Racial And Social Issues In Dick And Jane, By Toni Morrison

Toni Morrison´s first novel successfully portrayed the life of young girls from Afro-American families who are facing racism and violence while they are searching for an identity in the primarily white world. Morrison touched many points concerning racial and social problems that were on the stake during the period after the Great Depression and maybe could even have some meaning nowadays. It is possible for young girls to be able of building self-confidence, - even when they are exposed every day to different feminine beauty ideals as standards which they do not meet due to their ethnicity. Morrison drafted two characters –Claudia and Pecola- who reacted differently to this situation. Claudia went to the opposition and resistance while Pecola …show more content…
Morrison was trying to point out that little black girls do not exist in the perfect world of the white middle class, which was typically illustrated in literature for pupils. According to Rosenberg, young black girls, as Morrison herself, had a problem to find their identity because of the lack of portraits of Afro-American characters and their real life. The school children were getting a glimpse of a distant Anglo-Saxon´s middle class life that was so perfect and hostile towards them at the same time. It seems that this basic-school reader could symbolize the clash of the perception of the Afro-American girls with the cold distant world of white people. Klotman explored the three versions of the “Dick and Jane” in her analysis of “The bluest …show more content…
Using Claudia as narrator, Morrison decribes the Breedloves as people who were put „outdoor“ which, from Claudia’s childlike point of view“, was the worst. Morrison is employing another contrast such as a “Dick and Jane” reader and Breedlove family. Her family is not giving Pecola love and stability she needs and later it is one of the aspects, which led to her mental illness. It seems that being a victim itself is a mark of further victimization. The first seeds of wrong perception of herself are, for instance, caused by her mother Pauline Breedlove, who herself was infected by foisted standards of women beauty, which was undoubtedly caused by watching movies that changed her values and this resulted in her behavior towards her children, in other words, she rejected them. The failure of Pauline as a mother is shown, when Pecola calls her mother “Mrs. Breedlove”, thing that gives us a certain view of the mother’s emotional distance from her daughter. Her father Cholly also is not capable of bringing stability and love to his family. The reason could be his own unhappy childhood, when his father was unknown and his own mother abandoned him at the age of four. The situation is gradually snowballing, gaining violence and progressing towards destruction, which is