Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye Essay

In 1970, Toni Morrison published her first novel, The Bluest Eye. Set towards the conclusion of the Great Depression, The Bluest Eye follows a year in the life of 11-year old Pecola Breedlove, seen through the eyes of 9-year old Claudia MacTeer, Pecola’s peer, and an omniscient third party. Pecola longs for love and acceptance that she believes her black ethnicity deprives her of, and believes that “beauty” (blond hair and the “bluest” eyes) will abolish her invisibility in white society.…

Stephanie Tsank ENGL: 1200 28 April, 2017 The Bluest Eye and Glass Menagerie: The Impacts Race and Disability had on Beauty Standards The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison in 1970 and The Glass Menagerie, written by Tennessee Williams in 1944, have become staples in American literature. Although written in different time periods, both stories reflect the same social norms and beauty standards that are too often thrust upon women of the same decade. The Bluest Eye and The Glass Menagerie…

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison, Published 1970 The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison focusing on how black children grew up in the early 1940s after the Great Depression. It contains a number of autobiographical elements. It is set in the town where Morrison grew up, and it is told from the point of view of a nine-year-old, the age Morrison would have been the year the novel takes place (1941). Like the MacTeer family, Morrison’s family struggled to make ends meet during the Great…

Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye provides insight on an alienated portion of American society during the 1940s. The central character, Pecola Breedlove, is a young black girl who desperately wants to feel beautiful and gain the “bluest eyes” as the title references. Pecola attributes her ugliness as the center focus for identity. She partakes on the journey of self-actualization to discover that beauty doesn’t lie within blue eyes or blonde hair. Beauty was with her the entire time, she just…

Toni Morrison grew up in a time period when there was heavy racism, and times men frowned upon women who took up tasks that were usually given to males. For example, The Bluest Eyes had received “depressing…commentary” (Morrison xii) because rather than looking through the depths of her message, they looked at whether or not it was “faithful to…politics” (xii) or it represented their viewpoint of the situation. Sula is a work of art that brings up a series of questions to the reader such as the…

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…

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…

Name: Samuel Huang Major Works Data Sheet This form must be typed. Title of the Work: The Bluest Eye Author: Toni Morrison Date of Publication: 1970 (2007) Genre: Novel Historical information about the Setting: The novel takes place in Ohio after the Great Depression in the United States. There is still racial discrimination going on around this time and blacks still have fewer opportunities than whites. The fewer opportunities led to an economic insecurity for the blacks, which led to…

The Bluest Eye is a long poetic journey of broken spirits. The setting of this novel takes place in a time where black and white people recently began to reside amongst one another in the 1940s. Throughout this heartrending story, ideas of racism, irretrievable confidence, and mere self-pity loom in this interracial community; however, one can raise the question, if there is not any direct oppression of black people by the white people, how does racism function in The Bluest Eye? The…

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…