Essays on The Bluest Eye

The novel opens with an excerpt from an old-fashioned reading primer. The lines begin to blur and run together — as they do at the beginning of select chapters. What social commentary is implicit in Morrison’s superimposing these bland banalities describing a white family and its activities upon the tragic story of the destruction of…

Claudia MacTeer and Pecola Breedlove are two young girls that are main characters in The Bluest Eye. They both grow up in the same time period, but their fates are different and they both have different ways of maturing. And each girl overcomes the events in their lives different, whether they have control of the…

Beauty plays an important role in a woman’s femininity; it gives a woman confidence and acceptance from society. However, when a woman’s “whiteness” became the standard of beauty across the 1940s white-dominated society, African American females faced the wrath of their own community through the rise of internalized racism, which defined beautiful women as lighter-skin…

Individuals are shaped by their traumas and successes. Regardless of the person, everyone’s past effect their choices and experiences from then on. In Toni Morrison The Bluest Eyes, two main characters Claudia and Pecola are mentally affected by the rough past of their parents. The events of the past create a chain reaction that alter…

Each character had their own way of seeing themselves as ugly. Mrs. Breedlove just kind of dealt with it and moved on with her life, Sammy adjusted his behavior to it and use it strategically, and Pecola hid behind her ugliness. Their relationship never really works, but it fills their psychological needs because they are…

“The eyes are the window to the soul” is a common saying used by many individuals today. This statement is especially true in the case of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. In this novel, Pecola Breedlove wants nothing more than to have blue eyes because she believes it will make her beautiful and she believes…

Beauty. A simple word with many complicated definitions. Beauty is more so in the eyes of society than it is, in the eyes of the beholder. Since social norms define beauty, one must abide by that standard otherwise face disrespect, sorrow, and loss of individuality. Most characters in Morrison’s novel, all endeavor to adjust to…

 Psychological Approach As Pecola suffers abuses from her community, her mental state begins to degenerate while her obsession with obtaining blue eyes grows until outright condemnation and isolation from her community drives her to madness. Pecola’s delusional state is contained to herself as seen through the juxtaposition of italicized versus normal text conversation with a…

A social group is a group of people who have similar characteristics and contain a sense of unity. There are many ways to socially group people such as age, sex, income, and profession. Many psychologists have different definitions of what a social group is. A social group has been defined as “two or more persons…

To yearn for something unnatural to your own being is unproductive and unsatisfying. Throughout Morrison’s novel, Pecola Breedlove underwent a journey of ridicule, self-discovery, and self-appreciation, a journey that people of this time needed to take because the pressures of Whiteness imposed upon and accepted by the Black Community created loads of self-hatred and low…