Preview

the bluest eye

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
970 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
the bluest eye
“The Bluest Eye” In the novel, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, the adults poorly misguided the children in this story. Although, there were numerous children who were not protected and guided properly by the adults in this novel, Pecola Breedlove is one of the most challenged characters of this story by Toni Morrison. There were several different characters that impacted the life of Pecola Breedlove destructively. Due to the negative impact of her surroundings, Pecola suffered many personal failures. Her main failure was her poor self-esteem due to her poverty stricken upbringing by her parents’ lack of family hood and domestic violence. In addition, Pecola endured mental and sexual abuse which damaged her mental capacity completely.
Pecola Breedlove is a young girl growing up black and poor in the early 1940s. She is repeatedly called "ugly" by nearly everyone in her life, from the cruel children at school to her own mother. Her rough family life, which consisted of her parents constantly fighting both verbally and physically, influenced her poor self-esteem. Due to relentless bullying and constant criticism she received at school, Pecola was lead to seek escape from her misery by fantasizing about becoming beautiful. “Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmate alike. She was the only member of her class who sat alone at a double desk.” (p.45). Pecola’s definition of beauty was being white with blue eyes.
Pecola began to believe that if she could just achieve physical beauty, her life would automatically improve. Pecola also thinks that if she were prettier, her parents would not fight so much. This false belief turns out to be extremely destructive to Pecola’s self-esteem, consuming her whole life and eventually, her sanity. Pecola is a fragile and delicate child that has been almost completely destroyed

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    1. The history of the Breedloves' home is that it use to be a store. The Breedlove's lived in a store front. It is a very unattractive building within the community. "...pedestrians, who are residents of the neighborhood, simply look away when they pass it."(Morrison 33). That statement shows me that no one cared about this abandoned store. Before the store was abandoned it was a pizza parlor, a real estate office, and a gypsies base of operations. I believe that no one remembers the Breedlove's living in the store because no one ever took notice of the store also the Breedlove's were not active with in the community to be noticed by anyone. The book states that the Breedlove's did not make a wave in the mayor's office.…

    • 260 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    Melissa Owens Quotes

    • 3751 Words
    • 16 Pages

    Lily is a fourteen-year-old girl whose mother died when she was four years old, an accident that Lily feels she was responsible for. She dresses in clothes she made in home economics. She is not a popular person in school. She has jet-black hair that resembles a nest of cowlicks, no chin, Sophia Loren eyes and an inferiority complex. She takes to picking scabs on her body and biting the flesh around her fingernails until they bleed. Boys, even the hard-up ones, ignore her. Rosaleen makes Lily wear breeches in the cold, which are neither fashionable nor complimentary, especially under her dresses. Girls become quiet when she walks past, because she has no fashion…

    • 3751 Words
    • 16 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    The characters are repeatedly being subjected to images of whiteness offered through movies, books, magazines, toys, and of course advertisements. Early into the story, Pecola gushes over Shirley Temple’s beauty, and later on Mrs. Breedlove spends her days at the movies admiring the white actresses, wishing she could be in their place. The association between beauty and whiteness pushes the idea of beauty beyond the body’s exterior, making it a signifier of one’s value and worth. Many characters in the book believe their beauty means who they are in society, community, and…

    • 1060 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Pecola has the experience before Claudia and Frieda. Violence, sex, and the pressure of beauty force Pecola out of her childlike innocence. Once Pecola lost her innocence, it was a chain reaction and the others followed. It seems so “cool” to lose your innocence and become an adult but when you grow up, all you wish is to be young and ignorant again. The things that these girls learned during this period of their life will forever follow them and affect their everyday behavior. Once you know something you can never erase it, no matter how hard you…

    • 942 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Satisfactory Essays

    The Bluest Eye

    • 755 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The characters in “The Bluest Eye” are exposed to social standards and norms. The book opens with an excerpt from the book “Dick and Jane”. This excerpt represents the perfect, ideal, suburban, white family. Each chapter in the book also begins with a quote from this book. This makes the lives of the black families in the book seem worse. The comparison of Dick and Jane’s family and life to that of the black families in the book demonstrates how the black families would compare themselves to the white families. The blacks in “The Bluest Eye” feel conflicted because their self-identity does not match up with society’s social norms. An example of this is when Geraldine does everything she can to be that same as white families. She straightens her hair, uses lotion so she does not become ashy, has a steady income, and keeps in house in exceptional shape. But no matter how similar her life style is to theirs, she still does not feel as if she fits in because she knows she is black. This theme can be seen in everyday life when comparing the first and second floor cafeterias at Osbourn Park. It is more usual for white people to sit on the second floor while more colored people sit on the first floor. No one said the setup had to be that way, but it is normal for the students and it is what they are used to.…

    • 755 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Bluest Eye is a novel by Toni Morrison that takes place at the end of the Great Depression in Ohio. In the novel, the MacTeer family first takes in a young boarder named Pecola Breedlove after her father Cholly has attempted to burn down the family home, but she is soon reunited with her own family despite their hardships. The MacTeer family are essential to the novel because one of the young daughters, Frieda, seems to suffer from a much less severe racism than most other characters, going as far as to destroy a white doll she is given. Cholly drinks, and Cholly and Pecola’s mother Pauline are physically abusive towards each other, leading her brother Sammy to run away from the home.…

    • 658 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Bluest Eye, written in 1970, is novel by Toni Morrison. It is Morrison's first novel and was written while she was teaching at Howard University. The Bluest Eye tells the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl growing up in Morrison's hometown of Lorain, Ohio, during the hard times following the Great Depression. In this novel, Toni Morrison addresses a timeless problem of white racial dominance in the United States and points to the impact it has on the life of black females growing up in the 1930's.…

    • 1004 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Critical Lens

    • 935 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The author of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses a number of literary elements in order to illustrate Pecola’s desperation to try and become beautiful and thus improve her life. One of the most important literary elements used is setting. The setting of the novel as stated earlier is Lorain, Ohio during the 1940s when discrimination for being black was rampant. Located in the Midwest, Pecola grew up knowing that she was not beautiful, because she was black. Everywhere she went everyone looked down upon her and mocked her and her entire family.…

    • 935 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    However, besides the effort required to love one’s imperfections, the process showed how the “lens” in which one witnesses a sight can completely change their views, corroborating that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Nevertheless, the tale of Walker’s acceptance of her own insecurity illustrated how humanity has been forced to look through a lens that has unrealistic standards regarding beauty. In fact, the decisive viewpoint that forced Walker to change her own mindset was from a mind that had not been forced to conform to society’s lens: the viewpoint of her young daughter. Although many view children as being subordinate beings whose minds have nothing in them, some people, including Robert Fulghum, understand that children possess powerful ideas that an adult mind cannot develop due to their simplicity. Fulghum, an author of children’s literature and inspirational fiction, once stated, “Don't worry that children never listen to you; worry that they are always watching you.”…

    • 707 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Connie is clearly a girl of two minds; she was so full of herself. Most girls want to be attractive and noticed, but for Connie that was the only thing she had. I think that she based her confidence on her looks entirely without factoring in things like personality or family. Since it was her only escape, Connie would spend hours glancing in the mirrors and erasing her every flaw. Connie felt as if she stayed beautiful then everything will be fine. The author even says, ""She knew she was pretty and that was everything."(337) This is a problem because when a girl is just blind by her beauty they value nothing or no one. They can be very selfish and careless. The people who surrounded Connie knew how egotistical she was. Her mother even told her, "Stop Gawking at yourself, who are you? You think you are so pretty?" (337) Mothers usually try to boost their child's confidence so it's evident that Connie had the inverse problem. Another thing I found interesting is that Connie assumed that her mother favored her sister, June, because she is not as pretty. I don't think that the mother felt bad for June, she was probably annoyed with…

    • 1243 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Where Are You Going

    • 1045 Words
    • 5 Pages

    she was pretty and that was everything” (323). This captivation with herself along with the constant looking in the mirrors and thinking her mother was only pestering her all the time because her mother’s own good looks were long gone by now (323) shows a sign of immaturity because she believes everything revolves around whether or not someone is beautiful. Connie had two sides to her, which is most personified in her clothing and the way she makes it look one way at home and a different way when she is out (324).…

    • 1045 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Alice Walker "Beauty"

    • 650 Words
    • 3 Pages

    Alice Walker’s definition of beauty was evident as she was a child and when the “accident” had taken place. Before she was scarred, she saw herself as a cute child with confidence of a super model. However, she went through a drastic change as she was left with a whitish scar on her eye. Now all she seemed to care about were the people staring at her and her appearance. Walker does not stare at anyone fearing they might look back, and does not raise her head. She is only concerned with her physcial appearance and isolates herself because she looks different. She percieves beauty as what one looks like on the outside and doesn’t consider the characteristics and qualities to make one beautiful on the inside. For years, Walker is overwhelmed with feelings of shame and ugliness. She can not come to love herself because of her inability to get past her definition of beauty.…

    • 650 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The Thing in the Forest

    • 782 Words
    • 4 Pages

    The story includes two little girls as the main characters, yet Primrose, the one who later in life becomes a story teller, is assumed to be the narrator throughout the story. Primrose is “Plump and blond and curly… [She] had bitten nails, a velvet collar on her dressy green coat.” (353). Interestingly, the narrator (Primrose), who is made slightly greedy from her experiences during the war, goes into grave detail of her clothing. The “dressy” clothing holds no real value, and is only added into the story because it holds some sort of personal value to the narrator. Also, describing Primrose as “plump” is about the nicest way to describe and overweight child. It becomes evident from the first description of Primrose that she is favored by the narrator.…

    • 782 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    Olive Hoover’s dream is to become a beauty queen; however, she is a slightly overweight, awkward young girl who wears geeky glasses and dresses like she fell straight out of the eighties. Olive is desperate for people to see her as beautiful, asking her grandpa, “Grandpa, am I pretty?” only to not be able to accept his answer that she “is the most beautiful girl in the world.” She seeks to be a classic American beauty but does not even see herself as that ideal. In this way, it is her strive for achievement that actually highlights her failure.…

    • 983 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Better Essays
  • Good Essays

    Little Miss Sunshine

    • 452 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The film Little Miss Sunshine focuses on a young girl whose life was altered by the changing nature of society whereby "Child Beauty contests" define physical attraction and personality at as young as 8 years old. The pressure of the "beauty myth" is an onset for young children to follow societal expectations whether it be through beauty contests, fashion aimed at pre-teens or young adult celebrities acting as role models. An example of low self-esteem is shown through the restaurant scene where Olive is self-conscience when ordering ice cream. This provides the audience with an understanding of the new-formed issues faced by young women in today’s society due to the expectations of the "beauty world." Dayton and Faris use the visual techniques of costuming, whereby the children are spray tanned, lathered with makeup and expose their bodies to exaggerate the young children to physically look older. This has caused sudden dispute within modern day society as expectations for women have started to occur at much younger ages.…

    • 452 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays