ipl-logo

Survival In The Bluest Eye

1179 Words5 Pages

Survival tactics are one of the fine threads when Toni Morrison weaves the novel The Bluest Eye. Through Pocola Breedlove, the protagonist delineates how the little girl succumbs to the concept of assimilation to escape the fury of oppression. Relaxing her own individuality as Pecola started assimilating the white beauty ideals and failing to assimilate her black culture. Her longing for the blue eyes and the ideal of white beauty drives the mantra of the black people to the back seat that “Black is Beautiful”. The Bluest Eye is Morrison’s first novel published in 1970. The novel contains various personal components. It is set in the town where Morrison grew up, and it is narrated from the perspective of a nine-year-old, the age Morrison would have been …show more content…

Her physical deformity is her “ugliness”, a perception that is shared by the community and that forms the girl’s own identity. Pecola Breedlove is a young African American girl coming of age during the 1940s. She yearns to be respected and recognised by her own people as well as in a world that discards and diminishes the importance of the members of her own race and outlines magnificence according to an Anglo Saxon traditional touchstone. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola is wanting for beauty and her identity for her survival is through illusionary assimilation into the beauty ideals of the white world. She wants not only to be beautiful but also some kind of an ideal of beauty for other girls. Christian Barbara in her book Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers points out that “...The beauty searched for in the book is not just the possession of blue eyes, but the harmony that they symbolize… (25)”. The Characters not just endure part of separation at the hands of White people only, but they are also the victims of their White beauty. They are made to live in misery and trouble from the White people and their beauty standards as

Show More
Related

  • How Does James Baldwin Romanticize The Blues

    163 Words  | 1 Pages

    The blues is a musical form, a genre used to communicate the troubles of those who conduct it. It is a powerful form of expression, yet it is the form of suffering literally transformed into entertainment. When people face the sorrows and tragedies in life, they resort to different methods of coping to relieve themselves of this. Through destructive methods such as alcoholism and drugs they may attempt to escape from their problems, but will never truly be free from this suffering and will continue to struggle. James Baldwin creates a story that embraces this feeling.

    Read More

  • Essay On The Bluest Eye Beauty

    1630 Words  | 7 Pages

    Pecola wanted to have blue eyes because things may have been easy for her and her life may be better. Pauline messed up foot and fallen teeth made her feel so ugly and she did not wanted to fit in with society was of beauty she didn’t love herself. Cholly had always been neglected by her parents society and he had never learned how to love it affected him in the long run and a traumatic event in his life had scared him as a result. It is why beauty is undeserved for those who are called ugly according to

    Read More

  • The Effects Of Oppression On Young Black People

    265 Words  | 2 Pages

    These oppressions persist today and so do their effects on black families and even more in young black people. Because Morrison makes the issue not only beauty but also our perception of ugli-ness in general, the problem of the “ugly little girl asking for beauty” is a cultural problem. Every time a young person looks in the mirror and sees that they are not as beautiful as a movie star or not as as beautiful as the television, magazine, and billboard ads tells them they should be, they feel the fear of rejection and abandonment, and through this novel, readers have experienced the emotional pain of that which destroyed Pecola. “Suffering with Pecola, knowing that pain con-sciously, feeling it, acknowledging it openly and directly, most of

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye Beauty Standards Essay

    975 Words  | 4 Pages

    They constantly encounter the problem of not living up to society’s beauty standards, which results in feelings of self-hatred based on race. These feelings perpetuate racism, as society, and even black people, tend to favor white beauty since it is held up as superior. The problems that Pecola, Pauline, and Claudia face in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are not just figments of the past. Today, millions of women across the country feel some sort of self-loathing stemming from dissatisfaction over how they look. It is important that society tries to free itself from these nonsensical standards and celebrate the unique beauty of each individual

    Read More

  • Cultural Feminism In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

    856 Words  | 4 Pages

    Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye (1970) makes a scathing attack on the imposition of white/Anglo-Saxon standards of beauty on black women and creation of cultural perversion. It presents a critique of the dominant aesthetic that is internalized by majority of the black community, and attempts to deconstruct the meta-ethnicity, which exercises a hegemonic control over the lives of blacks in America. The political connotations of ethnicity are derived from the desire of minority ethnic groups in a multi-ethnic society to resist oppression by the dominant culture. The celebration of a separate identity constitutes its cultural corollary.

    Read More

  • Symbolism In The Bluest Eye

    1647 Words  | 7 Pages

    Many of the black characters, including Pecola, Cholly, and Pauline believe that they are indeed “ugly” and “dirty” because it’s what society has wanted people to think since the beginning of time. This idea that they are worth nothing and that there is no beauty or cleanliness in them has become embedded in their memories considering it is all they’ve ever known while growing up. Pecola and her family “did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the cutbacks at the plant. They lived there because they were poor and black, and they stayed there because they believed they were ugly” (38). While some of the black characters in The Bluest Eye are very much confident in themselves, there are characters like the Breedloves, who have succumbed to society’s opinion and have started to believe that they are the equivalent of dirtiness.

    Read More

  • [UNK] Descent: The Devastating Effects Of Racism And Abuse In Society

    754 Words  | 4 Pages

    Pecola’s Descent: The Devastating Effects of Racism and Abuse in Society Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye Illustrates how a lack of emotional sustenace from her family, sexual abuse, and societal racism all led to Pecola’s descent into hysteria. Toni Morrison explored this through the character Pecola Breedlove. Pecola Breedlove is a young black girl growing up in the 1940’s when society was full of racism and hate.

    Read More

  • Outline The Importance Of Safeguarding One's Cultural Identity

    295 Words  | 2 Pages

    The purpose of this investigation is to outline how the dominance of the white culture has created racial partiality for people of color blackpeople of color face living within a society where white aesthetics are the only factors equated to beauty, power and worth. Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye demonstrates the importance of safeguarding one’s cultural identity. The question examined is “in what ways and with what results does Morrison use the motif of the eye to highlight the theme of beauty within the novel The Bluest Eye”? The cause for the self hate black characters are seen developing is due to the eye, which represents the ignorant look the white society gives to the black community.

    Read More

  • The American Dream In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

    1002 Words  | 5 Pages

    The social standards of beauty and the idea of the American Dream in The Bluest Eye leads Mrs. Breedlove to feelings of shame that she later passes on to Pecola. The Breedloves are surrounded by the idea of perfection, and their absence of it makes them misfits. Mrs. Breedlove works for a white family, the Fishers. She enjoys the luxury of her work life and inevitably favors her work over her family. This leads Pecola to struggle to find her identity, in a time where perception is everything.

    Read More

  • Identity In The Bluest Eye

    835 Words  | 4 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • The Effects Of Motherhood In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

    3280 Words  | 14 Pages

    It is the mother’s vulnerability to the racial standards of beauty that is transmitted to the daughter and ultimately leads to her victimization. In fact, the reason of Pauline’s vulnerability to the racially prejudiced notions of beauty lies in her relationship with her own mother. The relationship between Pecola Breedlove, the protagonist, and her mother, Pauline Breedlove, is ironically characterized by lack of love, and emotional attachment, indifference, frustration and cruelty. Set in a small town in Ohio, during the Depression, The Bluest Eye is the story of eleven year old Pecola Breedlove, who, victimized by the racist society, yearns for blue eyes, which, she believes, will make her worthy of love, happiness and acceptance in the

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye Essay

    1401 Words  | 6 Pages

    The purpose of the book is to show how a young girl felt in the society that was around her and how she wanted to change due to the what the culture of the world at that time was saying. The Bluest Eye is a book about a nine year old girl, Claudia Macteer and her sister Frieda who take in Mr. Henry who is a tenant at the house and Pecola Breedove, a foster child. Pecola is a young girl who is described as a dark skin, curly hair and, brown eyed girl. Pecola hates her appearance and thinks she is ugly she desires to have blonde hair and blue

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye Research Paper

    1260 Words  | 6 Pages

    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

    Read More

  • Theme Of Double Consciousness In The Bluest Eye

    1542 Words  | 7 Pages

    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.

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye Beauty

    355 Words  | 2 Pages

    Joe Bender 04/22/2016 T.O. Critical Reading Beauty in the eyes of the beholder Confucius once said, “Everything has beauty, but not everyone sees it.” In this novel written by Toni Morrison called “The Bluest Eye”, a 11-year-old African American girl named Pecola searches for her beauty and tries to fend off all of the social norms and attitudes of those around her that lead her to believe she is ugly. She is raised in a family that doesn’t show much affection, and in a community that is a bit racist towards African Americans. These racist views of her community blur Pecola’s views of beauty and lead her to believe dark skin makes her automatically ugly, and that every white person with blue eyes is the definition of beautiful.

    Read More

More about Survival In The Bluest Eye

Open Document