The Bluest Eye Analysis

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Tiani McCarthy Professor Morris April 2014 The Bluest Eye Identity Crisis: The Bluest Eye The Bluest Eye describes the lives of three young black girls living in Ohio after the Great Depression in the 1940s. One of which acquires an inferiority complex after years of abuse not only mental and physical but also sexual. This constant abuse and criticism leads the main character Pecola Breedlove to long for a happier life where she is loved by all for having beautiful blue eyes like some of the iconic white celebrity children of that time. (Morrison 19) She believes that portraying a “whiter” physical appearance will improve her life. Pecola consequently loses her mind and self-destructs because of her relentless want to become other than who she is.Toni Morrison tells this tragic story of a girl’s hopeless need to be accepted by her family, her peers and society using various themes including self-worth based on society’s perception of beauty, self-hatred or internalized racism and the effect that parents have on their children. The story begins with a first-person narration by nine year old Claudia MacTeer. She and her ten year old sister Frieda live with their parents who take two people into their homes one autumn season. Pecola Breedlove is made temporarily homeless after her mentally unsound father burns down their home in a violent episode. Pecola is a shy and self-conscious girl with a very rough home life where her parents are in constant battle and discord. "And Pecola. She hid behind hers. (Ugliness) Concealed, veiled, eclipsed--peeping out from behind the shroud very seldom, and then only to yearn for the return of her mask" (Morrison 39). Throughout her life Pecola has been told that she is ugly and ignorant by those wh... ... middle of paper ... ...d impregnated by her father. After she is raped, the young girl is left to internalize her father’s self-hatred as well as the pain she carries from then on, not just theoretically but actually as she carries Cholly’s child. Pecola is a symbol of the black community and its belief that white beauty is superior to theirs. At the end of the novel Claudia admits that the town acted out their self-hate by using Pecola as the scapegoat for the whole community. Her ugliness made them comparatively beautiful in appearance and her quiet suffering presented them the opportunity to make their claim to superiority by pointing out what they considered to be a young black girl’s flaws and weaknesses. At the very end of the novel when Pecola wanders to the edge of town she becomes the token of human cruelty and the sad reminder of a community who turns its back on its own people.

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