An insight to the beauty standards of Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye” “The Bluest Eye” is a story, written as a Bildungsroman, set in Ohio. It is a novel about growing up as a black female in America during the years following the great depression. In the text “Out of Sight: Toni Morrison’s Revision of Beauty”, Malin LaVon Walther mentions that Morrison in “The Bluest Eye” (1970) presents a black community that has taken the white criteria and ideals for their own. This is an accurate statement since there are many fragments in the book where Toni Morrison shows how the standards of white beauty have taken the colored women’s attention. These particular beauty ideals have imprinted to the colored girls in their early days, and follow them through life.
“Toni Morrison has written several novels known for their epic themes and vivid dialogue.” Some of the novels include “The Bluest Eye” and “Song of Solomon”. In both novels, Morrison references the ongoing issue of racism. Morrison uses the settings and the goal that each main character strives to achieve as similarities.
This paper analyses Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Her first novel. The novel is based on the story of Margaret Garner recorded in The American Baptist in 1856 that Morrison came across while collecting material for The Black Book, a collection of memorabilia in 1974.
What is the most pressing issue facing society today? In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison argues that it is beauty standards, even calling physical beauty “the most destructive idea[] in the history of human thought” (122). While this may seem outrageous in a world of terrorism, global warming, homelessness, and hunger, beauty standards and the feelings of inferiority that stem from them affect everybody. In severe cases, these feelings can even manifest themselves deeply inside of a person and lead to eating disorders, depression, anxiety, self-hatred, and even suicide. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses the insecurities of the female characters to demonstrate that beauty standards are a danger to society, as they perpetuate racism and self-hatred.
Rhetorical Analysis Essay The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison takes place in Ohio in the 1940s. The novel is written from the perspective of African Americans and how they view themselves. Focusing on identity, Morrison uses rhetorical devices such as imagery, dictation, and symbolism to help stress her point of view on identity. In the novel the author argues that society influences an individual 's perception on beauty, which she supports through characters like Pecola and Mrs. Breedlove.
Throughout the novel The Bluest Eyes Toni Morrison’s gives the reader a clear depiction of abuse and the affects of abuse. A good definition of abuse is treating a person or animal with cruelty or violence. In this novel Morrison reveals to the reader that abuse can come in Two and can be passed down from adult to child. The first form of abuse is mental abuse, the second form is physically, and finally the idea that there is a cycle to abuse
Many try to fulfill the society’s standards of being beautiful. In this case, a little, black girl, who lives in a white society, attempts to reach this standard. Her desire for external beauty results in insanity. In Toni Morrison’s, The Bluest Eye, the use of symbolism presents itself through the allusion of a “Dick and Jane” story, blue eyes, and physical beauty. One use of symbolism that is presented in the novel is the allusion of a “Dick and Jane” series.
In The Bluest Eye, Morrison offers multiple perspectives to help explain the intensity of racism and what it means to be oppressed and degraded in society. Through the eyes of various characters, readers are taken on a journey during the 1940s to demonstrate how each black character copes with the unfair standards and beliefs that society has. While some of the characters internalize self-hatred and have the desire to be someone else, others do not wish to change themselves to fit into the societal standards. Throughout the novel, there are clear and distinct remarks that are made to help distinguish the difference between white characters and black characters which is quite crucial. Morrison uses dirt and cleanliness to symbolize how society
Morrison satirizes the internalized racism and what it can do to the most vulnerable member of a community, a young girl. At the same time, she does not want to dehumanize the people who wound this girl, because that would simple repeat their mistakes. Morrison decided to write a novel about how internalized racism affects young black girls in a range of ways, some petty and minute, some tragic and overwhelming. " Many critics explore how Morrison challenges prevailing stereotypes of African American women, especially in the women centered novels, like The Bluest Eye " (Raynor and Butler
The Bluest Eye is a satire that criticizes the American society in 1940. The black characters are interested in their own affairs abandoning other characters issues. As a matter of fact, the idea of neighborhood is a brilliant one as well as it shows the destruction of the African American society. To exemplify this, the neighborhood is fully aware of the miserable conditions of the Breedloves; the father, Cholly, is drunk and unemployment, the mother, Pauline, is brutal against her children and the daughter, Pecola, is victimized and lost. Although this full awareness of this horrible circumstances, no one gives them his hand even when they know that Cholly raped his daughter.
Morrison is among the pioneer of those contemporary black writers who have redefined African- American writings in more ways than one. This assignment will focus on the aspects of gender bias and double consciousness in The Bluest Eye. The Bluest Eye works at different layers of the lives of black people. At one level it accounts for the racial discrimination faced by Afro-Americans throughout their life time.
Root, Identity and Community have always been the underlying theme of Toni Morrison. Through the accounts of her novels, Toni Morrison shows several ways in which slavery, which was the most oppressive period in the black history, has affected the identity of African American. In Bluest Eye, Morrison shows that a black woman who searches for her true identity feels frustrated by her blackness and yearns to be white because of the constant fear of being rejected in her surroundings. Thus Morrison tries to locate post colonial black identity in the socio-political ground where cultures are hybridized, powers are negotiated and individuals are reproduced as resistant agents. She not only writes about claiming the superiority by the white but also
In Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, she validates her theme of how society can corrupt people through the portrayal of a conflicted society of racism to show segregation between the white and nonwhite, symbolic blue eyes to portray what the characters desperately desire in order to have a better life, and an abused
Toni Morrison, the first black women Nobel Prize winner, in her first novel, The Bluest Eye depicts the tragic condition of the blacks in racist America. It examines how the ideologies perpetuated by the dominant groups and adopted by the marginal groups influence the identity of the black women. Through the depictions of white beauty icons, Morrison’s black characters lose themselves to self-hatred. They try to obliterate their heritage, and eventually like Pecola Breedlove, the child protagonist, who yearns for blue eyes, has no recourse except madness. This assignment focusses on double consciousness and its devastating effects on Pecola.
Toni Morrison, in numerous interviews, has said that her reason for writing The Bluest Eye was that she realized there was a book she wanted very much to read that had not been written yet. She set out to construct that book – one that she says was about her, or somebody like her. For until then, nobody had taken a little black girl—the most vulnerable kind of person in the world—seriously in literature; black female children have never held centre stage in anything. Thus with the arrival of the character Pecola Breedlove, a little hurt black girl is put to the centre of the story. Pecola’s quest is to acquire “Shirley Temple beauty” and blue eyes – ideals of beauty sponsored by the white world.
