"The Blues Aesthetic in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye." African Site created by Anniina Jokinenon May 21, 1997.
"The Bluest Eye': notes on history, community, and black female subjectivity." The Bluest Eye. "Toni Morrison and the Burden of the Passing Narrative." The Bluest Eye. Pecola soaks up self-hatred in mass culture, but she has no pure, black past to turn to, given how white culture has already influenced and penetrated the previous generation of African-Americans. This is perhaps the most tragic aspect of Morrison's novel at all. Her mother, from her birth, placed upon her the same shroud of shame, loneliness, and inadequacy." (illis, 2006) These standards and feelings of rejection are the qualities that Pecola inherits from Pauline. These experiences worked to transform Pauline into a product of hatred and ignorance, leading her to hold herself up to standards that she didn't fully understand nor could realistically attain. "She was confronted by prejudice on a daily basis, both classism and racism, and for the first time, the white standard of beauty. Her mother, like her daughter, is said to be filled with a sense of self-hatred and rejection. Prophets of Recognition: Ideology and the Individual in Novels by Ralph Ellison, Toni Morrison, Saul Bellow, and Eudora Welty.
He is sent from place to place and thus there is…īorland, Hal. Likewise, Tom's quest for his identity leads him to the wilderness, back to Pagosa, and on the road as a bronco rider. She is raped by her father and chastised and beaten by her mother and she doesn't have a sense of home. Pecola has a house and a family, but she does not have safety, which is what truly makes a home a refuge. The dominant mindset) is what characters use to destroy other characters' sense of self.īoth the Bluest Eye and hen the Legends Die have a resounding theme of homelessness and this relates to the sense of self. Black American Literature Forum 21(4): 435-45.Įichelberger states that Morrison's work shows that the novel "in its particular cultural setting portrays domineering aggression as the true motivation for many cultural conditions that are commonly regarded as agents of freedom" (2). Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in the Bluest Eye. Black American Literature Forum 13(4): 123-5.
Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in the Bluest Eye. In Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye, Harold Bloom, ed. Even though she herself was an Afircan-America, the indoctrination into mainstream society that she had lived through - in a past that was arguably as disruptive and horrible as… This is evidenced in the fact that Pauline, Pecola's mother - and one of the primary characters by which Pecola learns that "standards" of beauty - is only truly happy when she is in the presence of rich white people that typify what she thinks of as "proper," "beautiful," and accomplished. This means that the concepts of beauty that are expressed in the book have both direct and symbolic implications. all non-whites, though there were gradients established in this regard) were of poorer moral quality and intelligence, and had other undesirable internal characteristics as well (Gibson 1990). Many scholars and scientists truly believed that physical beauty and grace were indicative of other "internal" traits, and that the "less beautiful" races (i.e.