But with blue eyes, she thought, everything would be different. She would be so pretty that her parents would stop fighting. Her father would stop drinking. Her brother would stop running away. If only she could be beautiful. If only people would look at her."
Pecola has numerous problems and several wishes but her deepest desire to attain a beautiful skin i.e. fair complexion. She believes that being beautiful would solve her problems and she would become a popular girl that everyone desired. But like Willy Loman, 1) she lacks the means to change her reality 2) she suffers because she cannot be content with what she has. By refusing to accept herself as she was, she gave immense power to others just like Willy Loman did. Both of them turned their abusers or those who had victimized them into something larger than life and this in the end results in tragedy for them as they are swallowed by the monsters they had created with their own flawed response to already bad circumstances. As Claudia observes in the novel: "We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us; her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health.... And she let us, and thereby deserved our contempt."
We know Willy and Pecola couldn't possibly have the power to attain what they wanted and we do accept that they were victims of bad circumstances. But it is man's response to these circumstances that make all the difference. Willy Loman could accept his position in life and live happily with his family but instead he turns into a schizophrenic and chooses to live in an imaginary world of his own where everything goes according to his will. Pecola also allows her tormentors...
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
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
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