In the book The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, there are many main themes and central ideas that the plot follows. The theme that I chose is the aspect of love and how it is displayed through the characters. In The Bluest Eye, the perception of love is viewed in different ways. Throughout the book, love is one thing that remained constant. Some instances it was the lack of love; other situations there were characters who showed love for someone or something, but in a way that is not normal or accepted in our community today. In some ways they are different from how people today view love, and in some ways they are the same. One way that love is discussed in the novel, is how it is perceived by the characters. Just about every conversation …show more content…
Actions such as Cholly “poking fun”(123) at Pauline when she lost her tooth or when they started fighting again after the baby. Maybe it was because “Cholly was truly free. Abandoned in a junk heap by his mother, rejected for a crap game by his father, there was nothing more to lose”(160) Or “while he moves inside her”(84), she wonders why they did not put the “necessary but private parts in a more convenient place”. She does not love him, but she knows that these intimate acts are those required of a wife. The lack of love is exhibited “as Pecola put the laundry bag in the wagon, we could hear Mrs. Breedlove hushing and soothing the tears of the little pink-and-yellow girl”(109) Mrs. Breedlove enver soothed Pecola and never held her and told her that everything was fine. But somehow the little white child that she worked for received her attention, was this …show more content…
Who controls how and when it is given out. Soaphead Church loved to look at the “slender-chested, finger-chested lassies”(179) who were barely teenagers...but he saw this as love. Who is to tell him that his perverted thoughts are not love? Although Pauline loved Cholly, the owner of the house she cleaned persisted in telling “only when you leave him. i’m only thinking of you and your future. what good is he, Pauline, what good is he to you?”(121) And what good was a guy who was either always drunk, beating her, or both… Even Cholly knew he was no good, and he himself did not quite understand love. Before heh touched his daughter he asked: “How dare she love him? Hadn’t she any sense at all?”(161) No one in his life had love him much besides his deceased great aunt, what made them love him now? The consequence of the adults not knowing what love was and how to show it, caused the children to suffer. Children like Pecola longed to be love, although she was forced into “the act of love” it only made her life worse. She had even more demons and was no longer happy with herself. Even though she lost the baby, all the traumatic experiences of her young life caused her to want to escape her life and she eventually went crazy. She felt that she did not have anyone there for her besides her imaginary friend in her mind, whom at the end of the book she pleaded “oh. don’t leave
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
As a child, he was not loved by his mother. She prefered her cat to her own son. Junior saw this at an early age and “spent some happy moments watching it suffer” (86). Junior locked Pecola in a room, becoming the perpetrator with the same turn of attitude as Cholly. When he saw that the cat liked Pecola, he threw the cat, killing it, because the thing his mother loved more than himself loved her. Pecola’s wish could be paralleled to the cat. It had blue eyes, and was loved dearly by someone, which could explain the attention she gave to the cat. Junior even said, “Gimme my cat! (90). Up to this point, he wanted nothing to do with the cat and even tortured it, but with it being the only connection to his mother, he called it his own. Pecola’s dream, or having the same attention as the cat, was killed when the cat was killed. Junior was not loved by his mother, only taken care of to live. She did not “allow her baby, Junior, to cry…[she] did not talk to him, coo to him, or indulge him in kissing bouts” (86). This unlove for her family caused Junior to be victimized, and then alter his ways, and become the perpetrator. Pecola is the victim in the rage of Junior, only because his mother did not love him. She wanted someone to be kind to her, and love her, but that was only met with
In the aftermath, there is a dialogue presented between Pecola and an imaginary friend. The dialogue includes conflicted feelings of Pecola’s rape, and her deluded thoughts of her wish for blue eyes has been granted. She believes that the changes in behavior of the people around her are because of her new eyes, and not the news of her rape. Claudia speaks for a final time, and describes the recent phenomenon of pecola’s insanity. She also suggests that Cholly, (who had since died), may have shown Pecola the only affection he could by raping her. Claudia believed that the whole community, herself included, have used Pecola as a way to make themselves feel beautiful and happier.
“Again, the hatred mixed with tenderness. The hatred would not let him pick her up, the tenderness forced him to cover her.” [This quote represents the emotions that flood through Pecola’s father’s head after he rapes her. Prior to and during raping Pecola, Pecola’s father is enraged with many emotions. These emotions include anger, tenderness and l0ve towards Pecola. This is a significant quote in the novel because this is one of the few parts of where Pecola’s father, Cholly’s, character is shown. This quote reveals Cholly’s character because it shows that the events that happened in his
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
“The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison is a very complex story. While not being a novel of great length is very long on complexity. It tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African American girl immersed in poverty and made “ugly” by the Society of the early 1940’s that defines beauty in terms of blonde haired white skinned , and in this case specifically Shirley Temple.
We can sympathize with Cholly when we look at all the dreadful experiences Cholly went through during his life. He couldn’t be a good husband because he never saw his father show love to his mother or show how to care for her. He couldn’t be a good father because he never had a father to set the example for him. All he learned from his parents was lack of love and the feeling of being neglected, and this became normal. Cholly loved Pecola, but didn’t know how to express it because his parents never expressed it to him. Cholly’s, Polly’s, and Pecola’s
Throughout Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, many characters, including Soaphead Church and Geraldine, use Pecola Breedlove to make themselves feel better. Using Pecola as a scapegoat, the other characters justify their shortcomings by comparing themselves to her. When they think about Pecola, the other characters in the book feel superior and thus boost their egos.
In the afterword of “The Bluest Eye”, Morrison describes the narrator of the story as “the sayer, the one who knows…a child speaking, mimicking the adult black women on the porch or in the backyard” (Morrison 213), in essence, a child acting as the narrator and imitating black women when speaking, possessing intimate secrets waiting to be divulged to the reader. By having a child act as the narrator and introduce emotionally taxing topics to the reader, the weight of these topics would be cushioned by creating skepticism about the truth behind a child’s statements in providing lots of seemingly “trivial information” (Morrison 213) and thereby “altering the priority an adult would assign the information” (Morrison 213). But rather than just being an arbitrary character in the story, Claudia can be justified as being the very embodiment
A woman’s race and the time period she lives in influences not only whether she will be a victim of sexual assault but also, the punishment of the offender. Toni Morrison, The author of The Bluest Eye, a victim of segregation, deals with sexual assault and segregation in her book. Chole Anthony Wofford, who goes by the name of Toni Morrison when writing her books, was born in Lorain, Ohio on February 18, 1931. Her father had several jobs to support their family, while her mother worked as a domestic worker. Toni lived in an integrated neighborhood. However, she did not become aware of segregation until she was a teenager. Her and her family eventually moved to the North to get away from
Racial supremacy has been an issue through the world. It has been demonstrated by slavery in America and the genocide by Hitler in World War 2. Racial supremacy was a big thing in America where white people were seen as the right people and the only people and the other people were just minorities. In the novel The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison racial supremacy is shown by a young girl named Pecola who wants blue eyes so she could have better life. White culture has been the dominant culture for many people who are brought up thinking that it is the perfect lifestyle.
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.
Have you ever felt that you must be destined for something greater than what; you are currently doing? Many individuals often suffer from this fear, and that they missed something earlier in their life, and that they are meant to be doing something more productive with their lives. This internal struggle is shared with many characters in The Bluest Eye, written by Toni Morrison. They believe that once they obtain certain spiritual, mental, or physical characteristics that they will be able to depart from their current, nauseating living conditions.
Pauline eventually meets Cholly, who is Pecola’s biological father, and they fall in love. "He seemed to relish her company and even to enjoy her country ways and lack of knowledge about city things. He talked with her about her foot and asked, when they walked through the town or in the fields, if she were tired. Instead of ignoring her infirmity, pretending it was not there, he made it seem like something special and endearing. For the first time Pauline felt that her bad foot was an asset. And he did touch her, firmly but gently, just as she had dreamed. But minus the gloom of setting suns and lonely river banks. She was secure and grateful; he was kind and lively. She had not known there was so much laughter in the world." (Morrison, p. 115)
Another example of the failure of adults is seen in Pauline Breedlove. Just as Geraldine focuses more on her desires than her child, so does Pauline in ways that also drift her away from her family. Mrs. Breedlove is a black woman who dreams she can somehow make her family appreciate her but after Pauline figures that she could not, she finds meaning in romantic movies and the Fisher Family - the white family she works for. The narrator tells readers, “More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man – they were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, the early-morning and late-evening edges of her day, the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely. . .Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness, and praise” (127). Pauline Breedlove works for a family that is not her family and because the Fishers give her what she desires, she ends up neglecting her own family. Mrs. Breedlove fails to