Violence In Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

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Violence and the Effect

Violence appears in many different shapes and forms and in some cases; it is hard to escape violence. As unfortunate as it sounds, everywhere we turn, all around the world, there is a footprint of violence in our society, in our workplace and in our home. There are many homes where parents beat each other and beat their children. There are many places where people are verbally and physically abused by others. There are also many places where racism reigns and people are hurt and violated because of their skin color, religion or gender. In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, the author does not only talk about violence, she also shows us how a person confuses love with violence.

“Violence repeatedly usurps the space that love might hold. Commonly the fantasied antidote to psychic wounds and losses, real and imagined, love is an expected unguent, a form of medication, pain's "natural" anodyne. But Morrison takes a harsher, tougher, less romantic view of love, one fashioned from the accumulated wisdom of the ages, a wisdom infused throughout her novel”. (Mc Dowell)

In a society where racism was in the outset of the moment in was extremely difficult to escape the antagonism of the community.

Violence is a way of demonstration of all the other feelings inside a human being. Feelings that are suppressed and can only be let out through the pain of another. There is always a reason for violence, a motive that can be scary, or perhaps even tender. It can be physical and it can be verbal. Violence can go from an everyday beating, to a once in a lifetime regret. It can be within a home, or a whole socie...

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...however, ends not with forbearance but in death”(Wren).

Works Cited

McDowell, Deborah E. "Philosophy of the Heart." Women's Review of Books 21.3 (Dec. 2003): 8-9. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 194. Detroit: Gale,2005.Literature Resource Center.Web. 13March. 2011

Scott, Lynn. "Beauty, Virtue and Disciplinary Power:" Midwestern Miscellany 24 (1996): 9-23. Rpt. in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Janet Witalec. Vol. 173. Detroit: Gale,2003.Literature Resource Center. Web. 14 Mar. 2011

Wren, James A. "Morrison's The Bluest Eye." Explicator 55.3 (Spring 1997): 172-174.Rpt. Ed. Tom Burns. Vol. 99. Detroit: Gale, 2005. Literature Resource Center.Web. 26 Apr. 2011.

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