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Beauty In The Bluest Eye

1097 Words5 Pages

Not many people realize how much white standards of beauty, like having blonde hair and blue eyes, affect people of different races. Society has guaranteed that ‘being beautiful’ is not only hard to achieve for people of color, but impossible in many cases. An African American girl cannot change her eye color to one that has been deemed ‘pretty,’ and yet she lets society tell her that not having those pretty eyes is somehow bad. Society has deemed black culture as something dirty and beneath those who have obtained society’s idea of beauty. Caucasian beauty standards influence every main character in the book “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, and it leads to the emotional downfall of Pecola Breedlove. Being beautiful becomes the character’s …show more content…

Many other characters are affected by the fact that they are not what society has deemed beautiful. The character Geraldine is a clear example of an adult who has become obsessed with chasing the ideals of white beauty. In the book, she has shaped her whole life around being as perfect as possible and in doing so, she abandons her sense of self and gives up her culture. She becomes uncaring for those around her, and focusses only on the “order, precision and constancy” of her life (85). She feels no love towards her husband or her son, and only likes the family’s cat. Her desire to have such an ideal family tortures her son. Geraldine feels that she must raise a clean and morally right child, but she does not feel that she has to have any type of bond with him; simply put, she does not love him. She did not let him cry when he was a baby, nor did she “talk to him, coo to him, or indulge him in kissing bouts” (86). She also has the barber “cut [Junior’s] hair as close to his scalp as possible,” with a part etched in to make him look more white (87). Also, even though Junior wants to play with the other black kids, Geraldine will not let

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