Theme Of Beauty In The Bluest Eye

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For young people, physical beauty has become an American value, a prerequisite for acceptance into a vein, racist and unethical American society. The story of Pecola, a young black girl, growing up in Ohio in 1941 clearly shows the fact that the “American Dream” was not available to everyone. Black children are invisible in this world, not special and almost nothing. The vision that the color of your skin somehow made you unimportant by both blacks and whites. White skin meant beauty, and cleanliness; that idea was not questioned at this time in history. In this book Toni Morrison presents that beauty is “The American Dream.”
In the story, The Bluest Eye, Pecola is always being called ugly by nearly everybody, from the mean kids at school to her own mother at home. This constant criticism, the constant bullying, and her rough family life lead Pecola to seek escape from her misery by dreaming about being more beautiful. Pecola starts to trust that if she could gain physical beauty, her life would become better. This false dream turns out to be a destructive nightmare to Pecola, not only consuming her whole life but, eventually, her sanity. In Chapter 1, Pecola drinks three quarts of milk out of a Shirley Temple cup just so she can look down at Shirley Temple's white face, here we can see a girl who is starting to obsess over her role model in a really creepy way. Its not a mistake that in this scene she is drinking white milk. She thinks by her consuming this substance in a certain cup she thinks that she will accomplish the prerequisite of becoming beautiful. Pecola's dream to achieve a white kind of beauty is not only linked to America's beauty obsession, but Pecola also thinks that if she were prettier, her parents wouldn't figh...

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...at her eyes are "bluer" than everyone else's.
What I found extraordinarily interesting was the fact that Pecola eventually gets "blue eyes" but with these eyes she becomes almost ignorant to the people that surround her, especially their reactions towards her. She believes that everyone is avoiding her like: not talking to her, not flattering her eyes, and not making eye contact, because the people she comes across with could be envious of her “blue eyes”. Another thing I found interesting about it was the irony of the position of her having “blue eyes”. Many blind people have blue eyes, and Pecola when she gets blue eyes she automatically becomes blind. Obviously she is not literally blind, but figuratively she is blind to what I have mentioned, as well as to the fact that she does not actually have blue eyes, and also her life has not improved at all with them.

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