The Bluest Eye

novel, The Bluest Eye, exhibits the effects that America’s idealization of beauty has on a young black child during the early 1940’s. Throughout the novel, it is explicit that Eurocentric features are perceived as the epitome of beauty and elegance. Being white means that you are automatically superior to any other race. Consequently, this results in the crucial insanity of Pecola Breedlove; the ultimate victim of the novel. She is utterly obsessed with the need to somehow acquire blue eyes,…

Jackie Lenane American Lit. Dr. Davis 04/28/16 The Bluest Eye The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, is a story of three young African American girls, Pecola Breedlove and Claudia MacTeer, who struggle against a culture that defines them as ugly and/or invisible. In a world where white, blond-haired, blue-eyed females are the ideal, the girls are isolated. The main character in the book, Pecola, desperately wants to be accepted in society and therefore becomes obsessive about obtaining this…

In the book The Bluest Eye the main focus is not only the main character Pecola Breedlove, it’s the effect the white beauty standard has on not only Pecola but the narrator Claudia Macteer. Morrison strongly emphasises the beauty standard often within the book, even with a lack of introduced white characters. This beauty standard has affected the black children in the story, Pecola mainly, extremely negatively. In fact it has negatively affected the black community as a whole negatively. The…

With the evident aspects of beauty expressed within the novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, and its transformation within societal perception, it is apparent that black women have been seen as infinitesimal and wholly “invisible” in the eyes of society. Written in the late 60s, The Bluest Eye takes a sentiment into the lives of young black girls and how society’s perception can create devastating impressions on how they see themselves as well as the world itself. Morrison successfully creates…

Through the experiences of the black characters in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the damages of white femininity are exposed. Throughout the book, white girls and white movie stars often embody standards of cleanliness and beauty by containing funkiness (blackness) and creating order. Morrison often substitutes whiteness for cleanliness and demonstrates the dangers of this mixture in how the black female characters witness the supposed beauty and vulnerability of white girls and movie stars.…

The Bluest Eye and why it needed to be so messed up Toni Morrison is known for her unique style of writing. Her raw and unforgiving style lends itself to speaking about topics that are hard to understand the deep nature of. She has a way of speaking to an audience that few other authors have. In The Bluest Eye she uses this style of writing to convey the harsh reality faced by black girls in the 1940s. Pecola in particular has a miserable life which can only be fully understood through…

and races altering and adjusting their physical attributes in order to reach the standards of being beautiful. For not being considered beautiful will lead to lack of self-esteem and rejection among their peers and society. In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, the women often face the pressure of society’s idea of “beautiful” through the use of the media to push images on what beauty should look like. Any women falling outside of society’s standards can be labeled as “Ugly” leaving woman to have…

Toni Morrison the bluest eye teaches us that society image of beauty can be dangerous.…

but sadly never made it to watch that day come in 1964 when segregation in all states became illegal. Yes, segregation is illegal and has been for over fifty years, but that still didn’t change the way people looked, treated, or thought of us. The Bluest Eye was nothing but the truth about how African American women were treated back then, and the novel was able to present three important themes: appearance, race, and…

In the novel The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, Morrison begins the novel by illustrating what an ideal family looks like. The ideal family has a cute and pretty house with two happy and loving parents with a happy daughter who plays all day. As the novel progresses we learn that the Breedlove’s, a black family living in 1941, do not have the characteristics of an ideal family. The father is an abusive alcoholic, the mother is an optimist trying to keep her family together, and Pecola is a…