Deformed Motherhood In The Bluest Eye Analysis

Great Essays
“Deformed Motherhood in the Bluest Eye” written by Navid Babamiri is a research article that explores and analyzes Toni Morrison use of mothers in the “Bluest Eye”. Babamiri closely looks at the impact that the lack of motherhood has on children. He narrows his focus to the African American family and how “ deformed motherhood” has played a pivotal role in self reflecting process of young girls in society. Mr. Babamiri finds a unique way to connect the lack of a mother's love and nurturance to the battle the racial inequality and self esteem.
Navid Babamiri is an English Professor, in the College of Persian Literature and foreign language, at Islamic Azad University in Tabriz Iran. This article was written and published when Mr.Salehi Babamiri was matriculating through his college career. He has written many articles throughout his life. Some of the articles in which he wrote are entitled “Masculinity/Femininity in Maya Angelou's I know why the Caged Bird Sings, The Sense of Exile and Abandonment in William Trevor’s Novel Felicia Journey, and Masculinity\Femininity in Alice Walker’s Color Purple: A Womanist
…show more content…
A teacher of compassion, love and fearlessness. This same ideology can be found within Navid Salehi Babamiri article “Deformed Motherhood in the Bluest Eyes, By Toni Morrison.” The Bluest Eye is a novel that discusses the issue of racial discrimination and self-esteem through the lives of Pecola, Pauline, Cholly, Claudia and Ms.Macteer (Claudia’s Mom). Babamiri uses the women in the bluest eye as a form of symbolism for the lack of motherhood in the African American Community. This lack of motherhood results in a poor sense of self among the children in the society, which they carry to adulthood. As a result the people in the African American community lack the ability to fight racial discrimination all because of the lack of “perseverance, nurturance, cultural bearing and healing from the

Related Documents

  • Decent Essays

    Slavery, colonial, subjection, the color bar, second class citizenship, segregation, discrimination, what does the Africans do of it all ?. The novel explores a black community in a particular time and place Lorin, Ohio, in the 1940s and shows the tragic that results from a racial society. The general story line of the novel explores and comments on the black-self-hatred. The novel is a complex investigation of the idea of physical beauty among blacks and whites. Nearly all the main characters in The Bluest Eye who are African American are consumed with the constant culturally imposed of white beauty.…

    • 369 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl in Ohio who faces great adversity as a result of her race, gender, and age. She wants nothing more than to have blue eyes, believing that they would make her beautiful and improve her quality of life. She lives in a small house with her mother Pauline, her father Cholly, and her brother Sammy. In an excerpt titled “Battle Royal” from Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison, the narrator faces similar adversity as a result of his race. He is forced to fight in a Battle Royal against other African American men for the entertainment of a large group of white men after being invited to the event to give his graduation speech.…

    • 1074 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    There are plenty of American literature that deal with the legacy of slavery and the embedded racism that followed. Toni Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye,” however takes a different approach from the traditional white versus black racism. The novel was written during the 60s and 70s; however it is set during the 1940s. In it Morrison depicts the lingering effects of constantly imposed white beauty being standardized in American society. By using characterization, she exposes a black community subscribed to the idea of a master narrative that light skin and blue eyes are beautiful.…

    • 801 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    In the novel Sula written by Toni Morrison, is a powerful and interesting novel. It has won her numerous of prizes such as the National Bestseller and the Noble Prize Award. Issues of motherhood is a major aspect of the novel, throughout the novel children lives are shaped differently than others, and they will be faced with obstacles. Gather and Grow states ‘‘that a mother is someone who nurtures someone who cares for the deepest places of your heart. Anyone can throw a meal at you or give you a bed to sleep on, but a mother makes a place for you.’’…

    • 1240 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Characters in “The Bluest Eyes” by Toni Morrison establish their sense of self-worth based on these ideas of beauty. The protagonist of the novel, Pecola Breedlove, an eleven year old black girl who believes that she is ugly and that having not…

    • 706 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Vintage International, 2004. Putnam, Amanda. "Mothering violence: ferocious female resistance in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, Sula, Beloved, and A Mercy." Black Women, Gender & Families, vol. 5, no. 2, 2011, p. 25…

    • 1806 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    While written over forty years apart, The Bluest Eye and Between the World and Me share a similar storyline of the black body being destroyed by the “white” gaze. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison chooses to use a single character, Pecola Breedlove, to adeptly depict how one 's body can become a subject of discrimination. After being impregnated by her own father, the entire town ridicules Pecola. She must now face the harsh gaze of an entire town that is convinced that Pecola is the ugliest girl possible. The town’s ideologies stem from white beliefs and actions, therefore the shameful act of becoming pregnant is considered black so it must be ugly.…

    • 945 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Through the experiences of the black characters in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the damages of white femininity are exposed. Throughout the book, white girls and white movie stars often embody standards of cleanliness and beauty by containing funkiness (blackness) and creating order. Morrison often substitutes whiteness for cleanliness and demonstrates the dangers of this mixture in how the black female characters witness the supposed beauty and vulnerability of white girls and movie stars. Whether or not white girls in the book believe in their beauty, they do believe in the power their whiteness grants them over both black girls and black women and act out in fear that this power may be taken from them.…

    • 1697 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Bluest Eye Trauma

    • 1608 Words
    • 7 Pages

    The prevalence of the prominent dilemma of discrimination portrayed through the different characters in Beloved and The Bluest Eye illustrates the damage that comes as a result of the trauma. The struggle to find rightful identity demonstrates Morrison’s portrayal of how damaging and scarring segregation can be and the long term effects it has. This is exemplified in Beloved when Sethe converses with Paul D about the loss of her child who now haunts the home. She discusses the devastating grief that she goes through knowing her child did not make it.…

    • 1608 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Throughout The Bluest Eye, “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window signs—all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every girl child treasured” (page 20). The characters live in an the mid-1900s where only girls with blonde-hair, blue-eyes, and white skin are considered beautiful. Throughout The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison explains that beauty is on the inside. In the novel, the influence of popular media is unveiled through the effect of advertisements on the standards of beauty that appear in the text, which are based on one’s skin color, eye color and hair color. The effect of advertisement on girls in the story is negative, because of their reactions to what society deems beautiful.…

    • 1086 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Toni Morrison is considered as one of the prominent writers in African-American history. In 1993, Morrison won the Nobel Prize for Literature and she became the eighth woman and the first African-American to win the prize. Her novels furnish themselves to feminist interpretation because they challenge the cultural norms of class, gender and race. In her novels, Beloved bagged Pulitzer Prize award for Fiction in 1988 and remains one of the most well-known and critically-acclaimed works. Toni Morrison’s first novel The Bluest Eye makes a scathing attack on the imposition of white standards of beauty on black women and the creation of cultural perversion and also presents the concept of motherhood has been distorted by racial ideology.…

    • 2350 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, is about the Problem of middle-class people ideas of beauty on a female of an African American girls. Her novel came about after Morrison talked with someone who wanted to have blue eyes, the novel shows a girl, Pecola Breedlove, who wanted love and to be taken into a world that doesn’t care about people of her race. Author Shelley Wong’s in her Article Transgression as Poesis in The Bluest Eye talks about the different ways in which Morrison wrote her novels such as main ideas, main arguments, rhetorical strategy and the style in which Morrison use to keep her audience engaged. In her Article Transgression as Poesis in The Bluest Eye Shelley Wong’s starts by saying how Morrison passage “rendered in the style of the Dick and Jane series of primers, and how the novel lays bare the syntax of static isolation at the center of our cultural texts.…

    • 1187 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    This paper attempts to examine how Toni Morrison has employed female black solidaity as an act of resistance against the patriarchal set up. The warmth, security and sisterhood which Nel-Sula shares through their relationship not only heal the oppression meted out to the doubly marginalized black women , but also poses a threat to the heterosexual patriarchal structure. Through the two complementary characters Nel-Sula, this paper attempts to delineate how female solidarity itself can be a tool for resisting the dominant patriarchal ideologies. “ ...they immediately felt the ease and comfort of old friends. Because each had discovered years before that they were neither white nor male,and that all freedom and triumph was forbidden…

    • 1636 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    The Bluest Eye Literary Analysis For some being a child is not as simple as just growing up, and for young black people in the 1940’s this cannot be any closer to the truth. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is a novel following the life of Pecola, a young black girl growing up during The Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio. In this coming of age story, Pecola experiences the harmful effects of beauty standards, racism, trauma, and rape. Pecola, along with other characters in the novel such as Claudia, Frieda, and Cholly Breedlove, experience a world in which innocence is difficult to maintain and outside forces attempt to cause pain at any given chance.…

    • 1033 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Great Essays

    In the novel The Bluest Eye Morrison 's message of beauty is related to society 's perception and acceptance of white culture and its impact on African Americans that causes them to question their self worth in a racist society; the author demonstrates these concepts through, direct characterization, symbols, and various point of views that highlight the serious problem of psychological oppression on young African American children in which racism impacts their self perception of their beauty by society 's limited standard of white beauty. The first example of direct characterization in the novel is when the omniscient narrator describes the Breedlove family, the narrator describes how they viewed themselves as ugly: “They lived there because…

    • 1246 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays

Related Topics