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The Bluest Eye Beauty Standards Essay

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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. 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 …show more content…

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

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In both The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison and Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me a main theme is image. Morrison uses Claudia, an African American child, to show a distinct hatred for the beauty standard. She had such a strong disdain for Shirley Temple and the white doll she was given as a gift. Her detest for these things was because she could never have those things, the beauty was unattainable.

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Likewise, Morrison also uses symbolism for the duration of the novel to establish how people can judge a person based on their economic standing. For instance, symbolism is represented through the blue eyes that is repeatedly mentioned in the novel. The blue eyes represent the idealistic white middle class life that Pecola dreams of having since white people commonly have blue eyes. The reader can infer this suggestion because whenever Pecola is experiencing bad things she wishes to have blue eyes. Morrison writes, "If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different and Mrs. Breedlove too…Each night, without fail, she prayed for the blue eyes…

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In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses character development to address racism and self-image in 1940s. Throughout the novel, Morrison shows how the characters react to the society and how the society treats them. The characters, such as, Pecola Breedlove, want to have the ideal beauty and to be treated differently. She thinks if she has blue eyes she will be treated better and be like everyone else. Since the novel takes place during the Civil Rights Movement, racism and other discrimination determine characters’ self-worth.

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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.

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The Bluest Eye illustrates the damage done to a black child when the way she is defined by white society obliterates all positive definitions of her self-worth. Gurleen Grewal reflects that “individuals collude in their own oppression by internalizing the dominant culture’s values in the face of great material contradictions” (21). Indeed, it is evident in the novel how the community at large has accepted light skin as beautiful, and thus has negated beauty in darker skin. Within this dominant culture, white colonialists are the “all-knowing master” that the narrator refers to – the people responsible for giving Pecola “a cloak of ugliness to wear”, which she had “accepted without question” (37). It is this cloak that hides the knowledge of her own true identity and self-worth which, though she “put it on”, “did not belong to [her]” (36).

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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

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