Reading The Bluest Eyes was a challenge as the subject matter of child rape was something I avoid. While these scenes (as well as others, for instance the death of a cat) were unsettling, the writing style remains vivid and lyrical to a point that is makes these scenes more bearable to get through. The one instance of that is this passage after the death of a cat—“She held her head down against the cold. But she could not hold it low enough to avoid seeing the snowflakes falling and dying on the pavement” (95). However, it is a narration that caught me off guard a bit. Though there is little transition, they do fulfill the purpose of explaining the backstory of Pecola and her parents without having Pecola reveal it herself due to her trauma.
Speaking of Pecola, I felt sorry for the fact that she is the one that had suffered through persecution, rape, and abuse. In fact, all that trauma did nothing but devolve her character to a point of madness by the end of the novel. However, the characters around her did more damage to her psyche than anything. Besides her apathetic mother and her rapist father, her friends Claudia and Frieda did try their best to help her and the fact they
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While I personally see it as a destruction of childhood innocence, I do recognize that the standards of beauty was the main issue given Pecola’s obsession for blue eyes and how she was regarded as ugly even in the eyes of other wealthier black people. Morrison did right to use the flower as a symbolism for not only beauty, but life as well. The catch is that flowers need nurturing like a child, but Pecola never received this from her parents. In a sense, Pecola is a flower who wilted as the result of negligence and mistreatment. Thus, it felt appropriate for the novel to begin with this sentence—“Quiet as it’s kept, there were no marigolds in the fall of 1941”
...nipulated into looking at herself through the eyes of everyone around her. She connects beauty with being loved and respected and believes that if she were beautiful, all the spite in her life would be replaced by warmth and she would be seen in a positive light. When Pecola finally believes that she has achieved beauty she feels unfulfilled and begins to obsess in being the best -- the most beautiful. Pecola’s state of mind has transformed from simply hoping for her wish to become a possibility, into desperately willing for the completion of the wish. This hopeless desire ultimately leads to insanity, suggesting that Pecola’s inability to have her own opinions greatly damages her, and that in the long run she will remain unhappy unless she develops a self-confident mind of her own.
In the beginning, the author explains how this young girl, Lizabeth, lived in the culturally deprived neighborhood during the depression. Lizabeth is at the age where she is just beginning to become a young woman and is almost ready to give up her childish ways. Through this time period she was confused and could not quite understand what was happening to her. In the end she rips Miss Lottie’s marigolds among the ugly place in which she lived. The marigolds were the only things that make the place a bit beautiful to the eye. In this scene the marigolds represent the only hope the people had for themselves in this time of depression. This could reveal how the author has experienced a loss of hope in times of need. In her explanation of how Lizabeth had torn up the flowers and destroyed all hope in that time of depression, might explain that she has also destroyed hope in a time of pain and grief. Later she writes, “And I too have planted marigolds.” This could mean she has learned from her experiences and that she has finally found hope and always tries to seek the good within the bad and the ugly. On another note, it could mean she just wants to act out on something, but she can’t, so she writes about her...
The more “ugly” incidents she is subjected to, the more extreme and abundant do her desires evolve to be. The climax is when Pecola is raped by the antagonist of the novel, her own father, Cholly Breedlove. Eventually, she loses her sanity and reaches out to Soaphead to ask for blue eyes. Disgusted with the molestation, people find another reason to despise Pecola and to ignore her. Becoming delusional, Pecola surmises that people ignore her because they are jealous; “Everybody’s jealous. Every time I look at somebody, they look off” (p. 193). Pecola consequently creates an imaginary friend (p. 191) to talk to as a defence mechanism to deal with the pain of being raped, and neglected by her own
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.
...tain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live.” When the society fails to nurture flowers like Pecola, when nourishment of the soul is denied, the fruit of self-love is never realized and it becomes self-hatred, which lead to Pecola’s undesirable fate. She is driven to insanity and the ultimately to the garbage on the outskirts of town.
"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.
...ft pregnant with his child, and pushed to madness by these terrible circumstances: she finds her beauty in the bluest eye.
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.
Both of these black female characters suffer from some degree of displacement, not only being poor and black in a white-dominated society, but more importantly, the displacement bu their own culture and its images of whiteness. The Bluest Eye is a cathartic novel in terms of how it adresses the opposing ideals of white culture and how these ideals are internalized by thise who are marginalized and
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.
The flower is a metaphor for women and has positive connotations of innocence as well as a sexual nature; this would have been typical of the Victorian era as women were viewed as sexual
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
The tragedy of Pecola Breedlove is an examination of the ideological and character villains of thematic narratives. This is not an avant garde idea, but Toni Morrison delivers the best methodical breakdown of a villain in any tale. The history provided for each villainous character explains that their acts, while monstrous, cannot be dismissed as evil for evil’s sake. The Bluest Eye delves into the black depths of racism by utilizing a hyperbolistic, singular example of the effect that racism has on an incredibly vulnerable member of society. She follows the journey of Pecola who has internalized the white standards she is trapped with. Her internalization is parallel to the devolving, obsession with having blue eyes. Her parents are not representative
Pecola and Claudia are two of the main characters that show a sister like connection, yet they show qualities that seem to be contrasting. As the story continues, their ideas and characters unfold, showing their perspective on the world. In The Bluest Eye, Pecola and Claudia are seen as two girls who are dissimilar in their views on societies beauty standards and similar in their child like qualities.
Pecola is a quintessential example of the pressure colored women often feel to shed themselves of their own heritage. We see early-on in the novel that she has an affinity for white culture as she gazes