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, it is merely so she may consumer and own, for a time Mary Jane's "Smiling white face. Blond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort. The eyes are petulant, mischievous. To Pecola they are simply pretty. She eats the candy, and its sweetness is good. To eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane." (Morrison 50).
Consuming, in this capitalist world that Pecola must suffer, however unknowing, is simultaneous although not quite as good as 'being' the thing, the Whiteness one consumes -- so this passage poignantly suggests. Repeatedly through the first section of the Bluest Eye, entitled "Autumn and Winter," Pecola is seen consuming things, in a futile attempt to be 'someone,' that is to be part of a white mass culture and escape the unloving confines of her impoverished and rejecting environment. The consumption of Mary Jane and her blue eyes recalls another early passage of the novel where Pecola commits the small childish crime, which is quite economically significant in the cash-strapped Breedlove household, of consuming all of the milk in the refrigerator. Pecola does so, however, not out of hunger, but because she adores the sight of Shirley Temple on the Shirley Temple milk cup.
Thus, Pecola's hunger is never expressed in terms of her bodily needs and desires. Rather, the expression of her hunger is expressed in the consumption of the consumer goods of the world around her, goods that do not reflect the girl's real physical needs and true appetites. Beside her in her bed at night, the narrator Claudia seethes not only at her sister's crime of drinking all of the milk, but at Shirley Temple herself. Claudia resents Shirley's ability to dance on the screen with a Black man, Mr....
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
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
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