"She [Pecola's mother] was confronted by prejudice on a daily basis, both classism and racism, and for the first time, the white standard of beauty. These experiences worked to transform Pauline into a product of hatred and ignorance, leading her to hold herself up to standards that she didn't fully understand nor could realistically attain. These standards and feelings of rejection are the qualities that Pecola inherits from Pauline. Her mother, from her birth, placed upon her the same shroud of shame, loneliness, and inadequacy." (Willis, 2006) This is perhaps the most tragic aspect of Morrison's novel at all. Pecola soaks up self-hatred in mass culture, but she has no pure, black past to turn to, given how white culture has already influenced and penetrated the previous generation of African-Americans. Thus, The Bluest Eye is not simply a cry of despair about the suffering of a particular black family, but also a call to arms to regenerate and recreate more powerful images of black female sexuality and spirituality, before it is too late and the spiritual bankruptcy of white, American consumer capitalism reigns supreme. Morrison suggests that Pecola's inability to produce further children and subsequent delusion is not an extraordinary event, but merely a metaphorical representation of a very ordinary, tragically common...
When mass culture equates success with assimilation, and that assimilation requires virtually impossible body modification, then it is necessary to challenge the assumptions of mass culture and change them, rather than merely change one's self to suit mass culture.
She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. So. The distaste must be for her, her blackness.... Phlegm and impatience mingle in his voice. (Morrison 49) but Pecola endures this discomfort and rejection, not so she can establish her empowered Blackness as a consumer, but so she can purchase candy. The candy is not to satisfy her bodily, physical sexual or even stomach's appetite. Rather,
Many scholars and scientists truly believed that physical beauty and grace were indicative of other "internal" traits, and that the "less beautiful" races (i.e. all non-whites, though there were gradients established in this regard) were of poorer moral quality and intelligence, and had other undesirable internal characteristics as well (Gibson 1990). This means that the concepts of beauty that are expressed in the book have both direct and symbolic
Eichelberger states that Morrison's work shows that the novel "in its particular cultural setting portrays domineering aggression as the true motivation for many cultural conditions that are commonly regarded as agents of freedom" (2). This ideology (i.e. The dominant mindset) is what characters use to destroy other characters' sense of self. Both the Bluest Eye and When the Legends Die have a resounding theme of homelessness and this relates to
Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye is deals with the historical and psychological effects of defining beauty according to race. The Bluest Eye is essentially about how concepts of beauty are instilled from a very young age. It is about the life of the Breedlove family who resides in Lorain, Ohio. The novels focal point is the daughter, an eleven-year-old Black girl who is trying to conquer a bout with
On the evening of her first menstruation, for example, she asks, 'How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you.' And, after a visit to Marie, Poland, and China, Pecola ponders, 'What did love feel like?... How do grownups act when they love each other? Eat fish together?' " (Bloom, 26) The question of how to get somebody to love you is significant for
Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike." pg. 45 Morrison does not explain what beauty should be associated with, but she clearly illustrates what it cannot be linked with. She wants readers to understand how psychologically damaging it can be for a person to be told repeatedly
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