The Color of Misperception
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is an exceptional piece of literature that explores the African-American community and the American society as a whole. The setting of the novel dates back to 1941 in the town of Lorain, Ohio, and Claudia MacTeer tells the story as an adult. She interacts with a character named Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl who longs to have blonde hair and blue eyes just like Shirley Temple. It is her belief that if she were to become like her idol, the quality of her life would improve. The novel follows Pecola and her interactions with other people, in the small community of Lorain, to help explains why she develops such a crippling color complex that results in emotional instability. …show more content…
In addition, Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye utilizes characters with various skin tones to explore the perception of beauty based on color and its impact on Pecola’s life.
Young children are one of the tools that Morrison uses to demonstrate the impact of the perception of beauty. In some sense the author in The Bluest Eye portrays that the children live within their own microcosm. Although, the adults in the novel may not realize that the way they treat children can impact that microcosm just like the mainstream ideology can impact theirs. Pecola Breedlove’s “fantasy of the blue eyes projects the self-denying identification of black people who have unconsciously introjected or internalized the aggressive …show more content…
She retreats into a world of where she is white because she believes that if she were white, she would be prettier and would no longer be in such a horrible predicament. She begins to imagine that she is Shirley Temple or Jane from Fun with Dick and Jane. The reality of being black is much harder than being white to Pecola. Imagining herself as a white person to escape her problems foreshadows Pecola’s eventual mental breakdown. Another instance that Morrison demonstrates how the far reaching influence of American perceptions of beauty is when Pecola wants life to be better because society projects an image of white as better, creating a longing to be white. Just as her mother dresses and changes her hair to be more like Jean Harlow, when Pecola sees “the picture of little Mary Jane, for whom the candy is named [with] [s]miling white face, [b]lond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort,” Pecola is emulating her mother’s own devaluation of what it means to be black (Morrison 50). That devaluation is passed onto her own child because while eating the candy she thinks “[t]o eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane, love Mary Jane, and be Mary Jane" (Morrison 50). Pecola’s warped sense of self demonstrates that mainstream perception of beauty “was distorting the minds of black youngsters to the point of making them self-hating” (Douglas).
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is an exceptional piece of literature that explores the African-American community and the American society as a whole. The setting of the novel dates back to 1941 in the town of Lorain, Ohio, and Claudia MacTeer tells the story as an adult. She interacts with a character named Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl who longs to have blonde hair and blue eyes just like Shirley Temple. It is her belief that if she were to become like her idol, the quality of her life would improve. The novel follows Pecola and her interactions with other people, in the small community of Lorain, to help explains why she develops such a crippling color complex that results in emotional instability. …show more content…
In addition, Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye utilizes characters with various skin tones to explore the perception of beauty based on color and its impact on Pecola’s life.
Young children are one of the tools that Morrison uses to demonstrate the impact of the perception of beauty. In some sense the author in The Bluest Eye portrays that the children live within their own microcosm. Although, the adults in the novel may not realize that the way they treat children can impact that microcosm just like the mainstream ideology can impact theirs. Pecola Breedlove’s “fantasy of the blue eyes projects the self-denying identification of black people who have unconsciously introjected or internalized the aggressive …show more content…
She retreats into a world of where she is white because she believes that if she were white, she would be prettier and would no longer be in such a horrible predicament. She begins to imagine that she is Shirley Temple or Jane from Fun with Dick and Jane. The reality of being black is much harder than being white to Pecola. Imagining herself as a white person to escape her problems foreshadows Pecola’s eventual mental breakdown. Another instance that Morrison demonstrates how the far reaching influence of American perceptions of beauty is when Pecola wants life to be better because society projects an image of white as better, creating a longing to be white. Just as her mother dresses and changes her hair to be more like Jean Harlow, when Pecola sees “the picture of little Mary Jane, for whom the candy is named [with] [s]miling white face, [b]lond hair in gentle disarray, blue eyes looking at her out of a world of clean comfort,” Pecola is emulating her mother’s own devaluation of what it means to be black (Morrison 50). That devaluation is passed onto her own child because while eating the candy she thinks “[t]o eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane, love Mary Jane, and be Mary Jane" (Morrison 50). Pecola’s warped sense of self demonstrates that mainstream perception of beauty “was distorting the minds of black youngsters to the point of making them self-hating” (Douglas).