the bluest eye - Oboulo.com

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Language : english

literature

school essay

date published

22/10/2007

review : not yet assessed

level : General public

requested 2 times

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Summary

In “The Bluest Eye,” Toni Morrison explores racial tension in the town of Lorain, Ohio, immediately following the Great Depression. The novel follows the lives of a number of African Americans, including Claudia MacTeer, the narrator, Pecola Breedlove, the main character, and Pauline Breedlove, Pecola’s mother. The central theme of the novel is the pervasive idea of white culture as the standard of beauty, and the subsequent belief that black culture is ugly and undesirable, and the way that this belief influences the lives of the three characters. Both Pecola and Pauline have completely accepted the idea of whiteness as the standard of beauty to the point where they see themselves as being ugly and undesirable, and aspire to become white: Pecola desires to have blue eyes and Pauline wishes to look like the white celebrities she sees in the movies. On the other hand, Claudia resists the message that she is ugly and does not succumb to the self-loathing that is prevalent among the town’s African American population.

Pecola Breedlove, whom the novel is named after, is the character that is the most susceptible to the belief that white culture is beautiful, and is also the most affected by it.
Unfortunately, Pecola's life does not change and she is constantly reminded of her ugliness.
She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty
Like a drug addict awakening from a euphoric stupor must come to terms with his squalid existence, so to did Pauline find a stark contrast between the scenes in the motion pictures and the scenes in her home.
In contrast to Pecola and Pauline, who see that whiteness and white culture are the standards of beauty and who try to emulate white women in an attempt to change their lives
In summary, a prominent theme in the novel 'The Bluest Eye' is the prevalence of the notion that whiteness is the ideal standard of beauty

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Language : english

literature

presentation

date published

27/09/2006

review : not yet assessed

level : Advanced

requested 3 times

Author's resume

Selection criteria

Summary

The Bluest Eye contains a number of autobiographical elements. It is set in the town where Morrison grew up (Lorain), and it is told from the point of view of a nine-year-old girl, 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 Depression. Morrison grew up listening to her mother singing and her grandfather playing the violin, just as Claudia does. In the novel’s afterword, Morrison explains that the story developed out of a conversation she had had in elementary school with a little girl, who longed for blue eyes. She was still thinking about this conversation in the 1960s, when the Black is Beautiful movement was working to reclaim African-American beauty, and that is how she began her first novel.

Literature has body as well as soul. It possesses qualities of sound and color, fancy and imagination. However, literature is much more than sound and color; it is a living thing of blood and fire, capable of infinite power and beauty. It is not an inanimate thing of dead words, sentences, stanzas, and paragraphs but a living force. Whoever makes and uses literature to evoke beauty of sound or color or imagination is not exploiting the gift of literature for all that it is worth; he or she is exploiting it only in those qualities that are inherent in the world but external to the mind and soul of man.

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Morrison rejects the theory that American literature reflects white male views. She argues that “Africanism”, a term she uses “for the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify” (Morrison, Playing, 6), has had a crucial presence in American literature throughout the years. Morrison writes, “These speculations have led me to wonder whether the major and championed characteristics of our national literature —individualism, masculinity, social engagement versus historical isolation; acute and ambiguous moral problematics; the thematics of innocence coupled with an obsession with death and hell —are not in fact responses to a dark, abiding, signing Africanist presence.”(Morrison, Playing, 5)

In Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination Morrison rejects the theory that American literature reflects white male views.
Toni Morrison is one of the most prominent contemporary authors in American literature.
Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford on February 18, 1931 to her parents, George Wofford and Ramah Willis Wofford.
Toni Morrison lived through the height of the Civil Rights Movement.
When she attended Howard University, a prominent historically Black university, Morrison became more aware of the harsh lives of many Black Americans, which had been less noticeable in the North.
Morrison shows the issue of self-hatred in her writings.
Everybody in the world was in a position to give [black women] orders.
In Beloved, mothers are also depicted in various ways. Baby Suggs is the grandmother in Beloved.
In Beloved, Seethe's family is torn because of the impact that slavery had on them.

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