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What narrative strategies does Toni Morrison use in the bluest eye
Racism in toni morrison's novels
Racism in toni morrison's novels
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As the story goes, In the Bluest Eye, the book provided different pictures in which there was white beauty qualities deformed the lives of black girls and women. In some parts of the book Mrs. Breedlove shares the guiltiness that Pecola is ugly, and lighter skinned Geraldine curses Pecola’s blackness. In the bluest Eye a major factor was whiteness as everyone take that as beauty that's why when Claudia reaches her adolescent she starts to hate herself because her self esteem is not where it should be cause of the racial critiques in the book, Race is a powerful determinant in the novel. The author uses different types of styles such as symbolism
One example of symbolism is when Pecola prays to disappear because of her parents fights, I understand her in some point because I can connect that in my life and I wouldn't like my parents to be fighting all the time, sometimes eye's are always the ones that do not fade away. This is symbolizing She cannot forget about her eyes. This is because her eyes see the horrid pictures of her parents' fighting and the bullying and teasing she receives from others from being black. She believes if she is white , or if she has blue eyes, she will see her parents being nice to each other and she will see others
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By reading this book I found first and third point of view used throughout the book. The author uses Claudia to see the thoughts and views of a 9 year old girl and to be able to acknowledge what she was going through and the reasons behind her decisions. The poor part of the community in the book is an important part to the theme that brings racism and problems, since many of the characters who identify with middle class white culture feel the need to separate themselves from lower class blacks. Both Claudia and the third-person narrator are deeply sympathetic. This are quotes from the book "saw the Kentucky sun drenching the yellow, heavy-lidded eyes of Cholly
For example you have parents who are poor examples. Pauline a mother to one of the children doesn't even show the true her to her community. It states “ Pauline kept this order, this beauty, for herself, a private world, and never introduced it to her storefront or her children” (Morrison.143). Also “If Pecola would had announced her intention to live the life they did they would have not tried to dissuade..” . These two quotes show how the mothers barely even care for their daughters to acknowledge her beauty let alone their own. While parents should be teaching their children to love themselves this book had plenty of the opposites. Also their is a part where it talks about how the parents have no respect for themselves. It states “They were whores in whore clothing who had never been young and had no word for innocence.”(Morrison.72). That quote shows how the young girls throughout the story barely had any role models to look up to so they could admire themselves. They were surrounded by influences that couldn’t show them the right way to love themselves. Consequently, leading to get the readers to acknowledge how self love can be important. All throughout the bluest eye you have moments where the young black girls are put down but still try to show/have racial pride. “What they do not know is that this plain brown girl will build her nest stick by stick..” (Morrison.99), “Black people were not
The major characters in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison were Pecola Breedlove, Cholly Breedlove, Claudia Mac...
The book is narrated from the first person perspectives of three women: Skeeter,Aibleen and Minny.The twenty two year old Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan is the daughter of a prominent white family who has just graduated and wants to pursure her career as a writer but it’s 1960s and her mother will not be happy if she doesn’t have a ring on her finger. She has been brought up by black maids since she was young, and longs to find out why her much-loved maid, Constantine, has disappeared.Aibleen is a black,wise maid who is raising her seventeenth white child.She dedicates all her work time to Miss.Leeflot,while trying to heal the scars left by her own son’s death.Minny,Aibleen’s best frend is short,fat and the sassiest women in Mississippi.She is the best cook but she cannot mind her tongue resulting having being fired from nineteen jobs. Stockett’s characters are strong, sometimes bold, yet sometimes silent. She adds humor and fun, as well as danger and intrigue in the novel. She has done a great job writing from the point of view of numerous characters. All three of them had their own chapter.Every character has a personality, goals, and a backstory.
Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye provides social commentary on a lesser known portion of black society in America. The protagonist Pecola is a young black girl who desperately wants to feel beautiful and gain the “bluest eyes” as the title references.
In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, the narrator Claudia tells the story of a girl named Pecola who dreams to have blue eyes so she can feel beautiful in a white society. At the beginning of the novel, Pecola moves into Claudia’s home and becomes friends with Claudia and Frieda, who is Claudia’s older sister. This particular passage on page nineteen describes the three girls eating and playing together. Using three allusions, Shirley Temple, Bojangles, and Jane Withers, this passage highlights the importance of white beauty to the girls, its emphasis in society, and shows that Claudia is independent.
Society, especially western, tends to conceptualize beauty through the use of publicity and cinema. We are under constant bombardment from consumer related magazine ads, billboards, television commercials, and movies about what “beautiful” people look like and how we should imitate them. This standard is overwhelmingly portrayed as a white beauty standard. Starting from a very young age this standard of beauty is created in our minds. We want to look like these actors and models; we want to be thin, fit, youthful looking, a symmetrical face and even have a particular race. We accept this beauty standard; we notice our various faults among ourselves and self-critique. We try to emulate the models as best we can; we forget that these standards are not reality. Publicity models and the most popular actors do not represent the majority of us and it is a foolish and unattainable dream to attempt to change ourselves to their beauty. The pressure society puts on us can cause low self-esteem and diseases such as anorexia. But we must look at the antithesis of society’s conception of this white standard, our minorities. Portraying this beauty standard to the polar opposites is more than racist. It is destructive to the minority community in that it creates resentment, low self-esteem, and a perverse hierarchy where minorities judge themselves and others on their proximity to the white beauty standard. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison critiques the white beauty standard that causes the black minority to feel a destructive self-hatred towards themselves and their fellow blacks because their self-perception is an unrealistic and unattainable beauty seen in publicity and films. This research paper’s aim is to present the influence of ...
The idea that blue eyes are a necessity for beauty has been imprinted on Pecola her whole life. " If [I] looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they would say, Why look at the pretty eyed Pecola. We mustn't do bad things in front of those pretty [blue] eyes'"
"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.
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.
The second person point of view helps the reader to connect with the girl in this story. It shows the reader a better understanding of this character and how she is being raised to be a respectable woman. This point of view also gives us an insight on the life of women and shows us how they fit into their society. Through this point of view, the reader can also identify the important aspects of the social class and culture. The daughter tries to assert a sense of selfhood by replying to the mother but it is visible that the mother is being over whelming and constraining her daughter to prepare her for
... when they read about racism. The characters deal with an internal polarization that forms with racism and the idea of beauty that has been deeply rooted into the character’s psyche. The seed of the distorted view of beauty and race grows throughout the novel and challenges the characters values in terms of how they view society and how they view themselves. Even the simple comparison of Maureen’s light skin, which is considered to be attractive, and Pecola’s dark skin, which is ‘ugly’ is the perfect example of how race affect people on a deeper and personal level. “The Bluest Eye” isn’t meant to be a novel that is supposed to overlook the physical effects of racism, it’s meant to offer a deeper look into the issues of the pressure African American people had to deal with during the Great Depression and how it devastates even the most basic human principles.
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.
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.
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
To me this insinuates her desire to see the world differently and conversely the world will view her differently as well. She even attempts to purchase a pair of blue eyes at one point. Claudia, the novels narrorator, describes her desire as “Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty. . . A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes. His outrage grew and felt like power.