Relationships in The Bluest Eye
This is an excerpt from the paper...
In The Bluest Eye Toni Morrison suspends her tale of a young girl's pursuit of misguided transcendence from a web of interrelationships among women. She does not idealize this elaborate framework and the women in her story are as fallible and subject to the influence of their environment as people are in real life. But Morrison extends the reach of this net of relationships into the future through the narrator, Claudia, and her sister Frieda and suggests that the strength that some women draw from others is where the hope for the future lies. Claudia and Frieda are not terribly remarkable girls--they are subject to envy and childish errors just like anyone else. But they have a far better moral grasp of the world that comes in large part from their mother's influence and enables them to sort among the examples offered by other women in order to make correct choices. In this they are contrasted with the pathetic figure of Pecola Breedlove whose victimization is only completed by incestuous rape, pregnancy, and madness. Throughout the novel Pecola is shown to be incapable of making the kinds of distinctions that Frieda and Claudia make. Unlike the two sisters Pecola's vision of the world is affected all the more directly by such outside influences as the society-wide worship of Anglo-Saxon blonde and blue-eyed beauty because she has no other example to intervene and, most of all, because she has never been given any strong sense of herself. Pecola cannot even express a
. . .
onship completely excludes their children.
The source of Mrs. Breedlove's other forms of satisfaction is hidden from Pecola and is only revealed accidentally when Claudia and Frieda seek her out at the house where her mother works. As they witness the interaction of "Polly" and the white child the differing reactions of the sisters and Pecola demonstrate how the differences in their mothers' care makes them susceptible to the myth of blue-eyed beauty. Much is said about the self-loathing of the Breedloves in the first explanation of Pecola's obsession with blue eyes. But the incident at her employer's house shows how committed Mrs. Breedlove is to the dominant aesthetic that is the source of Pecola's longing for blue eyes and her obsession with the tea-cup portrait of Shirley Temple. Her commitment to this ideal derives from her mother's and their belief in it is based on their lack of belief in themselves.
Claudia, of course, had already demonstrated how little use she had for this ideal in her thorough dissection of the blue-eyed doll she was given. The bed-time discomfort she experienced with this plastic symbol of everything beautiful is emblematic of her discomfort with the whole idea of accepting a standard that adu
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
Claudia Frieda, Frieda Claudia, Aunt Jimmy, Shirley Temple, Maginot Line--who, Breedlove MacTeer, Miss Marie, Breedlove Pecola, Louis Junior, Cholly Breedlove's, frieda claudia, claudia frieda, pecola's mother, women novel, cholly breedlove's, blue eyes, blue-eyed beauty, miss marie, aunt jimmy, obsession blue eyes, marigold seeds, blonde blue-eyed beauty,
Approximate Word count = 3176
Approximate Pages = 13 (250 words per page)
More Essays on Relationships in The Bluest Eye
|
Customer Service
to Over
32,000 Professionally Written Papers!!!
