It is possibly or probably Morrison speaking from her own personal heart, maybe remembering her own childhood as a black girl in a time when black children were not very often used as characters in books; meanwhile, author Morrison has Claudia saying (62) "What was the secret?" Of Maureen's magical whiteness and social power. "What did we lack? Why was it important? And so what?"
Morrison also offers readers a little history lesson about how life was for Southern African-Americans who migrated north in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s. Through the character of Pauline Breedlove, Pecola's mother, who moved to Lorain, Ohio, readers learn that Pauline wasn't used to "so much white folks. The ones I seed before was something hateful... [and] they was everywhere - next door, downstairs, all over the streets - and colored folks few and far between." Even the "colored folks" were "different" in the north; "No better than whites for meanness," Pauline explained.
It is interesting to learn from a scholarly article by Ruth Rosenberg in the journal Melus that there weren't many books about what it was like growing up as a black child when Morrison was a child in Lorain, Ohio in the 1940s. In fact, Rosenberg writes that "Black girls did not exist as far as the publishers of school anthologies were concerned." A study of 5,206 children's book that were published between 1962 and 1964 showed that of those "thousands of books," only 349 include "even one black child either in the illustrations or the text," Rosenberg explains. Only 6.7% showed a black child. So with that as backdrop, Rosenberg quotes Morrison as saying that at the time she started writing the Bluest Eye in 1965 she was tired of "little black girls who were props" and were "never center stage."
Now that Morrison has written the Bluest Eye little black girls are center stage. And in the book, Rosenberg writes that life for Morrison as a child is very likely the same life that the girls in her book are living. And it is a life where children are supposed to be totally obedient and not question their place in society. "Adults do not talk to us - they give us directions," Claudia the narrator states. "They issue orders without providing information," she goes on. "We didn't initiate talk with grown-ups;...
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
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
Toni Morrison What meanings can be attributed to the literary accomplishments of American author Toni Morrison? How does Morrison use history to portray her stories and her characters? How did Morrison become known as one of the premier African-American authors in America? This paper delves into those issues and others relevant to the writing of Toni Morrison. What meanings are attributed to the works of Toni Morrison? Critic Marilyn Sanders Mobley -- in
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
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