The Bluest Eye

Comparative Essay on The Bluest Eye and Sea Hearts Thesis: Both novels, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Margo Lanagan’s Sea Hearts, convey the negative impact of perceptions of beauty on protagonists in their respective conformist societies. EXPAND Introduction Set in the 1940s, The Bluest Eye, explores the psychological impact of an eleven-year-old African-American, Pecola Breedlove, in the predominantly Caucasian society of Lorain, Ohio, whilst Sea Hearts, a fantasy based on the Selkie…

When I hear Toni Morrison, I think of an author whose books involves people who have serious issues because of what I thought after reading The Bluest Eye last year. Song of Solomon and The Bluest Eye have many similarities. For example, the books are focusing the lives of an African American, Pecola and Milkman. In the books, sex is described in a disgusting and weird way. By this I mean, Morrison writes the parents of the main characters having sex in an unusual way involving mostly foreplay…

contrast between Claudia´s hatred and Pecola obsession with Temple is a strong device supporting the idea of pushing unconscious sense of lower class status. Within the book, there is a significant growth of Pecola’s obsession about Temple and the blue eyes, which became the centre of Pecola´s dreams. That-, was also the way of an escape from the many pains she was exposed to, for instance, bullying, and rape by her father or mother´s beating. While reading the book, it was quite clear that…

Set in the 1940’s, Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye” is a tale of Pecola, a young Negro girl shunned by society for being ugly due to her skin colour and appearance. Morrison explores life in America during the late 60s and early 70s in which American culture was influenced predominantly by the white race. Using a creative approach, Toni Morrison explores the white ideal that the Negro population strives to attain to shed light on an arguably different kind of racism. Through the use of…

In the novels Youth and The Bluest Eye, the narrative is ambiguous to the characters. In The Bluest Eye, there are multiple narrative perspectives that equips a more knowledgeable response to the events of the novel. The novel jumps around in characters lives to explain a better perspective to why some characters act the way they do or how past events shape them to whom they are in current events. In Youth, the main character 's perspective is vague. The narrative expresses to what the character…

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…

firsthand, brings to light the struggle African Americans face daily to overcome these systematic barriers in her works. Through symbolism and contrasting perspectives that follow eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove’s desperate pursuit of blue eyes, Morrison’s The Bluest Eye analyzes the way in which race affects social status and calls for action against white superiority in society. By demonstrating the decline in Pecola’s mental state, Morrison…

In the theme of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison illustrates the destructive nature of whiteness being a scale for acceptance through certain black characters of this novel. The characters that display this destruction are Pecola Breedlove, Geraldine, and Pauline Breedlove. Pecola Breedlove desperately searches for ways of obtaining blue eyes because she believes it is the only way of receiving love and acceptance from her mother and community. Geraldine uses whiteness as a scale of accepting…

The Bluest Eye is a novel by Toni Morrison about a girl named Pecola. Pecola is a daughter of Cholly and Polly Breedlove. “Love is never better than the lover. Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe”. Cholly is a free man, a husband, and a father of three children. He symbolizes a lover who wants nothing but for his children to feel at ease. Polly is a wife and a mother to Pecola…

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye takes place in Lorain, Ohio sometime in the early 1940’s. Moreover, the MacTeer and Breedlove families are the main characters that surround the protagonist, Pecola Breedlove. There are a handful of hardships that Pecola and the others face, and within these struggles lie symbols that convey a deeper meaning to the context. The main two symbols that Pecola herself struggles with are the identity of blue eyes and her the love within her house and others. Pecola’s…