The world is filled with labels, some negative and some positive. When it comes to negative labeling, a person’s sense of beauty in themselves and in the world is impacted. In The Bluest Eye, author Toni Morrison uses her characters such as Pecola to illustrate how another’s labeling can alter the way one internalizes his or her own beauty; Morrison poses an overall negative storyline filled with labels and discrimination that in turn allows the reader to identify the highlighted and deeper beauty that is not always visible to the naked eye. Pecola, a young girl during a time of extreme racism and discrimination, is raised in an abusive and unstable home. The effects of the abuse on Pecola has a large impact on her views of the world and …show more content…
She has three cents in her shoe and could not be any more innocent or excited than a young child on their way to receive a treat that will wash all of their worries way. On the way, Pecola notices a dandelions sprouting around a telephone pole that catches her eye. “Why, she wonders, do people call them weeds? She thought they were pretty,” (47). Pecola has the ability to look at the simplicity of the flower, not its negative label as a weed that should be gotten rid of. Similar to the flower, she is treated by the way she has been labeled: as a poor, ugly, black girl. It is noticeable that the author points out Pecola’s ability to recognize the negative label of the flower and still find beauty within. After arriving at the store, the clerk treats her harshly due to her appearance and because of this Pecola has a hard time finding her confidence to do such a simple task such as buying a piece of candy. When leaving the store, Pecola is overwhelmed with shame and embarrassment of herself due to the ugly way the clerk interacted with her. While passing the flowers again, the narrator writes, “She thinks, ‘They are ugly. They are just weeds,” (50). After experiencing the internal labeling of Pecola that the clerk acts on, Pecola analyzes this treatment and believes it must be her own fault, as she is continuously treated so harshly and has never had anyone to show her what she
In Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson”, readers read through the perspective of a young black girl named Sylvia. She, along with her cousin and a few friends, are taken on educational field trips with an educated African American woman named Ms. Moore. Sylvia believes she just wants to prevent them from having any fun and finds Ms. Moore to be odd person because she makes it clear that she wants an involvement in their lives. It is an involvement that is seen as a total nuisance. Yet as their teacher, she tries to give them an education that is hard for them to achieve due to their families’ financial status and how the color of their skin affects their position in the world.
Although Flannery O’Connor’s short story, “The Lame Shall Enter First,” creates a wicked atmosphere through its plot and characters, it can easily be compared to “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin with its dangerous environment within the city of Harlem. The evil shown in both of these stories are reflected through the effects of family neglect, the main characters’ persistence for change and the outcomes, and the secondary characters that are primary source of darkness. Family neglect and the different effects it can have on people are shown within O’Connor’s and Baldwin’s short stories. O’Connor shows this through the opposing circumstances it had on Sheppard and Norton. After his wife’s death, Sheppard took up a life of serving for the needy
The character of Pecola Shows
Delicate and sensitive, she passively suffers the abuse of her mother, father, and classmates. She is a symbol of the black community’s self-hatred and belief in its own ugliness. Others in the community, including her mother and father, act out their own self-hatred by expressing hatred towards her. Pecola’s desire for blue eyes comes from her stereotypical perception that as a black female, she needs to look beautiful to be treated beautifully. She believes that being granted the blue eyes that she wishes for would change both how others see her and what she is forced to see.
Later in the book, Toni Morrison uses Pecola’s own conviction of being “ugly” to show that she truly believes that if she changed her physical appearance to match those at the top of the race and beauty hierarchies, her perception of her reality would be ameliorated. Back at home after her parents’ fight, Pecola ponders the unfair way she is treated by teachers compared to her Caucasian classmates at school. When the narrator says, “It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights—if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different. Maybe they’d say, ‘Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn’t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes’”
Combined with her isolation and experiences of discrimination, Pecola concludes that she herself was ugly, and because of that, hates
Pecola and her mother, Pauline, see themselves as ugly because they hold themselves to beauty standards in which light-skinned people are the ideal. Pecola and her mother have a brutal home life due to the drunken violence of Cholly Breedlove, and the constant pressure of beauty standards only adds to their misfortune. Morrison explains this pressure by asserting that “[i]t was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they
Connie from “Where are you going, Where have you been?” by Joyce Carol Oates represents a situation opposite of that which Pecola is subject to. Connie “knew she was pretty and that was everything” (Seagull Reader 337). She had “long dark blonde hair that drew anyone’s eye to it” (337). She lived with her parents and sister in a comfortable home.
Throughout Toni Morrison's short story "Recitatif", there is a continuous undertone of racial tension between the two main characters, Twyla and Roberta. Although it is never disclosed which character is white and which is black, Morrison makes it clear that the two are on opposite sides of the fence in this tension. The story takes place over many years of the character's lives and examines five different time periods in which their lives intertwine. In this paper I will examine how Morrison strategically manipulates our own thoughts on racial stereotypes to muddle our ability to discern the races of Twyla and Roberta as they grow and their paths stray. To start, to stereotype is "to believe unfairly that all people or things with a particular
Due to all of this, Pecola goes crazy, becoming schizophrenic and inventing someone to help her deal with her pain. She is always flapping her wings, a metaphor using the motif of birds showing how Pecola must get away from her family to end her suffering (Morrison 158). At the same time, the prostitutes, which are considered “ruined” to society, stand
The first memory I have of a classroom is from the first grade when my teacher asked the class the meaning of “breeze”. I remember the silence in the room as we mulled over the foreign word. I thought I had heard the word before in a “Chicken Soup” story my mom had read to me the other night. So, I shot my hand up in the air and said, “breeze is like the wind”. My teacher smiled at me.
1) Society has change the way Pecola perceives herself and she has the idea in her mind that her life would be less miserable if she has blue eyes. She is always thinking that “if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (Morrison 46). Pecola has gotten the impression of her life being complete if only she has blue eyes. She would see the eyes of others and become envious of their blue eyes. The boys at school would always pick on her and call her an ugly black girl.
As Paul C. Taylor declares, “the most prominent type of racialized ranking represents blackness as a condition to be despised, and most tokens of this type extend this attitude to cover the physical features that are central to the description of black identity” (16). Such attitudes are found in the words of black women themselves, when they talk about Pecola’s baby, saying that it “ought to be a law: two ugly people doubling up like that to make more ugly. Be better off in the ground” (188). Without any support from her community or even family, Pecola is a character who is
Morrison 's first novel, The Bluest Eye, examines the tragic effects of imposing white, middle-class American ideals of beauty on the developing female identity of a young African American girl during the early 1940s. Inspired by a conversation Morrison once had with an elementary school classmate who wished for blue eyes, the novel poignantly shows the psychological devastation of a young black girl, Pecola Breedlove, who searches for love and acceptance in a world that denies and devalues people of her own race. As her mental state slowly unravels, Pecola hopelessly longs to possess the conventional American standards of feminine beauty—namely, white skin, blonde hair, and blue eyes—as presented to her by the popular icons and traditions of white culture. Written as a fragmented narrative from multiple perspectives and with significant typographical deviations, The Bluest Eye juxtaposes passages from the Dick-and-Jane grammar school primer with memories and stories of Pecola 's life alternately told in retrospect by one of Pecola 's now-grown childhood friends and by an omniscient narrator. Published in the midst of the Black Arts movement that flourished during the late 1960s and early 1970s, The Bluest Eye has attracted
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.