Race, Beauty, and Purity in The Bluest Eye

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According to Zlogar, “The Bluest Eye opens and closes with Claudia MacTeer’s reflection on the meaning and significance of a little girl’s suffering and her community’s responsibility and obligation to her” (“The Bluest Eye” 188). According to Zlogar, “Dark-skinned Claudia values herself more than the world does” (“The Bluest Eye” 188). According to Zlogar, “Using Marigold seeds as a metaphor for the affection that might have allowed her abused friend PecolaBreedlove to thrive, Claudia realizes that the failure of her seeds to sprout demonstrates that the soil of her community ‘is bad for certain kinds of flowers” (“The Bluest Eye” 188). According to Zlogar. “While Claudia MacTeer withstands that world’s harshness through the strength and love of her family, a fragile child such as Pecola has no chance’ (“The Bluest Eye 188).

The author of the “The Bluest Eye” is Toni Morrison. According to Bloom,” Novelist Toni Morrison was born Chloe Anthony Wofford, on February 18,1931, and grew up in Lorain, Ohio, the second of four children of George Wofford, a shipyard welder, and his wife Ramah Willis Wofford” (“Toni Morrison” 2762). According to Bloom, “After attending Lorain High School she went to Howard University Players, and in the summer toured the South with a student-faculty repertory troupe” (“Toni Morrison” 2762).

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According to Bloom, “After earning her an M.A. at Cornell in 1955 Morrison taught for two years at Texas Southern University, and then in 1957 took a teaching position at Howard, where she married Harold Morrison, a Jamaican architect” (“Toni Morrison” 2762). According to Bloom, “In 1964, she divorced Morrison and returned with her two sons to Lorain; a year and a half later she became an editor for a textbook subsidiary of Random House in Syracuse” (“Toni Morrison” 2762). According to Bloom, “By 1970 she had moved to an editorial position at Random House in New York, where she eventually became a senior editor” (“Toni Morrison” 2762). According to Bloom, “In the early 1970s, she began to write a series of articles, most of which appeared in the New York Times Book review” (“Toni Morrison” 2762). According to Bloom, “She has taught Afro-American literature an creative writing at the State University of New York, Purchase, Yale University, and Bard College” (“Toni Morrison” 2762).

According to Bloom, ‘Toni Morrison began to write when she returned to Howard in 1957, and since then she has published several novels in which the problems of Black women in the north are a major theme” (“Toni Morrison” 2762). According to Bloom, “her books have a fabulistic quality, and she has at times been directly inspired by Afro-American folktales” (“Toni Morrison” 2762). According to Bloom, “Her novels are “The Bluest Eye (1970)”; “Sula (1974)”; “The Song of Soloman (1977)”; and “Tar Baby (1981)”” “(Toni Morrison 2762). According to Bloom, “Morrison, like many of the powerful women in her fiction, has capacities that strike her friends as other-worldy. According to Bloom, “To Toni Morrison, however, there is no magic in writing, editing, teaching, and raising two boys alone” (“Toni Morrison” 2762).

According to Bloom, ‘Toni Morrsion is an editor with a New York publishing firm, and (The Bluest Eye) is her first novel” (“Toni Morrison” 2763). According to Bloom, “The title pinpoints the focus of her book” (“Toni Morrison” 2763). According to Bloom, “Pecola Breedlove, in her first year of womanhood, is black, ugly, and poor living in a store front, sharing a bedroom with her brother, her father, she goes to Soaphead Church, a man who believes himself possessed of holy powers” (“Toni Morrison’ 2763). According to Bloom, “What she wants is blue eyes” (“Toni Morrison” 2763). According to Bloom, “In this scene, in which a young black on the verge of madness seeks beauty and happiness in a wish for white girl’s eyes, the author makes her most telling statement on the tragic effect of face prejudice on children” (“Toni Morrison” 2763). According to Bloom, “For most of way, Pecola knowing her, and perhaps offering contrast, by themselves being black and poor (though from a happier home), serve little purpose beyond distraction” (“Toni Morrison” 2763). According to Bloom, “Claudia tells the story part way into each of the four seasonal divisions of the book” (“Toni Morrrison” 2763). According to Bloom, “There are vivid scenes: Pecola’s first “ministratin”, a “pretty milk-brown lady” driving Pecola from her home for the killing of a cat, by the woman’s own son; the young Cholly Breddlove (later to be Pecola’s father0 caught during the sex act by white men and being forced to continue for their amusement” (“Toni Morrison” 2763).

“The Bluest Eye” symbolizes a lot of important themes society as dealt with and are still dealing with today. The novel revolves around themes such as race, beauty, innocence, and purity, which are such major and sensitive topic to talk about. Toni Morrison based the novel off of a true event in which she had a childhood conversation with a girl who wanted blue eyes. The novel is such a heartbreaking story because it deals with so much that society as dealing with back in the 1940s and 1950s and still in the present day. People often forget how hurtful racism was in the past. Black women and children were never at center stage and were always unimportant, for this reason Morrison wanted to focus on a young black girl being hurt.

The novel “The Bluest Eye” is about Claudia Macteer and her sister Fredia living with their parents. Their family decide to take in a boarder name Mr. hendryand they also decide to take in a young black girl named Pecola Breedlove who is experiencing phyical and sexual abuse and neglect. Society makes Pecola feel like she is ugly so she thinks in order to be beautiful she should be white and have blue eyes. Her parents are Cholly and Pauline bbeedlove. According to Zlogar, “Pecola’s mother, a maid and frustrated artist who abuses her children” (“The Bluest Eye” 188). According to Zlogar, “Pecola’s abusive father is Cholly Breedlove” (“The Bluest Eye” 188). Pecola is a quiet child and her home life is very difficult. Her father is an alcoholic and is constantly fighting with her mom. Pecola gets bullied by the boys at her school and the new light-skinned girl Maureen Peal. In the novel one day Cholly comes home drunk and finds Pecola in the kitchen washing dishes. He then rapes her and afterwards puts a quilt over her. Pecola tells her mother but her mother doesn’t believe her and hits her. Pecola is then impregnated with her father’s child, the child soon dies. According to Zlogar, “The narratives of Pauline and Cholly Breedlove help the reader at least to understand their characters, even if it is difficult to empathize with them” (“The Bluest Eye” 190).

Novelist Toni Morrison talks about serious subjects such as race and beauty to grab the reader’s attention because people often don’t talk about race and beauty especially when it comes to black women. Society back then and even now make black women feel as if they are ugly and not cared for. The point Most back girls’ mothers taught them that they were ugly and white was beautiful and more superior to them. Morrson writes about these types of things because it makes her writing more interesting and teaches people about African American history as well.

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Race, Beauty, and Purity in The Bluest Eye. (2022, December 27). Edubirdie. Retrieved November 2, 2024, from https://edubirdie.com/examples/concepts-of-race-beauty-innocence-goodness-and-purity-in-the-bluest-eye/
“Race, Beauty, and Purity in The Bluest Eye.” Edubirdie, 27 Dec. 2022, edubirdie.com/examples/concepts-of-race-beauty-innocence-goodness-and-purity-in-the-bluest-eye/
Race, Beauty, and Purity in The Bluest Eye. [online]. Available at: <https://edubirdie.com/examples/concepts-of-race-beauty-innocence-goodness-and-purity-in-the-bluest-eye/> [Accessed 2 Nov. 2024].
Race, Beauty, and Purity in The Bluest Eye [Internet]. Edubirdie. 2022 Dec 27 [cited 2024 Nov 2]. Available from: https://edubirdie.com/examples/concepts-of-race-beauty-innocence-goodness-and-purity-in-the-bluest-eye/
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