The Bluest Eye By Toni Morrison

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.

Toni Morrison, the author of The Bluest Eye, centers her novel around two things: beauty and wealth in their relation to race and a brutal rape of a young girl by her father. Morrison explores and exposes these themes in relation to the underlying factors of black society: racism and sexism. Every character has a problem to deal with and it involves racism and/or sexism. Whether the characters are the victim or the aggressor, they can do nothing about their problem or condition, especially when concerning gender and race. Morrison's characters are clearly at the mercy of preconceived notions maintained by society. Because of these preconceived notions, the racism found in The Bluest Eye is not whites against blacks. Morrison writes about

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.

In the novel The Bluest Eye, author Toni Morrison uses the internalization of beauty standards and its effect on characters’ social interactions with the community to reveal society’s assumption that appearance is the decisive factor in determining one’s status and critique its detrimental effect on one’s personal identity.

One of the most prominent themes found in Toni Morrison’s acutely tragic novel The Bluest Eye is the transferal or redirection of emotions in an effort on the part of the characters to make pain bearable. The most obvious manifestation of that is the existence of race hatred for one’s own race that pervades the story; nearly every character that the narrator spends time with feels at some point a self-loathing as a result of the racism present in 1941 American society. The characters, particularly the adults, have become bitter and hate themselves because of the powerlessness they feel in the situation. They transfer the anger and hatred onto themselves, or at times the others around them, because they

“To GO BACK to the original hunger was impossible. Luckily for Denver, looking was food enough to last…it was breaking through her own skin to a place where hunger hadn’t been discovered. It didn’t have to happen often, because beloved seldom looked right at her…Beloved rested cheek on knuckles and looked at Denver with attention. It was lovely…being pulled into view by the interested, uncritical eyes of the other…Denver’s skin… become soft and bright like the lisle dress.” (139). The hunger that Morrison presents is not the literal hunger that humans feel but the hunger for love and attention that Denver lacked all those years living in 124 with her mother Sethe. Denver has always felt lonely because no one would come to their house because

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, presents the reader with some of the strong racial imbalances present in the African American communities in the United States. The novel, The Bluest Eye, addresses many themes such as, feminism, rape culture, repetition in rupture, abjection, oppression, racism and the innocence of youth (Morrison 1970). The evident issue in the novel is the way that the African American people oppress not only themselves but others, to the standards of the white American standards of things such as beauty. The characters, Pecola and Pauline, are the major characters in the novel and are, as written by Morrison (1970), the ciphers of the way African Americans treated each-other and themselves in a time of racial oppression

Besides, Morrison also creates the bad character. They did racial action to Pecola. They were Geraldine, Mr. Yakabowsky, and the boy of Pecola's classmates. In stressing these bad characters, Morrison tried to say the bad thing they do to Pecola. It can be seen in these statement:

living condition after the Great Depression, but these movies also ingrain into her mind the concept of beauty that is measured by race and skin color, bringing her torturous feelings of shame and envy when she returns to the realm of reality into her own skin and life. After their interactions with accessible dolls and movies, Pecola and her mother are left miserable as they become more aware of their dark skin color and how far away it is from white.

The formulation of identity is not only comprised of a person’s personality or innate ways it encompasses a variety of aspects drawn from their surroundings, influenced and shaped by cultural standards. The presence of whiteness in society then becomes that influence, disabling one’s ability to ever truly form their own cultural identity. Day asserts that“Morrison’s first novel, The Bluest Eye ,exposes the results of white presence in society on African Americans and how this presence imposes difficulty on the individual to form an identity” (Day 1). In this quotation Day expresses that the development of one’s personal identity is reflective of that individual’s environment and or cultural community. The article is structured around the major themes present in Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye. The inability of an individual’s formation of a personal identity is a result of cultural trauma, that is produced by the presence and imposition of whiteness in a cultural society.“The inability of male and female characters to form a sense of identity in her novels Beloved and The Bluest Eye is tied to a cultural trauma they experience which makes it impossible to shape a sense of self” (Day 1). This quotation shows the interconnectedness of an individual’s external environment influencing their internal one. The cultural trauma expressed not only comes by way of the institution of slavery, but the internalization of the physical manifestation of racism as white presence.The purpose of this journal is to explain the correlation between identity and white presence as it relates to Toni Morrison’s Beloved and The Bluest Eye. In which

Unlike other books on the subject of racism that were published at the time of Toni Morrison, Morrison’s “The Bluest Eye” is exceptional because of the manner in which it addresses the persistent effects of slavery, mainly self-hatred, instead of the most apparent problems of isolation. In this book, black characters are infatuated with the idea of what white represents. Being that this book highlights the problems of racism and segregation, the author employs a number of symbols to illustrate his point. One of these symbols used by Toni Morrison is the blue eyes. In the book, the characters are obsessed about the blue eyes and what it represents to each of them.

Is someone who strives to become something that they are not, motivated simply by acceptance? For example, a person who changes his or her hairstyle or way of dress may desire to be seen as cool. Also, others may even join a sport simply to be popular and feel more accepted. In our lives, we are always changing and adjusting in order to show progress or to be seen as better. The changing of one’s race is another action taken by individuals who seek acceptance in high society. In The Bluest Eye, the author Toni Morrison tells of several intertwining stories of many black individuals. Most of these individuals, when addressed by other characters, struggle with negative references of name-calling and descriptions. Negative remarks aside, some black individuals in the novel are raised in a light that mirrors the opposing race’s life rather than their own. Throughout the novel, the author and society constantly place black individuals on a lower pedestal so much that they strive to be white or to have white qualities.

Society’s perception of women is based on certain characteristics; Toni Morrison demonstrates this through her characters. Claudia, the youngest character, represents innocence that is conflicted between her own sensible judgment and what is expected of her. Pauline internalizes expectations, and lives accordingly, but lacks self-identity. Having no sense of self she finds herself seeking validation from those who should not affect her. The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison focuses on the hardships that women of color face when seeking acceptance from society. She depicts how detrimental it is to believe that a woman’s self worth is determined by society’s unrealistic standards of beauty and femininity.

The Bluest Eye(1970) is Morrison’s first novel and also a very powerful study of how African-American families and particularly women are affected by racism and consequent sexual and mental abuse and how these women dwindle into madness. She depicts the struggle of living as a black American in a white, patriarchal society. This work is powerfully engaged with questions of history, memory and trauma. Her novels function as a form of cultural memory and how, in their engagement with African American past, they testify to historical trauma. In a 1989 interview with Bonnie Angelo, Morrison talks about racism as it is taught, institutionalized and culturally reproduced. “Everybody remembers the first time they were taught that part of the human race was Other. That’s a trauma. It’s as though I told you that your left hand is not part of your body.”

Although my students were unaware of it, in a sense what they were questioning from the standpoint of literary criticism is not only the theory of postmodernism with its emphasis on race, class and gender, but the theory of naturalism as well: the idea that one 's social and physical environments can drastically affect one 's nature and potential for surviving and succeeding in this world. In this article, I will explore Toni Morrison 's The Bluest Eye from a naturalistic perspective; however, while doing so I will propose that because Morrison 's novels are distinctly black and examine distinctly black issues, we must expand or deconstruct the traditional theory of naturalism to deal adequately with the African American experience: a