The Bluest Eye By Ellen Foster: An Analysis

As stated before, it is based or should one say inspired by the life of the slave Margaret Garner, who was an African American slave . She attempts to escape in 1856 Kentucky by fleeing to Ohio, which was a free state. A mob of slave owners, planters and overseers arrived to repossess her and her children under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which gave slave owners the right to pursue

Although written decades apart, Jacqueline Woodson’s Another Brooklyn and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye both explore the trials and tribulations that young black girls must endure as they begin to step into womanhood. While the burdens that the protagonists in each of these texts differ in some key ways, one of the most interesting things that both Woodson and Morrison depicted was a sense of difficulty in coping with these changes, and rather than having any semblance of mastery over their circumstances, these young protagonists would instead project their emotions onto something else as they try to discover what causes their suffering.

Family, community, and society have a consistent, unavoidable impact on the individual and our own sense of identity. Whether it is the home we grow up in, the societal standards we face, or the relationships we lose and make, self-identification is significantly influenced by our surroundings. This journey to find oneself is a central theme within both Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, and Marilynne Robinson’s, Housekeeping. The Bluest Eye tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl who yearns for the acceptance and love from society. The idea that she must have blue eyes if she wants to look beautiful has been imprinted on her and has affected the way she identifies herself. Then Housekeeping follows two sisters, Lucille and Ruth, who after a series of abandonments, search for their own identities through the mother-daughter relationships they form and the homes that they connect with. While the characters within the two novels both undergo a search for self-identification, the formal structures of the two narratives are different. The Bluest Eye uses differing narrative perspectives, with the character, Claudia serving as the primary narrator. In contrast, Ruth narrates Housekeeping herself, offering an internal understanding and perspective. Overall, the different narration styles within The Bluest Eye and Housekeeping play a significant role in the way the audience follows the characters’ search for self-identification, as it is

Food and appetite is a relatable experience for everyone. Many believe food is strictly just for enjoying while you eat, however within Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eyes” she makes many distinct references to food. Through these means, she creates each individual personality of the characters. She goes on to use this association for most food references within her novel. The result enables the reader to have a more relatable experience with each of her characters regardless of color. Overall, these food and appetites references allow the reader to have a more hands-on approach and bring about a greater understanding of her character 's mentality while helping to disregard racial associations.

The opinions of others, wether one notices or not, greatly affect his or her life. In Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl with dark brown eyes, is deemed ugly. Although she does not possess ugliness; she “put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to [her]” (Morrison 38). Pecola believes she is ugly because she does not meet the societal beauty standard. Pecola convinces herself that all her struggles are rooted in the fact that she not beautiful. If Pecola was white, blond, and blue-eyed her life would be different—it would be better. Pecola believes that having blue eyes would change her entire life. Though she would not be given different friends or a different family, those same friends

Women. When hearing that word alone, you think of weakness, their insignificance, and how lowly they are viewed in society. Females can be seen as unworthy or nothing without a man if they are not advocating them and are constantly being treated differently from men. However, in the book, “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, they live up to their reputations for how they view themselves. Specifically, being focused on women like Pecola, and Claudia. They are often questioning their worth from society’s judgement of beauty. Though one character, Frieda embraces it despite being black. With having everything temporary, the desire of grasping and having something permanent increases. The women desires to be of

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison strongly ties the contents of her novel to its structure and style through the presentation of chapter titles, dialogue, and the use of changing narrators. These structural assets highlight details and themes of the novel while eliciting strong responses and interpretations from readers. The structure of the novel also allows for creative and powerful presentations of information. Morrison is clever in her style, forcing readers to think deeply about the novel’s heavy content without using the structure to allow for vagueness.

Drawing inspiration from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Sia Figiel utilizes some of the same techniques and covers similar themes in her novel Where we Once Belonged which primarily centers around Alofa, a girl growing up in a village Samoa.  Although the narrative voices of Claudia from The Bluest Eye and Alofa from Where we Once Belonged differ in their presence and focus, they both offer a young female adolescent’s perspective on life in their communities and how the influences of different cultural expectations affect their own identity.

Russell M. Nelson once said, “We were born to die and we die to live.” Toni Morrison correlates to Nelson’s quote in her Nobel Lecture of 1993, “We die. That may be the meaning of life. But we do language. That may be the measure of our lives.” In Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye, she uses language to examine the concepts of racism, lack of self-identity, gender roles, and socioeconomic hardships as they factor into a misinterpretation of the American Dream. Morrison illustrates problems that these issues provoke through the struggles of an African American community during the1940s. Through the characters’ challenges of being accepted by society, the reader can blatantly see corruption not only in America, but also throughout the entire world. Morrison uniquely applies multiple points of view to tell the story of a young black girl who desires blue eyes in order to be socially “beautiful”. The reason the book is so effective is that Morrison bases the themes on personal experiences. By the end of the novel, we do not directly gain a sense of hope, change and progress for the future, but instead raises awareness of racism, sexism and self-identity. To convey the importance of personal experiences vis á vis social issues, Morrison parallels crucial times in history to the novel. The author demonstrates how history affects her characters and how the characters’ lives in microcosm represent what was occurring globally at the time. The Bluest Eye offers the possibility for

were dirty and loud”(Morrison 87).She is teaching her son how to acknowledge the difference between black people, the colored who would be fair skinned and the African Americans who are dark skinned. She did not want her son Junior to play with dark skinned black people because she found them to be dirty and loud. This was one problem the delusion of passing caused. Geraldine already passed and was welcomed by the white community and left behind her dark skinned people later pushing them away in order to keep her status in the white community.

When one thinks of the word house, a place of comfort, love, and support comes to mind. Meanwhile, society tends to forget that initially home is a house: a constructed place of living that has all the materialistic essentials to survive in it; but is not a home because it has no feeling of love, safety or serenity within it. These two words, “home” and “house” seem so similar, but are very different in their meanings. In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, houses and homes are depicted very neatly and compared with one another, as the residents of those. Even though everything origins around Breedloves’ family and shown through their lives, almost all of the characters are preoccupied with defining their social class status in Midwestern society during the Great Depression. There is an evident desire to escape poverty and the limiting circumstances of the time and their social classes; represented through houses and physical space characters in. In addition to the social and economical influences, houses in the novel also symbolize the emotional situations and values of the characters who inhabit them. At the time, owning a house says something about one 's income and social class status, especially for African Americans, which are coming out of the age of slavery. However, the pressure from the environment creates emotional situations that hard to overcome and cuts all accomplished efforts to none. Followed by the mental state characters’ values change and are projected onto

In the novel, The Bluest Eye, the author, Toni Morrison, tells the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove. Pecola desires for acceptance, but she is rejected by people around her, including her own parents. The one thing she truly desires is to belong, and to be loved by those around her. However, based on her experiences throughout the novel, Pecola’s idea of love is misguided.

Set in the 1940s, during the Great Depression, the novel The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, illustrates in the inner struggles of African-American criticism. The Breedloves, the family the story revolves around a poor, black and ugly family. They live in a two-room store front, which is open, showing that they have nothing. In the family there is a girl named Pecola Breedlove, she is a black and thinks that she is ugly because she is not white. Pecola’s father, Cholly Breedlove, goes through humiliated experiences that shape his future negatively. Claudia MacTeer, Pecola’s friend, thinks differently and is content of her color. The Bluest Eye demonstrates many types of racism and the struggles of embracing the beauty of race.

What role do societal values and different cultures play in developing one’s sense of self.

Finding good qualities in any of the men of The Bluest Eye are hard to come by. There are many factors that come into play that have shaped the personalities of all of these males. The female characters in the novel endured a lot in coping with the males. Toni Morrison does an exceptional job of painting a vivid picture of the social climate of America in the 1960’s and society’s affects on the people of The Bluest Eye. In a variety of ways, the males of The Bluest Eye have many issues in their past that cause them to act very callous, immoral and bring a lot of anguish to those around them.