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The Bluest Eye By Toni Morriso - Online Term Paper

The Bluest Eye By Toni Morriso

The Breedlove family has moved from the rural south to urban Lorain, Ohio, and the displacement, in addition to grinding work conditions and poverty, contributes to the family's dysfunction. Told from the perspectives of the adolescent sisters, Claudia and Frieda MacTeer, Morrison's narrative weaves its way through the four seasons and traces the daughter's (Pecola Breedlove) descent into madness. Through flashback and temporal shifts, Morrison provides readers with the context and history behind the Breedloves' misery and Pecola's obsessive desire to have "the bluest eyes."
This short novel counterbalances two points of view: one, the tragic consequences of racism (in the Breedlove ...

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object of scorn for her "ugliness" from her family and acquaintances, Pecola yearns to become beautiful and, (she thinks) as a result of her beauty, loveable. That beauty is strictly defined by white and unattainable standards; however, a Shirley Temple mug and Mary Jane candies become the emblems of that for which Pecola yearns.
The same racism that underpins the standards of beauty under which Pecola and her mother, Pauline, suffer, is also at the root of Pecola's father's alcoholism and violence. After he impregnates Pecola and she is beaten by her mother for it, Pecola (with the treachery of Soaphead Church, a "faith healer") goes mad, believing she has obtained her blue eyes. By novel's end she obsessively, repeatedly asks an imaginary other if, indeed, her eyes are "the bluest."
There is an interesting (and excerptable) scene in the novel when Pauline is in the hospital giving birth to Pecola. The doctors come by her bed as the attending physician says, ...

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The Bluest Eye By Toni Morriso. (2005, January 9). Retrieved April 18, 2024, from http://www.essayworld.com/essays/The-Bluest-Eye-By-Toni-Morriso/20319

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PAPER DETAILS

Added: 1/9/2005 09:59:48 PM
Category: English
Type: Premium Paper
Words: 452
Pages: 2

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