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Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye

Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye is a story about a black girl who believes that having the bluest eyes will make her beautiful. It is the story about the family that bred a young black girl who believed herself ugly and the society that bred feelings of unworthiness and inferiority in all blacks. Morrison wrote the novel in the late 1960s, a time of great upheaval in American society. Since that time, the country has made great strides in the social treatment and legal status of African Americans. Nonetheless, there are many who argue that the notions of white supremacy that were the basis of so much of America's history continue to affect self-image and social status of many African Americans today. This paper examines the ways in which Morrison demonstrates that psychological damage through the central character of Pecola in the novel.

The strongest theme in The Bluest Eye is the effect of racism on African American's self-image and sense of self-worth (Mbalia 28). Doreathea Mbalia contends that Morrison specifically explores the effect of the dominant culture's (whites') standards of beauty on the African American female adolescents' self-image (28). Thus, she contrasts the self-images held by Claudia (the narrator) and Frieda McTeer with that of Pecola Breedlove, whom Mbalia argues is most affected by the dominant culture's beauty standards because she is the poorest and, therefore, the most vulnerable (28). But Morrison also demonstrates the family history that bred not love, but self-hatred.

Morrison begins The Bluest Eye with a narrative prologue that reads like a grade-school reading primer. The language is simple: "Here is the house. It is green and white" (Morrison 3). It introduces us to a typical family -- "Mother, Father, Dick, and Jane" -- who live in the green and white house with a cat and a dog. The family sounds completely normal, completely nuclear. It is the sort of family children read about in books. But as M...

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Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 11:12, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1693939.html