Create a new account

It's simple, and free.

Images of Black Women in 3 Novels

This study will analyze the images of black women as presented in three novels, Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry..., Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. The study will focus on what the female characters think of themselves and what society thinks of them (and black male characters) in terms of their skin color. This consideration will include the differences between dark- and light-skinned characters in terms of their interpersonal and social experiences.

The thesis of the study will be that, despite these differences, the overall messages of the three novels is that it is a tragedy that human beings are judged according to their skin color, and it is an even greater tragedy when people are judged by the members of their own race because of skin color differences.

Pecola Breedlove, the young black protagonist of Morrison's novel, is dark-skinned and is seen by almost everybody else in the novel as a symbol of all that is ugly and undesirable in society. Worse, Pecola sees herself in the same way. She longs to be white and pretty and lovable, like Shirley Temple. She is hated by everybody, including herself.

Pecola sees the only answer to be her complete transformation into a white girl, symbolized by her desire for blue eyes: "Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. Fervently, for a year she had prayed" (Morrison 46). She thinks about a white shopkeeper and the look he gives her, a look in which she feels invisible:

She looks up at him and sees the vacuum, . . . the total absence of human recognition. . . . This vacuum has an edge, . . . [a] distaste. She has seen it lurking in the eyes of all white people. The distaste must be for her, her blackness. . . . Her blackness is static and dread. And it is the blackness that accounts for, that creates, the vacuum edged with distaste in white eyes (Morrison 48-49).

The desire of Pecola to be white with bl...

Page 1 of 9 Next >

More on Images of Black Women in 3 Novels...

Loading...
APA     MLA     Chicago
Images of Black Women in 3 Novels. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 01:21, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1692397.html