The bluest eyes

572 Words2 Pages
bulb-icon

Recommended: The bluest eye analysis

There are several themes throughout the novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. One theme being self-hatred. Throughout this novel, self-hatred has made itself prevalent through different characters, like Claudia and Pecola. Claudia’s self-hatred can be seen when she dismembers and destroys her doll with blue eyes and blond hair because she viewed herself as ugly and that she didn’t have the things that the doll had. Another example of self-hatred in this novel is with how Pecola feels guilty about her appearance. Pecola honestly believed that the reason her brother ran away was not because of her parents fighting, but due to her ugly appearance. Claudia even mentioned how everyone felt better about themselves because of Pecola. “All of our waste we dumped on her and she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us” (205). This is a major impact on why Pecola felt the way she did about herself.
Another them throughout this novel is that anger present in everyones lives. Toni Morrison criticizes some major characters like Cholly, Polly, Claudia, and P...

Show More
Related

  • Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

    480 Words  | 1 Pages

    In the novel, The Bluest Eye, the author, Toni Morrison, tells the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove. Pecola longs for acceptance from the world. She is an innocent little girl, however, she is rejected practically by the whole world, and her own parents. Pecola endures physical and verbal abuse at home, and also at school. She is always the main character in the jokes that usually refer to her very dark skin. Her mother cherishes the white daughter of the family she works for and calls her own daughter a "rotten piece of apple. Her father Cholly is constantly drunk, and sexually molests her daughter more than once, eventually rapes and impregnates her.

    Read More

  • Memoirs of a Geisha and the Bluest Eye

    906 Words  | 2 Pages

    The major characters in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison were Pecola Breedlove, Cholly Breedlove, Claudia Mac...

    Read More

  • Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

    2708 Words  | 6 Pages

    He deserves the reader’s hate, but Morrison prevents Cholly from being covered with a blanket of undeserved, inescapable sympathy. Morrison creates undeserved sympathy from the reader using language and her depiction of Cholly acting within the bounds of his character. This ultimately generates a reader who becomes soft on crime and led by emotions manipulated by the authority of text.

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye

    565 Words  | 2 Pages

    Beauty is something that a lot of people in life strive for , because everyone has fitted in their mind what exactly beauty is. People know that it can help you out in life. But what most people don’t know is that, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Meaning that beauty should not be characterized by what people are told it is, beauty is different for everyone, what is beautiful for you may be ugly to someone else. The characters in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye are confronted with the ideal of beauty and strive for it whether they know it or not. The two characters that I think were followed the ideal of beauty in Toni Morrison’s story are Pauline and Pecola.

    Read More

  • Blond Hair, Blue Eyed Beauty

    2310 Words  | 5 Pages

    Blond hair, blue eyes. In America these are the ideals of a woman’s beauty. This image is drilled into our minds across the lifespan in the media and it conditions people's standards of beauty. We see Black women wish that their skin was lighter. In an episode of "The Tyra Banks Show", a Black girl as young as 6 talks about how she doesn't like her hair and wishes that it was long and straight like a white woman's. Some minorities get surgery to change their facial features, or only date white men. Having been taught to think that white people are more attractive than people of their own ethnicity. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the character of Pecola exemplifies the inferiority felt throughout the black community due to the ideology that white qualities propel you in social status. Pecola’s mother, Pauline Breedlove, said it best when she was introduced to beauty it being the most destructive ideas in the history of human though. From which the envy, insecurity and disillusion have been derived by the ideas of beauty and physical appearance. Pecola’s story is about the consequences of a little black girl growing up in a society dominated by white supremacy. We must not look at beauty as a value rather an oppressive discourse that has taken over our society. Pecola truly believes that if her eyes were blue she would be pretty, virtuous, and loved by everyone around her. Friends would play with her, teachers would treat her better and even her parents might stop their constant fights because, in her heart of hearts, no one would want to “do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.”

    Read More

  • Quest for Personal Identity in The Bluest Eye

    2750 Words  | 6 Pages

    Quest for Personal Identity in The Bluest Eye A main theme in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is the quest for individual identity and the influence of the family and community on that quest. This theme is present throughout the novel and evident in many of the characters. Pecola Breedlove, Cholly Breedlove, and Pauline Breedlove are all embodiments of this quest for identity, as well as symbols of the quest of many of the many Black people that were moving to the north in search of greater opportunities.

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

    952 Words  | 2 Pages

    "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). In the novel The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, the main character, Pecola, comes to see herself as ugly. This idea she creates results from her isolation from friends, the community, and ever her family. There are three stages that lead up to Pecola portraying herself as an ugly human being. The three stages that lead to Pecola's realization are her family's outlook toward her, the community members telling her she is ugly, and her actually accepting what the other say or think about her. Each stage progresses into the other to finally reach the last stage and the end of the novel when Pecola eventually has to rely on herself as an imaginary friend so she will have someone to talk to.

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye

    1323 Words  | 3 Pages

    Throughout Toni Morrison’s controversial debut The Bluest Eye, several characters are entangled with the extremes of human cruelty and desire. A once innocent Pecola arguably receives the most appalling treatment, as not only is she exposed to unrelenting racism and severe domestic abuse, she is also raped and impregnated by her own father, Cholly. By all accounts, Cholly should be detestable and unworthy of any kind of sympathy. However, over the course of the novel, as Cholly’s character and life are slowly brought into the light and out of the self-hatred veil, the reader comes to partially understand why Cholly did what he did and what really drives him. By painting this severely flawed yet completely human picture of Cholly, Morrison draws comparison with how Pecola was treated by both of her undesirable parents. According to literary educator Allen Alexander, even though Cholly was cripplingly flawed and often despicable, he was a more “genuine” person to Pecola than Pauline was (301). Alexander went on to claim that while Cholly raped Pecola physically, Pauline and Soaphead Church both raped her mental wellbeing (301). Alexander is saying that the awful way Pecola was treated in a routine matter had an effect just as great if not greater than Cholly’s terrible assault. The abuse that Pecola lived through was the trigger that shattered her mind. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses the characters of Cholly Breedlove and Frieda McTeer to juxtapose sexual violence and mental maltreatment in order to highlight the terrible effects of mental abuse.

    Read More

  • The Character of Cholly in The Bluest Eye

    1333 Words  | 3 Pages

    This theory is particularly evident in Morrison's development of Cholly, the man who raped his daughter.  She could have portrayed him as a degenerate akin to Soaphead, a slimy character, who leaves us with a feeling of revulsion.  Instead, step-by-step, she leads us through Cholly's life and experiences; so in the end, instead of hating him, we feel his pain.

    Read More

  • Beauty and The Bluest Eye

    416 Words  | 1 Pages

    Toni Morrison's novel, The Bluest Eye contributes to the study of the American novel by bringing to light an unflattering side of American history. The story of a young black girl named Pecola, growing up in Lorain, Ohio in 1941 clearly illustrates the fact that the "American Dream" was not available to everyone. The world that Pecola inhabits adores blonde haired blue eyed girls and boys. Black children are invisible in this world, not special, less than nothing. The idea that the color of your skin somehow made you lesser was cultivated by both whites and blacks. White skin meant beauty and privilege and that idea was not questioned at this time in history. The idea that the color of your skin somehow made you less of a person contaminated black people's lives in many different ways. The taunts of schoolboys directed at Pecola clearly illustrate this fact; "It was their contempt for their own blackness that gave the first insult its teeth" (65). This self hatred also possessed an undercurrent of anger and injustice that eventually led to the civil rights movement.

    Read More

  • Bluest Eye Gender

    645 Words  | 2 Pages

    Toni morrison tries to change are perspective by giving us background story of each character that does wrong to pecola. One such character Cholly Breedlove is Humiliated by white men which leads to his down spiral of hatred against women, neglection of his children, alcoholism and his death. His rape of Pecola can't be justified, but his background is a reflection of racist america which instilled in him worthlessness “ The Breedloves did not live in a storefront because they were having temporary difficulty adjusting to the

    Read More

  • Personal Response to The Bluest Eye

    1456 Words  | 3 Pages

    Do you know what she came for? Blue eyes. New, blue eyes, She said. Like she was buying shoes. "I'd like a pair of new blue eyes." Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye

    1388 Words  | 3 Pages

    The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison is an African American writer, who believes in fighting discrimation and segregation with a mental preparation. Tony focuses on many black Americans to the white American culture and concludes that blacks are exploited because racism regarding white skin color within the black community. The bluest eye is a story about a young black girl named Pecola, who grew up in Ohio. Pecola adores blonde haired blue eyes girls and boys. She thinks white skin meant beauty and freedom and that thought was not a subject at this time in history. This book is really about the impact on a child’s state of mind. Tony Morrison has divided her book into four seasons: autumn, winter, spring, and summer. The main characters in this book are three girls, Claudia and Frieds McTeer, and Pecola Breedlove. Why was Pecola considered a case? Pecola was a poor girl who had no place to go. The county placed her in the McTeer’shouse for a few days until they could decide what to do until the family was reunited. Pecola stayed at the McTeer’s house because she was being abuse at her house and Cholly had burned up his house. The first event that happens in the book was that her menstrual cycle had started. She didn’t know what to do; she thought she was bleeding to death. When the girls were in the bed, Pecola asked, “If it was true that she can have a baby now?” So now the only concern is if she is raped again she could possibly get pregnant. Pecola thought if she had blue eyes and was beautiful, that her parents would stop fighting and become a happy family.In nursery books, the ideal girl would have blonde hair and blue eyes. There is a lot of commercial ads have all showed the same ideal look just like the nursery book has. Pecola assumes she has this beautiful and becomes temporary happy, but not satisfied. Now, Pecola wants to be even more beautiful because she isn’t satisfied with what she has. The fact is that a standard of beautyis established, the community is pressured to play the game. Black people and the black culture is judged as being out of place and filthy. Beauty, in heart is having blond hair, blue eyes, and a perfect family. Beauty is then applied to everyone as a kind of level of class.

    Read More

  • Social Issues in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

    562 Words  | 2 Pages

    A reader might easily conclude that the most prominent social issue presented in The Bluest Eye is that of racism, but more important issues lie beneath the surface. Pecola experiences damage from her abusive and negligent parents. The reader is told that even Pecola's mother thought she was ugly from the time of birth. Pecola's negativity may have initially been caused by her family's failure to provide her with identity, love, security, and socialization, ail which are essential for any child's development (Samuels 13). Pecola's parents are able only to give her a childhood of limited possibilities. She struggles to find herself in infertile soil, leading to the analysis of a life of sterility (13). Like the marigolds planted that year, Pecola never grew.

    Read More

  • The Bluest Eye Marxism Analysis

    1649 Words  | 4 Pages

    She believes that if she could have blue eyes, their beauty would inspire kind behavior from others. Blues eyes in Pecola’s definition, is the pure definition of beauty. But beauty in the sense that if she had them she would see things differently. But within the world that Pecola lives in the color of one’s eye, and skin heavily influences their treatment. So her desperation for wanting to change her appearance on the account of her environment and culture seems child-like but it is logical. If Pecola could alter her appearance she would alter her influence and treatment toward and from others. In this Morrison uses Marxism as a way to justify Pecola’s change in reality depending on her appearance. The white ideologies reflected upon Pecola’s internal and external conflicts which allowed her to imagine herself a different life. The impacts of one’s social class also impacts one’s perspective of their race. The vulnerability created by the low social class allows racism to protrude in society and have a detrimental effect for the young black girls in “The Bluest Eye” (Tinsley).The quotes explained above express the social and economic aspect of the Marxist theory. The theory that centers around the separation of social classes and the relationship surrounding them not one’s internalization of oneself

    Read More

More about The bluest eyes

Open Document