Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye Essay

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye explains the idea of racial self-loathing through the perspective of several characters. Each of these characters experience a form of racism and feeling less valuable than white people; how the characters are presented at the end of the novel result from this experience. Morrison also includes the character’s reactions, and how they handle the situation they’re in. Characters that are more impacted by racism, like Mrs. Breedlove and Pecola, develop a hatred for…

“The Bluest Eyes”, written by Toni Morrison, is a novel about young African American girls as they struggle with self identification and self love. This story talks about their constant battles with society's standards, and how they must overcome different forms of adversity. Throughout the novel there is the constant theme of beauty, and how beauty plays a major role on the lives of those young girls. Beauty, and its many different effects on people's’ lives can be seen through literary…

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…

lasting and painful impression on those that do not fit this criteria. Toni Morrison, an African American female novelist who experienced these hindrances 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…

know where to look.” This was during the peak of Toni Morrison’s active years as a fiction writer. The protagonists Morrison writes about are almost all heroes. It is oftentimes difficult to determine this, however, because their heroism is masked by unconventional qualities, making them anti-heroes. Confronted with conflict, they eventually come to a point where they self define themselves as successful. In Morrison’s novels The Bluest Eye, Sula and Beloved, the main protagonists’…

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…

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.…

Toni Morrison’s 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…

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…

different ages 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…