The Bluest Eye Loss Of Innocence

In the course of The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove has shown signs of low self esteem. She would always be the one to compare herself to something she admires to be beautiful. Perhaps, sometimes problems surround her get a little too much, she has not yet realized the fog will clear up. For example in the autumn chapter, a quote has said “Thrown, in this way, into the binding conviction that only a miracle could relieve her, she would never know her beauty. She would only see what there was to see: the eyes of other people.” There is no such thing as a “Pecola’s point of view”. She lives off of people's judgements and believe physical appearance is all there is to a person. Her desire to be beautiful is not having attractive long black hair and golden skin color, but blonde hair with a white pigmentation. Which causes her to dream and want even more.

“The Bluest Eye” is taking place around 1940 in Lorain, Ohio. During the year of 1940, discrimination, especially toward African Americans, was still a serious problem. People believe that whiteness is the standard of beauty. The main character, Pecola, who was a nine-years-old African-American, was influenced by how people view beauty. Pecola suffered and felt that she is inferior to others. Pecola believed that having a pair of blue eyes would made people think she is pretty, and would be the key resolving all the problems.

She thought that if she had blue eyes, the blue eyes of the accepted white ideal, she would be beautiful and therefore loved. The acquisition of the blue eyes she so fiercely covets signifies Pecola's step into madness. It was a safe place, where she could have her blue eyes, and where she could be accepted.

“‘I can’t go to school no more. And I thought maybe you could help me.’ ‘Help you how? Tell me. Don’t be frightened.’ ‘My eyes.’ ‘What about your eyes?’ ‘I want them blue.’ … Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty” (174). Conversation is exchanged between Soaphead Church and Pecola about the longing of blue eyes. Soaphead Church gets angry because he can not help Pecola. The blue eyes symbolize beauty, and Pecola associates that with being loved and accepted. She believes that if she possesses blue eyes, people will disregard she is black, and the cruelty in her life will be replaced with respect and affection. This hopeless desire ultimately leads Pecola to complete madness.To summarize, beauty is a crucial piece of the racism that is displayed in the novel, and affects many different characters.

Trauma is an event in an individual's life which is "defined by its intensity, by the subject's incapacity to respond adequately to it, and by the upheaval and long-lasting effects that it brings about in the psychical organization" (Dodge, Kenneth A., John E. Bates, and Gregory S. Petit). In Toni Morrison's, The Bluest Eye, it is demonstrated very clearly how just one unresolved act of trauma can lead to an almost never-ending cycle of tragedy in a community. The cycle of tragedy is easily transferred from parent to child, and its effects can be easily worsened by a lack of support from other people in the community.

No matter how ugly, mean, pitiful one can be, the family is always meant to support, raise, guide, nurture and be a means of inspiration in anyone’s life. In the novel, this isn’t the case for Pecola, which is why she gets mentally unstable as she couldn’t bear the torture of ugliness of not having blue eyes. Blue eyes are the one and only reason she could blame as per to her ability and thought process. In fact, she doesn’t get the real ugliness of how her father rapes her, the ugliness of how the mother choose the white girl over her, the ugliness of the fights between her parents is coming from their unpleasant past. After all, she doesn’t have that mentor in her life to explain what was happening. Everybody in her family is occupied with their own mindset. She is very young to understand and analyze on her own. The narrator Claudia even gets to compare between her and Pecola and starts accepting life and feel blessed for having a supportive family, which she doesn’t feel until Pecola enters in her life. So, this shows how young kids psychology is totally built upon the type of family environment she/he gets. There is a saying that young kids are like a raw clay ready to be shaped into the different form of objects by the potter. Undoubtedly, it stands so true. Indeed, kids shape themselves according to the type of environment they grow up with. By all means, Pecola’s family is the

Throughout all of history there has been an ideal beauty that most have tried to obtain. But what if that beauty was impossible to grasp because something was holding one back. There was nothing one could do to be ‘beautiful’. Growing up and being convinced that one was ugly, useless, and dirty. For Pecola Breedlove, this state of longing was reality. Blue eyes, blonde hair, and pale white skin was the definition of beauty. Pecola was a black girl with the dream to be beautiful. Toni Morrison takes the reader into the life of a young girl through Morrison’s exceptional novel, The Bluest Eye. The novel displays the battles that Pecola struggles with each and every day. Morrison takes the reader through the themes of whiteness and beauty,

Pecola Breedlove, a major character in The Bluest Eye falls victim to this. Pecola is a young black girl, who prays for blue eyes in hope that they will bring love, admiration, and

The desire to feel beautiful has never been more in demand, yet so impossible to achieve. In the book “The Bluest Eye”, the author, Toni Morrison, tells the story of two black families that live during the mid-1900’s. Even though slavery is a thing of the past, discrimination and racism are still a big issue at this time. Through the whole book, characters struggle to feel beautiful and battle the curse of being ugly because of their skin color. Throughout the book Pecola feels ugly and does not like who she is because of her back skin. She believes the only thing that can ever make her beautiful is if she got blue eyes. Frieda, Pecola, Claudia, and other black characters have been taught that the key to being beautiful is by having white skin. So by being black, this makes them automatically ugly. In the final chapter of the book, the need to feel beautiful drives Pecola so crazy that she imagines that she has blue eyes. She thinks that people don’t want to look at her because they are jealous of her beauty, but the truth is they don’t look at her because she is pregnant. From the time these black girls are little, the belief that beauty comes from the color of their skin has been hammered into their mind. Mrs. Breedlove and Geraldine are also affected by the standards of beauty and the impossible goal to look and be accepted by white people. Throughout “The Bluest Eye” Toni Morrison uses the motif of beauty to portray its negative effect on characters.

A Search For A Self Finding a self-identity is often a sign of maturing and growing up. This becomes the main issue in novel The Bluest Eyes. Pecola Breedlove, Cholly Breedlove, and Pauline Breedlove are the characters that search for their identity through others that has influenced them and by the lifestyles that they have. First, Pecola Breedlove struggles to get accepted into society dued to the beauty factor that the normal people have. Cholly Breedlove, her father, is a drunk who has problems that he takes out of Pecola sexually and Pauline physically. Pauline is Cholly’s wife that is never there for her daughters.

The plot in The Bluest Eye is the tragedy of Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl whose fondest wish is to miraculously awaken one day with blue eyes, thinking that perhaps it will make her mother attentive and her father loving:

The novel The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison is subjected on a young girl, Pecola Breedlove and her experiences growing up in a poor black family. The life depicted is one of poverty, ridicule, and dissatisfaction of self. Pecola feels ugly because of her social status as a poor young black girl and longs to have blue eyes, the pinnacle of beauty and worth. Throughout the book, Morrison touches on controversial subjects, such as the depicting of Pecola's father raping her, Mrs. Breedlove's sexual feelings toward her husband, and Pecola's menstruation. The book's content is controversial on many levels and it has bred conflict among its readers.

There are many themes that seem to run throughout this story. Each theme and conflict seems to always involve the character of Pecola Breedlove. There is the theme of finding an identity. There is also the theme of Pecola as a victim. Of all the characters in the story we can definitely sympathize with Pecola because of the many harsh circumstances she has had to go through in her lifetime. Perhaps her rape was the most tragic and dramatic experience Pecola had experiences, but nonetheless she continued her life. She eliminates her sense of ugliness, which lingers in the beginning of the story, and when she sees that she has blue eyes now she changes her perspective on life. She believes that these eyes have been given

The Bluest Eye is not one story, but rather different, some of the time opposing, interlocking stories. Characters recount stories to comprehend their lives, and these stories have enormous power for both great and malice. Claudia's stories, specifically, emerge for their positive power. As a matter of first importance, she discloses to Pecola's story, and however she doubts the precision and significance of her variant, to some degree her consideration and care recover the offensiveness of Pecola's life. Besides, when the grown-ups portray Pecola's pregnancy and expectation that the child passes on, Claudia and Frieda endeavor to revamp this story as a confident one, giving themselves a role as friends in need. At long last, Claudia opposes

The social standards of beauty and the idea of the American Dream in The Bluest Eye leads Mrs. Breedlove to feelings of shame, that she later passes on to Pecola. The Breedloves are surrounded by the idea of perfection, and their absence of it makes them misfits. Mrs. Breedlove works for a white family, the fishers. She enjoys the luxury of her work life and inevitably favors her work over her family. This leads to Pecola struggle to find her identity, in a time where perception is everything. Pecola is challenged by the idea that her mother perferis her work life, that they have an outdated house, and that she does not look like the shirley temple doll with blue eyes.