The Bluest Eye Analysis

424 Words1 Page
bulb-icon

Recommended: Beauty standards social construction

The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison and published in 1970 is the story of a young girl struggling with her sense of self-beauty. It’s the early 1940’s in Lorain, Ohio. This story talks about the struggles of self-beauty that young Pecola Breedlove goes through. She believes that if she had blue hair and blonde eyes she would be beautiful. Her story is told through the voices of Frieda and Claudia MacTeer. Pecola whom is the protagonist struggles with seeing her self- beauty and worth. A series of events in her life contributes to this feeling of her not feeling beautiful. Pecola yearns for blonde hair and blue eyes. She was infatuated with Shirley Temple and believed that she was the most beautiful thing she’d ever seen. …show more content…

Pecola lives a hard life with a mother who is a self-centered martyr and a father who is an abusive drunk. A series of events caused by her family and community causes for her to feel a sense of low self-esteem. Boys and someone who she thought was her friend, Maureen, tease Pecola. She also gets blamed for killing a cat. To add on to Pecola’s problems her father Cholly tries to burn down their house and she has to stay with the MacTeers. Once her family reunites and gets back together Cholly decides to one-day rape Pecola and by doing so he impregnates her. Her mother Pauline doesn’t believe her and in return beats her ruthlessly. Claudia and Frieda want for her baby to live and they believe that if they plant marigold seeds and the flower lives so will the baby. Unfortunately the baby dies during a premature birth. After losing the baby her father rapes her again causing her to go mad. She starts to see a positive side to her being raped. She then believes that she now has blue eyes. I think the audience will love the story that is being told about them, and their lives. Readers would relate to these characters because there are people out

Show More
Related

  • Angelas Ashes

    644 Words  | 2 Pages

    eat and keep the children healthy. Margaret, the only girl dies and Frankie's mother and

    Read More

  • The Liars Club: A Memoir Of Mary Karr's Life

    622 Words  | 2 Pages

    Charlie's mother, Grandma Moore was not a good mother. She was someone who only stuck up for Charlie and would pin Charlie against Mary and Lecia. Grandma Moore was diagnosed with cancer and to stop the cancer from spreading, the doctors

    Read More

  • Compare And Contrast Holden Caulfield And Jeannette Walls

    468 Words  | 1 Pages

    As she got older, Jeannette and her siblings made their own life, even as their parents became homeless. Jeannette and her older sister Lori decide to run away from their family in Virginia and go start a new life in New York City. However, after a few months, the rest of the family moves to New York and settles down. While in the City, Jeannette gets a job as a reporter, which was her life goal, and one day on her way to an event she sees her mother rummaging around in a dumpster. While the rest of the family gets along, Maureen, the youngest of the family goes insane and stabs their

    Read More

  • Use of Parody in Shrek

    764 Words  | 2 Pages

    and Fiona marry. And as said in the film they live ugly ever after. In

    Read More

  • Internal Struggles in The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

    772 Words  | 2 Pages

    ...her to feel despair. Her misery resulted in her doing unthinkable things such us the unexplainable bond with the woman in the wallpaper.

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Juno

    1379 Words  | 3 Pages

    So instead of getting an abortion, she makes up her mind to have the baby and give it up for adoption. She first has to tell her divorced father and stepmother, Mac and Bren, that she is pregnant. The parents take the news with little shock and respond t...

    Read More

  • Isolation And Loneliness in A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

    799 Words  | 2 Pages

    who wanted to enter her life, she is left alone after her father’s death. Her attitude

    Read More

  • Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

    2708 Words  | 6 Pages

    ...ror of Pecola’s first sexual experience: her father rapes her), and a difficult marriage situation (caused by his own drunkenness). The “bads” certainly outweigh the “goods” in his situation. Thus, the reader ought not to feel sympathy for Cholly. But, Morrison presents information about Cholly in such a way that mandates sympathy from her reader. This depiction of Cholly as a man of freedom and the victim of awful happenings is wrong because it evokes sympathy for a man who does not deserve it. He deserves the reader’s hate, but Morrison prevents Cholly covered with a blanket of undeserved, inescapable sympathy. Morrison creates undeserved sympathy from the reader using language and her depiction of Cholly acting within the bounds of his character. This ultimately generates a reader who becomes soft on crime and led by emotions manipulated by the authority of text.

    Read More

  • Motifs In The Bluest Eye

    853 Words  | 2 Pages

    In the young girls' minds, blue eyes are the primary representation of what they see as the ideal image of those around them. They have built this ideal image from the things and

    Read More

  • The Most Tragic Character in Medea by Euripides

    1346 Words  | 3 Pages

    tragedy in her life has caused her to act in such a way. She is left

    Read More

  • Beauty and The Bluest Eye

    416 Words  | 1 Pages

    Toni Morrison's novel, The Bluest Eye contributes to the study of the American novel by bringing to light an unflattering side of American history. The story of a young black girl named Pecola, growing up in Lorain, Ohio in 1941 clearly illustrates the fact that the "American Dream" was not available to everyone. The world that Pecola inhabits adores blonde haired blue eyed girls and boys. Black children are invisible in this world, not special, less than nothing. The idea that the color of your skin somehow made you lesser was cultivated by both whites and blacks. White skin meant beauty and privilege and that idea was not questioned at this time in history. The idea that the color of your skin somehow made you less of a person contaminated black people's lives in many different ways. The taunts of schoolboys directed at Pecola clearly illustrate this fact; "It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth" (65). This self hatred also possessed an undercurrent of anger and injustice that eventually led to the civil rights movement.

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye

    1323 Words  | 3 Pages

    Throughout Toni Morrison’s controversial debut The Bluest Eye, several characters are entangled with the extremes of human cruelty and desire. A once innocent Pecola arguably receives the most appalling treatment, as not only is she exposed to unrelenting racism and severe domestic abuse, she is also raped and impregnated by her own father, Cholly. By all accounts, Cholly should be detestable and unworthy of any kind of sympathy. However, over the course of the novel, as Cholly’s character and life are slowly brought into the light and out of the self-hatred veil, the reader comes to partially understand why Cholly did what he did and what really drives him. By painting this severely flawed yet completely human picture of Cholly, Morrison draws comparison with how Pecola was treated by both of her undesirable parents. According to literary educator Allen Alexander, even though Cholly was cripplingly flawed and often despicable, he was a more “genuine” person to Pecola than Pauline was (301). Alexander went on to claim that while Cholly raped Pecola physically, Pauline and Soaphead Church both raped her mental wellbeing (301). Alexander is saying that the awful way Pecola was treated in a routine matter had an effect just as great if not greater than Cholly’s terrible assault. The abuse that Pecola lived through was the trigger that shattered her mind. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses the characters of Cholly Breedlove and Frieda McTeer to juxtapose sexual violence and mental maltreatment in order to highlight the terrible effects of mental abuse.

    Read More

  • The Role Of Women In A Streetcar Named Desire By Tennessee Williams

    981 Words  | 2 Pages

    and moves to Stella ­ her sister who gave up aristocratic roots and decided to live like a

    Read More

  • Analysis Of Toni Morrison's 'The Bluest Eye'

    1087 Words  | 3 Pages

    One who has experienced life must acknowledge "That world contains many things, and on the level of society, part of what it contains is the political reality of the time - power structures, relations among classes, issues of justice and rights, interactions between the sexes and among various racial and ethnic constituencies" (Foster 115). The reality of American society is the learned conformism to stereotype, ostracize, discriminate, and to be prejudice to one another based on the societal definitions of beauty, success, and normality. The African American female Literature Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, explored America’s racial prejudice of the 1940s in her eye-opening novel The Bluest Eye. Through developing a parallel structure between

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye Marxism Analysis

    1649 Words  | 4 Pages

    “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder”: A Marxist reading of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

    Read More

More about The Bluest Eye Analysis

Open Document