor, and ugly child. Mr. Yacobowski’s blunt ignorance is similar to many other people’s reactions when Pecola is around. Pecola doesn’t know how to think for herself yet, and from this encounter she is forced to see herself, in the eyes of Mr....
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. 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.
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.
She faces constant criticism, has an aggressive home life, and lives in a society that considers beauty as being white, which negatively affects Pecola and leads her to fantasize about becoming more beautiful. She feels the only way to Morrison uses Shirley Temple to show Pecola’s fondness for beauty. Shirley Temple was a popular young actress during the 1930’s, and was known for her curly blonde hair and blue eyes. Pecola developed a fascination for Shirley Temple cups, “she was fond of the Shirley Temple cup and took every opportunity to drink milk out of it just to handle and see sweet Shirley’s face”(pg.23). This image shows that Pecola believes that having blue eyes will maker her life like Shirley making her more like a white child. Another instance showing this is when Pecola goes to the store she buys the candy Mary Jane, which has a girl with blue eyes on the wrapper. We see her fascination with Mary Jane’s blue eyes, and she felt if she ate the candy she would become Mary Jane. This is shown when Morrison writes, “To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane”(pg.50) When it comes to Pecola mother, there is similar racial self-loathing manifested in her as
rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes” (Morrison, 174). By
Upon reading The Bluest Eye a second time, I noticed something about the nature of Morrison's prose. The term that I have heard to describe the book most frequently is beautiful. The first chapters strike me as both incredibly realistic, and unbelievably beautiful. The fact that Morrison can give a scene where Claudia is actually throwing up on herself a rosy colored, nostalgic tint, and still manage to convey a sense of realism is a testament to Morrison's skill with words. The language certainly is beautiful, a sort of sensual prose, almost bordering on poetry. I also believe that the style of Morrison's descriptions is a key to understanding the major underlying theme of the novel, which is the association of rac...
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.
The world has led her to believe that she is ugly and that the epitome of "beautiful" requires blue eyes. Therefore, every night she prays that she will wake up with blue eyes. Brought up as a poor unwanted girl, Pecola Breedlove desires the acceptance and love of society. The image of "Shirley Temple beauty" surrounds her. In her mind, if she was to be beautiful, people would love and accept her.
In the 1940's as well as present day, the media pushed on society an image of perfection and beauty. This image is many times fake, but the naive cannot deceive, and it can become an icon of beauty. If you do not fall within the image then you are ugly. In the book "The Bluest Eye," we witness the power that the media has on specific characters: Pecola Breedlove, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer. The icon of beauty at that point in time is Shirley Temple, a white girl with blond hair and blue eyes. She is also the first reference to beauty in the book. Claudia explains her feelings towards Shirley Temple by saying, "...I had felt a stranger, more frightening thing than hatred for all the Shirley Temples of the world" (19). Claudia is relating the hatred that she felt towards Shirley Temple to the envy she has towards girls who are beautiful like Shirley. Claudia herself knows that the media is trying to imply this image she says, "Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signsall the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured" (20). This idea is repeated repetitively throughout the story, the idea that blue-eyed is beautiful. Frieda and Pecola love Shirley Temple while Claudia despises her with envy. Pecola once goes to purchase some candies called Mary Janes, she is very intrigued by the blue-eyed, blond girl in the wrapper. The narrator tells us that Pecola feels Mary Jane's eyes are pretty and that by eating the candy she feels the love that she has for the girl on the wrapper and she finds herself closer to her (50). The idea pushed by the media that blue eyes are beautiful builds up a strong destructive desire in Pecola.
Memoirs of A Geisha is an exotic fable is about a young, innocent girl named Chiyo (9 years old in 1929) who lives in a poor fishing village in Yoroido with her older sister Satsu, her father and sick mother. Since Chiyo’s mother was going to die soon and her father couldn’t do much to support their family, he sold his two daughters into slavery to a renowned geisha house. The bluest eyes in comparison has an extremely different story line due to the fact that the books are based around two completely different cultures. However the themes and messages portrayed in these books are that of a similar nature told through different perspectives. The Bluest Eye is about a young girl named Pecola. Her innermost desire is to have the "bluest" eyes so that others will view her as pretty, in the end that desire is what finishes her, she believes that God gives her blue eyes causing her insanity. Both of these books use extensive description which is brought out through the characters and narrators.
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
Pecola’s innocence is ripped from her grasp when her father rapes her physically and mentally. The community deals with its own insecurities but are taken out on this poor, “ugly”, black young girl. She protects herself from this sorrow behind her obsessive longing for beautiful blue eyes. To her surprise, her eyes do not replace the pain of the racial struggles she faces or the carrying her father’s baby. In The Bluest Eye, racism and beauty are approached in a very unconventional way.
She believes that beauty and self-worth are associated with whiteness and its attributes and, consequently, she cannot create positive self-image for herself. And since Pecola believes in her abjection as a black, every night she prays to God for blue eyes. Pecola believes that not only will the world around look more beautiful to her but that she too will look more beautiful to the world around her. Morrison uses Pecola’s character as a representative figure, reminding us as readers, of the many other black females who constantly feel the same desire to appear more white, even in today 's world. Just
The narration of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is actually a compilation of many different voices. The novel shifts between Claudia MacTeer's first person narrative and an omniscient narrator. At the end of the novel, the omniscient voice and Claudia's narrative merge, and the reader realizes this is an older Claudia looking back on her childhood (Peach 25). Morrison uses multiple narrators in order to gain greater validity for her story. According to Philip Page, even though the voices are divided, they combine to make a whole, and "this broader perspective also encompasses past and present... as well as the future of the grown-up Claudia" (55).