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 implications.
This is evidenced in the fact that Pauline, Pecola's mother -- and one of the primary characters by which Pecola learns that "standards" of beauty -- is only truly happy when she is in the presence of rich white people that typify what she thinks of as "proper," "beautiful," and accomplished. Even though she herself was an Afircan-America, the indoctrination into mainstream society that she had lived through -- in a past that was arguably as disruptive and horrible as Pecola's own experiences -- made her believe that she was ugly because she was darker skinned, and because of all the other "detriments" to her character that were attendant on this darkness. This indicates how insidious and pervasive cultural attitudes of racism truly are; it was not merely that Pauline and Pecola and the other African-Americans in the Bluest Eye had to contend with a world that judged them harshly, unfairly, and preemptively, but that they had to deal with inner selves that engaged in the same judgment.
There are also more subtle and insidious ways in which the literature of the first half of the twentieth century -- that which Pecola and Pauline would have encountered in school, when they attended -- that concepts of beauty and institutional racism were created. The sheer absence of positive black role models or even the presence of African-American children in stories was a major part of the cultural forces that instilled a warped and denied sense of beauty to Pecola, just as it has led to a great deal of harm and struggle for real-world African-Americans, and African-American women, specifically (Rosenberg 1987). One cannot have a concept of something that simply doesn't exist, and this...
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
That shows the same thing, that Morrison is showing racism even exists in the black community. This book shows that white society controls everything, from how people feel about each other to how they see themselves and what they think is beautiful. Pecola is black, but she wants to be white, and that means she does not understand who she really is and why it is not bad to
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
Her mother, like her daughter, is said to be filled with a sense of self-hatred and rejection. "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
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
Racist Beauty Ideals and Racial Self-Hatred This paper examines Toni Morrison's novel the Bluest Eye from the perspective of three different interest groups: Those who would interrogate the paper on the basis of issues related to gender, or of the feminist movement; Those whose interests lie in the book's treatment of children's issues or advocacy, and Those engaging in a dialogue centering around issues of race. It should also be understood that these topics
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