Symbolism In The Bluest Eye By Tony Morrison

Improved Essays
In the novel "The Bluest eye" by Tony Morrison, Morrison attempts to explore the meaning of beauty through the point of view of adolescent black girls as they tackle poverty, racism, sexism and the transition to adulthood. Morrison accomplishes this, through her writing she scrupulously decides which rhetoric devices to use in order to do so. Throughout her writing Morrison uses Scesis Onomaton to emphasize particular aspects she deems vital to the storytelling, while using symbolism to represent greater ideals and subject matters. Morrison uses Scesis Onomaton throughout her writing sparingly, only using it where necessary in order to emphasize what she believes needs to be made obvious to the reader. One such example for which Morrison chooses …show more content…
As she explores social issues from the point of view of the adolescent, it is important that the aspects of the concepts are portrayed in a reasonable way, so these characters can understand while hinting at greater themes that may be too complicated for children to grasp. She does this with Pecola's character as she uses symbolism to describe the significance of the blue eye. Morrison writes "Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed," as Morrison describes earlier Pecola is viewed by society as ugly, she is ostracized by teachers, peers and the community at large with the exception of the three local "whores" who are also ostracized themselves. She accepts this and agrees that she herself is ugly and as this line portrays, believes that a change of eye color will make all the difference. It is not by chance that Morrison chooses to make her desire blue eyes specifically; rather than her noise, her lips, or her hair, Morrison decides that it needs to be the eyes, and instead of light brown eyes or even green eyes Morrison decides blue. This is because blue eyes symbolize something more than just an eye color, that Pecola may think it does. Blue eyes are extremely rare in black people in fact they are a genetic mutation; Pecola only wants Blue eyes because they are a well-known trait associated with white people of whom Pecola has most likely been led to believe …show more content…
The symbolism her is within the doll or more so what the dolls represent. They represent societies beauty standards, a white woman with blonde hair and blue eyes. Claudia's examination of it is more so an examination of the beauty standards that all woman may be tasked with having to examine. By examining it, is also to destroy it as the doll/beauty standard was never meant to be examined but irrefutably loved. Once properly examined it is now destroyed, it is no longer a doll, no longer the standard of beauty. What Morrison is symbolizing here is that once Claudia/members of the outgroup of society for which Claudia's character symbolizes, dissect the doll/beauty standards for which they look nothing alike, they are left with nothing, but something manufactured in surplus such as, "mere metal".
Morrison uses Scesis Onomaton and symbolism throughout her writing to emphasize and represent critical elements of her story to readers. As you analyze her rhetorical choices you discover deep truths and meanings. The Scesis Onomaton emphasizes the Breedlove's status within society, and the superficiality garnered by Geraldine due to her adjacent superficial status. Morrison's symbolism reveals Pecola's self-hatred as well as the importance of the function of the eyes, and reveals societies breakable beauty

Related Documents

  • Great Essays

    Pecola suffers the most from what society see’sthat. Pecola an eleven-year-old black girl who believes that she is hideous and that will help her out with her flaw is to have beautiful blue eyes. She wishes to be beaautiful so that way she can be loved. Without your beauty she feels that you cant be loved at all what so ever. Pecola also feels that having blue eys make you more happy.…

    • 1281 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    Major Essay Two: Toni Morrison’s “Recitatif” In Toni Morrison’s only short story “Recitatif”, Morrison writes about race, sympathy, and stereotype through two main characters Roberta and Twyla. There is another character Maggie, who is disabled, but she seems to be a go-between. Throughout the story, there are questions about the race of each character. One girl is black and one girl is white.…

    • 836 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Great Essays

    The Bluest Eye due to its abusive nature should not be taught in high school classrooms. As, it displays extreme vulgarity, cases of abuse, and violence. The students may or may not relate to Pecola, however, the Morrison novel presents too many challenges to educate in the classroom. The University Wire proposed that Morrison’s and others who write with similar vulgarity offer a unique human experience (University Wire).…

    • 2258 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    rescued and raised by his grandmother who does not hesitate to remind him that he owes her his life. Cholly does not experience any confidence during intimacy because he is unable to bond with his parents, and his grandmother, even though she takes it upon herself to save Cholly and raise him, remains at an emotional distance. Cholly is also disturbed by the fact that he is not his father's namesake. When he asks his grandmother why he isn't named after his own father, his grandmother replies thus: 'He wasn't nowhere around when you was born. Your mama didn't name you nothing.…

    • 1469 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Pecola is inundated by the glorification of white beauty standards everywhere she looks: the world’s love of Shirley Temple, the way that Maureen Peal, a mixed race girl at her school, is treated, and the positive way that white people in general are portrayed in the media that she sees. All of these influences lead Pecola, who has brown eyes, to believe that, “if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights -- if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (46). Pecola believes that she is treated so poorly by the world around her is because she is ugly; she believes that her race, gender, and age make her undesirable, and she wants nothing more than to change that. The narrator says that Pecola’s eyes “held the pictures and knew the sights”, which implies that Pecola’s eyes symbolize how she views the world. Her eyes hold the pictures and memories of having been bullied for her ugliness and experiencing her parents’ constant fighting and abuse.…

    • 1251 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    In the very last chapter of the book, she starts talking to herself and believing that she has blue eyes in order to be accepted. However in the end she believes, “Everybody’s jealous. Every time I look at somebody, they look off, ” thinking that she has been given blue eyes and now everyone is jealous of her (page 210). Pecola is negatively affected by society’s exploitation of the standards of beauty.…

    • 1086 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    From the beginning the readers understand that Pecola Breedlove’s main desire is to have blue eyes. That is what she feels would make her beautiful. This idea has come from what society and media has told her what beauty is. She sees people like Shirley Temple on a milk cup with blue eyes and realizes that she can’t relate to the people that she sees on a milk cup because they look nothing like her. This topic is discussed in “Probing Racial Dilemmas in The Bluest Eye with the Spyglass of Psychology”.…

    • 1861 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Improved 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 essay will be discussing how the motif of sacrifice is used by Toni Morrison throughout her novel Sula (1974), namely the sacrifice of motherhood. Sacrifice is found in different forms in Sula; physically through self-mutilation, murder or suicide and also the emotional sacrifice of love. This sacrifice of love is shown primarily through the mothers in the story, through what they have had to give up to keep their children alive.…

    • 1375 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Early in the novel Pecola and Frieda spoke about Shirley Temple’s beauty “Frieda and she had a long conversation about how cu-ute Shirley Temple was. I couldn’t join them in their adoration because I hated Shirley” (Morison 1.1.35). Claudia uses the example of Shirley Temple to show the difference between her and the other girls. Unlike Pecola and Frieda, Claudia tries to resist popular beauty icons, to the extent that when she receives a white baby doll for charismas she completely resists taking it, something very admirable about her. Pocola however is very dissimilar, she as other Americans had agreed to the idea that whiteness should be desired “Adults, older girls, shops, magazines, newspapers, window sings-all the world had agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink skinned doll was what every girl child treasured” (Morrison 1.1.39).…

    • 706 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    In Medallion, as the people have kept the community spirit of the southern black since the slavery days of Bottom, they live as "neighbors" (3), taking care of each other, including even the prostitutes. They look after the children instead of their disappeared mother for 18 months (34) and the orphans. It is natural for them to cook and to clean the house of the solitary elder. All women participate in raising children and taking care of the old is a good aspect of the traditional value, which transcended from the slavery period. Eva, Sula's grandmother, the head of Peace family, represents this old value of "taking care of the other and sacrifices herself, and carries heavy burden" (Krumholz 554).…

    • 1794 Words
    • 8 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    Pecola, and the other young black girls in the novel, are psychologically damaged by this ideal of beautiful that is defined by the white culture; Morrison tries to give the courage that black is beautiful, but the couraged is beaten down with fear for being black because it is seen as ugly. On page 46, the narrator explains how boys at her school would lower her self-esteem more by mocking other boys to loving Pecola: “...when one of the girls at school wanted to be particularly insulting to a boy...she could say, ‘Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove! Bobby loves Pecola Breedlove!’ and never fail to get reals of laughter from those in earshot, and mock and mock anger from the accused” (46). Even more, the narrator emphasizes that “if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (46).…

    • 2002 Words
    • 9 Pages
    Superior Essays
  • Improved Essays

    According to the girl the doll was to represent her “fondest wish.”. Here Morrison is pointing out that girls liking dolls is a social construct. This is even more evident when the little girls claim “that…

    • 1098 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Racism and hate by individuals in society led to her destructive of end. Her imagination and desire for blue eyes led to her insanity and isolation towards the end of the novel. Pecola ultimately became insane through society based on the obsession she had for beauty itself. Her constant desire for beauty is one of the factors that led to her end. Pecola was damaged by her personal experiences being hated by individuals who never gave her the chance to become…

    • 1246 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Superior Essays

    (176). Pecola faces the most trauma out of anyone in this story from her rape to her damaged family life, her desire to be beautiful, and finally this pivotal situation with the Soaphead Church and his dog. This has distorted her perception of reality. She believes that having blue eyes could somehow fix what has gone wrong in her life. After this she is convinced that she has blue eyes and is able to suppress and overlook her traumatic past.…

    • 1033 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Superior Essays