The Bluest Eye Research Paper

Women. When hearing that word alone, you think of weakness, their insignificance, and how lowly they are viewed in society. Females can be seen as unworthy or nothing without a man if they are not advocating them and are constantly being treated differently from men. However, in the book, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, they live up to their reputations for how they view themselves. Specifically, being focused on women like Pecola, and Claudia. They are often questioning their worth from society’s judgement of beauty. Though one character, Frieda embraces it despite being black. With having everything temporary, the desire of grasping and having something permanent increases. The women desires to be of

The immoral acts of society raped Pecola Breedlove, took her innocence, and left her to go insane. The Random House Dictionary defines “rape” as “an act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse; despoliation; violation.” The Random House definition perfectly describes what happens to Pecola over the course of the novel. From Pecola’s standpoint, society rapes her repeatedly, by their judgmental attitudes towards everything that she is; she is “ugly,” she is poor, she is black. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Morrison shines a critical light on society, illumining the immoral acts that it participates in, through the story of how a little girl is thrown by the wayside since she does not embody the societal ideal. Instead of one human

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison depicts racism all throughout the novel. Discrimination is very heavy in the 1940s, and the protagonist Pecola Breedlove experiences that. Pecola is a lower-class black girl who is constantly picked on for not only her looks, but her uncontrollable family situation. Maureen Peal is a new girl that arrives at Pecola’s school, and she is an upper-class, wealthy black girl. When Maureen goes out for ice cream with Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia, the girls talk about menstruation, and Maureen accuses Pecola if she has ever seen her father naked. Pecola denies the accusation, and conflict arises between the girls. Maureen shouts, “‘I am cute! And you are ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute!’” (Morrison 73).

Cisneros continues to write phrases like “I don’t remember” and “it was dark” and “make him stop.” These short phrases imitate the way in which the boy was handling Esperanza in the moment; he was using quick and powerful movements and blows to make Esperanza submissive and to gain maximum pleasure from her. Structural techniques, specifically sentence structure, allows readers to see and realize that the pain sexual assault causes affects the way its victims function, through Esperanza’s reflection about her experience at the carnival and Esperanza realizing the severity of sexual

She wants the audience to feel as innocent as she did in the beginning, as shameful and disgusted in the middle, and as nostalgic in the end of her article. In the beginning, she creates the image of what she looks like, “… [b]ell bottom jeans and blue peasant blouses and striped knit shirts that clung to my breasts, ” (Wilkinson). By doing so, readers can vividly imagine what she looks like and feel more attached and involved in the story she is creating. In the middle she takes us through all the times she was sexually abused and by using imagery, she makes the reader feel as beaten down and scared as she was. For example, she creates an image of the church where her first sexual assault occurred, “At the entrance to the church was a small vestibule with two white doors. Behind the doors was a dangling rope attached to the church bell,” (Wilkinson). She goes on to build the tension with her words like “groped,” “accident,” “hiding,” and “secret,” (Wilkinson). These make the reader more and more uncomfortable as she describes her experiences, which was the point, to make the reader feel some semblance of what she did. In the end, she describes her older and present self, looking through old pictures: “ Sometimes in old photographs, I see glimpses of that young woman. Corners of my mouth turned down. Staring into the camera with empty eyes where joy should

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses the oppression of blacks and the praising of whites to demonstrate the unjustified power and influence of the dominant individuals. Within American society, the dominant races rise to power and exert their influence by building an environment that worships whiteness and devalues blackness, creating powerless and powerful communities.

First of all, Morrison uses lack of spacing to show how Pecola’s rape is due to society when the author starts the book off with the “Dick and Jane” book. In the 1940’s the children's book “Dick and Jane” had placed the white man’s lifestyle on society, showing how a “perfect” life should be with your family. While including “Dick and Jane” in her novel, she would use a lack of spacing and “Caps” to mock the book. “Dick and Jane” described their house as “greenandwhiteithasareddooritisveryprettyhereisthefamilymother…” and so on. Morrison uses lack of spacing to mock the way their describe their house. Morrison does this to show how “Dick and Jane” shows an artificial love, a love that is picturesque. This shows how society is placing artificial truth within America, which leads to oppression, and the rape of Pecola.

Tom slammed the door behind him, and walked to his vehicle, which had been parked askew in the driveway in his earlier haste to get inside to Lila. It was only when he entered, and the sound of the ignition broke the silence, and the headlights, the darkness, that he paused to think of what had occurred. Regardless of the surprise gift that had arrived at his office, and the note that had accompanied it, Tom instinctively knew that the acts he’d perpetrated inside weren’t what Lila had wanted. How could any women wish to be struck about the face, called a slut and a whore, and be humiliated and degraded by the man she loved. Possibly in a roleplay, but that hadn’t been roleplay, or what Lila had wanted, but what Tom had. And the, recognition, of the stranger who’d invaded his mind, and raped his wife brought a nausea to the pit of his stomach, and as Tom reversed the car, with his gaze fixated on the living room windows, he wound

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye explores the impact of home on childhood, the formative years of any human. Throughout the book, she describes the childhoods of both adults, namely Polly Breedlove and Cholly Breedlove, and children, specifically Pecola, Claudia, and “Junior,” and leaves the reader to figure out how their childhoods shaped who they are. In the novel. Morrison argues that the totality of one’s childhood, including one’s home and experiences, is key in forming one’s disposition and character later in life. In doing so, Morrison wants the reader to see that the best defense against a predatory, racist society is the home.

This can be seen toward the end of the novel, on page 199, where, in a conversation between Pecola and a figure of her thoughts, Morrison reveals that Pecola may have been raped twice. “You said he tried to do it to you when you were sleeping on the couch. ‘See there! You don’t even know what you’re talking about. It was when I was washing dishes,’” reads the exchange. These lines also tell the reader that even with this information, Pecola is still internally unsure of what happened herself. Through internal dialogue, her personal insecurities are projected. Dialogue is key in presenting major ideas in the novel.

Have you ever felt that you must be destined for something greater than what; you are currently doing? Many individuals often suffer from this fear, and that they missed something earlier in their life, and that they are meant to be doing something more productive with their lives. This internal struggle is shared with many characters in The Bluest Eye, written by Toni Morrison. They believe that once they obtain certain spiritual, mental, or physical characteristics that they will be able to depart from their current, nauseating living conditions.

The novel The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison is subjected on a young girl, Pecola Breedlove and her experiences growing up in a poor black family. The life depicted is one of poverty, ridicule, and dissatisfaction of self. Pecola feels ugly because of her social status as a poor young black girl and longs to have blue eyes, the pinnacle of beauty and worth. Throughout the book, Morrison touches on controversial subjects, such as the depicting of Pecola's father raping her, Mrs. Breedlove's sexual feelings toward her husband, and Pecola's menstruation. The book's content is controversial on many levels and it has bred conflict among its readers.

Despite the vulgarity of Cholly’s actions, Morrison avoided demonizing Pecola’s antagonist; so as to emphasize the flaws of society rather then his particular character. She focused more on the tragedy of his childhood experience and only hastily depicts his experience as an adult aggressor. For the same reason, she chose the vignette structure (in order to stagger the upsetting episodes that occurred). The audience is thereby forced to reassemble the story; causing them to not immediately pity Pecola and criminalize her oppressors. The turmoil that African American males experienced in the novel imposed an inferiority complex in their psyche that drove them to persecute individuals weaker than themselves, namely, children. Morrison purposely avoids portraying

By the end of The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses Pecola’s relationship with the race and beauty hierarchies to convey her desperate desire to imitate the looks of Caucasians for fear of loneliness inevitably transform into a never-ending cycle of searching for recognition and acceptance. Finally reaching her breaking point after the various rejections from strangers and her own family, Pecola desperately resorts to visiting a misanthrope and pedophile named Elihue Micah Whitcomb, otherwise known as Soaphead Church. When he sees Pecola, he says, “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” (174), Morrison conveys that Pecola can no longer internalize whiteness by drinking milk or eating Mary Jane’s to momentarily gain status in the hierarchies, she must externalize whiteness by changing the color of her eyes. Soaphead’s use of the word “ugly” to describe Pecola shows that the idealization of white race and beauty standards has solidified in her life.

It is evident in the novel that Pecola is treated by others as an ‘inconvenience’. She possesses no voice or physical integrity. Other than accepting her ethnic identity as a black girl, she assumes a false identity. She is not happy with her appearance and yearns for blue eyes only – a symbolic of American White beauty. Morrison, here, uses a contrast between Sharley Temple and Pecola. Pecola goes literally crazy by the disparity between her existence and the epitome of beauty set by the dominant White culture. Pecola’s psyche has been deformed by the oppressing White culture. Hence, she rejects her original identity and craves for a false notion of beauty.