Essays on Pecola

Macbeth is a play written by William Shakespeare and The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison. Both Macbeth and The Bluest Eye deal with human nature and its striving to reach the best possible state of existence. The goal of Macbeth and his wife is to gain power at all costs which deprives them of humanity. Pecola also wants to improve her life which is why she wishes to have blue eyes. There is much suffering and fight for power in these texts as well as the age all problem of evil which affects all people. ...

Mental Illness as an Escape from Cruel Society in The Bluest Eye, Tender is the Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest

Mental illness in literature is often a way to accentuate eccentricities, make a character seem dangerous, or lend a character a greater sense of tragedy. The best examples, however, involve using the specter of mental illness as a way to reflect on the way society oppresses the Other, and how these people can use it to empower themselves and their own sense of agency. This latter example is highlighted in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, F. Scott Fitzgerald’ ...

1. Like everything in Pecola’s life, her being pregnant is packaged with her ugliness. Instead of seeing compassion for Pecola, as a young girl in a difficult situation, they use this fact to criticize her. Morison includes a number of fragments of conversation on the issue. Some say that it is Cholly, her father. They imply that even though she is twelve, she is to blame for the pregnancy: “But you never know. How come she didn’t fight him?” (Morison, 189). Others use it to remind themselves how ugly Pecola is, “Ought to be a law: two ugly people ...

1. Find one good website—other than Wikipedia—about Toni Morrison or The Bluest Eye. Give us the link and explain why you think the website is useful or interesting. What new information did you learned from the site?

Biography.com provides basic information about Toni Morrison and her career (http://www.biography.com/people/toni-morrison-9415590#synopsis). Their entry includes that Morrison won both the Nobel Prize and the Pulitzer Prize fro literature, the two most prominent writing prizes that a novelist can win. The book we are reading now, The Bluest Eye and also Song of Solomon and Beloved are her most popular novels. According to the entry, Morison has also won, “Nearly every book prize possible.”

Her father was a blue-collar welder but had to work, other jobs in order to support his four children. Given the situation of Claudio in The Bluest Eye, ...

The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Tony Morrison and published in 1970. It is a story of high dramatic tension which arises a number of questions regarding the social construction of race and gender, the individual quest of each person to find and define the unique characteristics of his/her traits and maintain them without being disorientated, the way a multicultural society works or is supposed to work so that no inequalities exist and respect towards everybody is achieved. The aim of this essay is to present you with the aspects of this story in such a way that the connections it holds ...

Children are most delicate and vulnerable to the legacies of racism and sexism, they will often find their life opportunities limited or destroyed if the racist oppression internalized within families and communities continues unabated. Black women are mostly represented as unattractive, uneducated, and their inherent value as human beings faces constant attacks from a Eurocentric ideal of beauty that doubly oppresses black men and women. In most cases, the children are not protected from the realities of their environment, and their parents are, in fact, a direct cause of the traumas they experience. The young women are exposed to physical, emotional ...

The novel opens with a story from Dick-and-Jane primer that presents a contrast between the said narrative and the circumstances of the characters in the novel’s story. This stark contrast between the two sets of characters at first appears to tell the reader that the middle-class family of Dick and Jane, who are presumably whites, are in a far better condition than the main characters of the story. The tone of the novel is one that portrays an emotion of pessimism and loss of hope, through a situational irony. Situational irony “refers to the chasm between what we hope for or ...

How does the Toni Morrison, in “The Bluest Eyes,” develop the character of Pecola so as to expose and attack “racial self-loathing” in the black community?

In the novel, “The Bluest Eye,” Toni Morrison exposes and attacks racial self-loathing in the black community through her main character, Pecola. Pecola is depicted as a black girl. However, she is white at her heart. Pecola has self-loathing that gets worsen as the novel goes on. When the clerk of a store completely ignores her, for the first time, she gets the knowledge of her blackness. She tries to wash it away as ...

Impact of “The Bluest Eyes”

Tony Morrison made me feel pity for the life of the black community and her characters. While analyzing the character Pecola, I could compare her life with the life of a well-known personality and the king of pop music, Michael Jackson. Pecola and Michael Jackson are same in some way or other. The two ware longing for the same thing. They wanted to change their appearance to be recognized in the society. His or her idea is to change something and conform to everyone to be accepted. The story of the novel revolves around the idea of racial self-hatred or ...

English

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is a novel which delves into the serious issue of discrimination on the basis of appearance and race. Delving deeply into this novel raises serious issues with respect to cleanliness, order and beauty (Baillie, 21). The author attacks the fundamental western ideas and ideologies with respect to racism by quoting the philosopher Count Joseph de Gobineau. In order to display the manner in which globalised doctrine on race has been accepted by Elihue Micah Whitcomb and her family, the author quotes “all civilizations derive from the white race, that none can exist without its ...

The Bluest Eye: Structure vs. Agency

Toni Morrison’ novel, ‘The Bluest Eye,’ looks at the life of black families living in Ohio in the early 1940s. That was the time when many Black families; whose ancestors were brought from Africa to work in fields by Whites here, had made America their home and sought to live the American dream of freedom and happiness. ‘Bluest Eye,’ as the name suggests, is the color of the eyes of Pecola Breedlove, the young daughter of Pauline and Cholly, who like any other child her age, wanted to live a life of freedom and fun. However, that was not to ...

Loss of innocence is no doubt the greatest theme in the novel, The Bluest Eye, a story in which sexual acts are illegal, harsh and extremely hurtful. The novel gives prominence to the aspect of coming of age sexually. The black girls in the novel are brought out as victims that are both socially powerless and sexually abused – they lose their innocence to the situation in which they are growing. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of the loss of innocence in the novel is when Pecola is raped twice by her father Cholly Breedlove. The young girl gets raped just ...

Toni Morrison, the author of The Bluest Eye, writes a masterpiece novel that describes how the standard of beauty has been socially constructed by the dominant race in the US, Whites. This form of social construct has had an effect on the black community where the lighter one’s skin is, the better they look and are assimilated into the society at large. On the other hand, the darker one looks, they are subjected to internalized racism and considered ugly. According to the novel, the American standard of beauty that is socially acceptable is being white and having blue eyes ( ...