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Toni Morrison the Effects of Popular Culture
We the readers see pain and the effect that the beauty brings to the book The Bluest Eye. The book goes into very deep detail of the character Pecole Breedlove who believes and knows that she has no beauty at all. The media today as well in the 1940’s has a very high image of what beauty is to them and around the world. The media tries to make images look like they are perfectionist. The media tries to make you feel bad about yourself that way you will want to look like the image they are displaying. When most of the times the pictures and videos that they are putting out there in the world are very much fake. But the young cannot differentiate that it’s fake because they are blind by the beauty.
Shirley Temple was the first image that was equal to beauty in The Bluest Eye. Shirley Temple was the perfectionist as this time in 1940. She was your average young talented TV star. She was a little white girl with blue eye and
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Pecola now finds herself feeling really close to the beautiful girl on the candy wrapper. This here is showing another reason on how the media builds a strong image on the world’s perfectionist and beauties. “If those eyes of her were different, that is to say beautiful, she herself would be different”. (Morrison 46) Pecola has now come to believe that to be beautiful you have to have blue eyes. She begins to pray to God that she can be blessed with blue eyes. Everyone is involved to what Pecola is feeling in the novel. “Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.” (Morrison 46) Pecole is relating to what she see’s on the media. Today numerous celebrities make commercials and take pictures for articles in magazine to show how you need to look in, if you want to fit in, in this world or like I say how they want you to
people. In her eyes, her skin is too dark, and the color of her skin
Claudia MacTeer in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye looks longingly upon society from the outside. Growing up the youngest in the family as well as in a racial minority leaves Claudia feeling excluded and left out. She desires a place within the group society has formed without her. She desires to fit in and be accepted. Claudia desperately wants to experience life to the fullest. She does not want to miss out on any event. Claudia's curiosity is often her conscious motivation to get involved, but the reasons that she acts the way she does go deeper than that. Her personality and character traits make fitting in unfortunately hard to accomplish.
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.
"And Pecola. She hid behind hers. (Ugliness) Concealed, veiled, eclipsed--peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask" (Morrison 39). In the novel The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, the main character, Pecola, comes to see herself as ugly. This idea she creates results from her isolation from friends, the community, and ever her family. There are three stages that lead up to Pecola portraying herself as an ugly human being. The three stages that lead to Pecola's realization are her family's outlook toward her, the community members telling her she is ugly, and her actually accepting what the other say or think about her. Each stage progresses into the other to finally reach the last stage and the end of the novel when Pecola eventually has to rely on herself as an imaginary friend so she will have someone to talk to.
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison shows that anger is healthy and that it is not something to be feared; those who are not able to get angry are the ones who suffer the most. She criticizes Cholly, Polly, Claudia, Soaphead Church, the Mobile Girls, and Pecola because these blacks in her story wrongly place their anger on themselves, their own race, their family, or even God, instead of being angry at those they should have been angry at: whites.
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
The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison that reveals many lessons and conflicts between young and adult characters of color. The setting takes place during the 1940s in Lorain, Ohio. The dominant speaker of this book is a nine year old girl named Claudia MacTeer who gets to know many of her neighbors. As a result of this, Claudia learns numerous lessons from her experience with the citizens of Lorain. Besides Claudia, The Bluest Eye is also told through many characters for readers to understand the connection between each of the adults and children. Many parents in the novel like Geraldine and Pauline Breedlove clearly show readers how adults change their own children. Furthermore, other adult characters like Cholly Breedlove simply show the continuation of how one is affected from the beginning of childhood through adulthood. The characters who have shared experiences and moments of hardship in their lives support the lessons Toni Morrison reveals to readers in The Bluest Eye. The failure of adults is an important theme Toni Morrison shows all readers in The Bluest Eye because the failures of adults affect children. One example that shows how the failures of adults affect children in this novel is through Geraldine. Geraldine fails to love her son and parent well. Geraldine is a middle class woman who is married and has a son named Junior. She sees herself as a “colored person” rather than a “nigger” because she hates the blackness in her and fears the differences of these two interpretations. Because of this Geraldine has so much self-hatred that she expresses it towards her family. In this quote, Morrison reveals to readers that Geraldine has greater love for her cat than Junior.
To begin, "The Bluest Eye" is Toni Morrison's first novel. This novel tells a story of an African American girl's desire for the bluest eyes, which is the symbol for her of what it means to feel beautiful and accepted in society (American). In the novel, women suffer from the racial oppression, but they also suffer from violation and harsh actions brought to them by men (LitCharts). Male oppression is told all throughout the story, but the theme of women and feminity with the actions of male oppression over the women reaches its horrible climax
Many American's today are not satisfied with their physical appearance. They do not feel that they are as beautiful as the women on television or in magazines. The media is brainwashing American females that if they are not slim and have blonde hair and blue eyes, they are not beautiful. This causes women not only to hate the ideal females, but also hate themselves. In Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye two of her main characters, Claudia and Pecola show hatred toward others, and themselves because they are not as beautiful as the supreme females.
The Bluest Eye depicts the tone of passion. As the readers progress through the novel, the passion of black women expressed in-depth to the readers to show how their desires were to fit in with society. In the season Spring, chapter nine, page 138, Morrison writes:
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.
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 feels that she did not belong in society because of her skin color, because she did not have blue eye as she wished. This is an issue question of race and discrimination. Pecola should learn to appreciate her body just the way God mad her. Everyone has their own beauty, and people don’t need to have light skin and certain color of eye to be considered beautiful. At the end of the day, inner beauty is what defines who you really are. Pecola cares more about what other people think of her and how they see her which can relate to so many readers. Also, society is not the only thing that makes her feel that way, she is the one that lets them feed into her. No one can make you feel bad about yourself without you already having that feeling inside of you; she does not accept herself the way she is. Every night before she goes to bed as mention in the book she always pray for blue eyes. No one should feel that way about themselves. We should love ourselves no matter what, God made us all beautiful in our own way and that is what we should believe and trust in. if someone can’t love their self how can they expect for other people to love them? No one will love someone i if they do not love