The Bluest Eye, Sex, Race, Gender, and Pecola
Sex is an integral part of the human experience, and each community approaches sex in a way that reflect its culture and perceptions. In the Bluest Eyes, one can derive many observations about the social and cultural values of the community at hand by evaluating characters’ sexuality, sexual experiences, and their perception towards it. Sex in the Bluest Eye is shameful, humiliating, and oppressive, exposing a culture of racial oppression, gender inequality, and self-internalization of discrimination. Pecola Breedlove, who goes through sexual maturation in the course of the novel, becomes the ideal victim for these destructive values.
The sexuality of the characters of The Bluest Eyes reveals strong disparity between black men and black women. Throughout the novel, only male characters indulge in sex: Cholly Breedlove, Soaphead Church, and Henry Washington are the only characters who embrace their sexual fantasies. More importantly, the sexual acts they engage in are all illegal, perverted, and dirty: Cholly raped his daughter, Soaphead Church continuously took advantage of young girls, Henry Washington brought prostitutes into the Macteers home and molested Frieda. Just the frequency of these actions alone makes this a dangerous community, and even more by how these men were never lawfully …show more content…
The strong presence of the ‘women don’t like sex anyway’ archetype reveals the strong suppression against women and a high level of dissatisfaction in their lives. This theme on the suppression of black women is recurrent within The Bluest Eyes, with various descriptions on how they “egde into life from the back door… (and) everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders” (138). However, what more painful is how the devaluation of their sex life reveals how much they have mentally internalized that
Sex is an integral part of the human experience, and each community approaches sex in a way that reflect its culture and perceptions. In the Bluest Eyes, one can derive many observations about the social and cultural values of the community at hand by evaluating characters’ sexuality, sexual experiences, and their perception towards it. Sex in the Bluest Eye is shameful, humiliating, and oppressive, exposing a culture of racial oppression, gender inequality, and self-internalization of discrimination. Pecola Breedlove, who goes through sexual maturation in the course of the novel, becomes the ideal victim for these destructive values.
The sexuality of the characters of The Bluest Eyes reveals strong disparity between black men and black women. Throughout the novel, only male characters indulge in sex: Cholly Breedlove, Soaphead Church, and Henry Washington are the only characters who embrace their sexual fantasies. More importantly, the sexual acts they engage in are all illegal, perverted, and dirty: Cholly raped his daughter, Soaphead Church continuously took advantage of young girls, Henry Washington brought prostitutes into the Macteers home and molested Frieda. Just the frequency of these actions alone makes this a dangerous community, and even more by how these men were never lawfully …show more content…
The strong presence of the ‘women don’t like sex anyway’ archetype reveals the strong suppression against women and a high level of dissatisfaction in their lives. This theme on the suppression of black women is recurrent within The Bluest Eyes, with various descriptions on how they “egde into life from the back door… (and) everybody in the world was in a position to give them orders” (138). However, what more painful is how the devaluation of their sex life reveals how much they have mentally internalized that