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 the future of the two girls.
During the 1940’s African Americans were subjected to segregation and Jim Crow, which oppressed them in their own country. Morrison replicates this broken relationship between Black people as a whole with the broken upbringing the two girls were forced to suffer. Because of the past of Pecola and Claudia parents and societal ideals of a black women the characters believe that they are not attractive enough nor good enough because of the abuse from their parents, that translates from their post memory from their childhood. This relates to the constant subjugation Black people had to face every day in their own country at the hands of white people and society.
Ms. MacTeer is constantly fussing and displays anger towards the girls. Claudia, her daughter, explains in chapter 1 that she has always hated the blue eyed, baby doll that she was given for Christmas. This is an allusion to how white girls were seen as more desirable and pretty than Black girls socially. The girls receive dolls and are curious as to why those dolls are seen as beautiful. Morrison uses this event to proclaim that there is no difference between Black girls and white girls. There is no true reason that white girls should be put on a pedestal above other races.
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Although Claudia finds nothing from her examination of the doll, Morrison is critiquing the social structure America has that turns racial beauty into a pyramid with white at the top. Because of the constant badgering and yelling from her parents she believes she can never do anything right which translates into her lack of self-confidence and negative attitude towards herself. As a child, these traumatic psychological experiences have a big impact on the rest of her development. This causes the girls to develop inferiority complexes that haunt them and their future. This is because of the treatment at home, and the position of black families in of the 1940s. She feels useless.
The feeling that her mother and society portrays of the black woman creates her own mentality of herself and forces her to believe that she is unworthy of beauty and the good life. The societal implications of the 1940s constructs the self-self of Claudia. “The disrupter of seasons was a new girl in school named Maureen Peal. A high-yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back. The quality of her clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me. I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly black e mos. I am cute! (Morrison).
Claudia is hurt by the lack of respect from Mareen and takes it to heart, because she is not white or loved by her teachers or peers that this is true. This is instilled because of society and lack of acknowledgment from her parents. Morrison is now creating a subliminal message for Black people to have a stronger family. No matter where they go, Claudia and the others are unable to cope with their situation. Because of the fractured family life, the girls are broken. They lack pride, acceptance for themselves, or trust in others to form a community.
All of these issues and more root from the situation of the family. This also portrays the girls in a state of victimhood. They have no mental capacity to fight back so they fall into an abyss of depression and accepting that they are worth nothing in this world. Pecola’s self-image of herself is also negative because she believes she is ugly. This comes from her parents who were abused as children and society. Her parents affect from post memory shape how her parents speak of life. Because Pecola’s parents had bad childhoods it is projected onto her through the distant and collective culture of trauma from their experiences. Pecola’s father was abused as a child and was caught having sex.
When Cholly was young, two white men once caught him having sex with a girl. They forced him to continue and watched. “Never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters. Such an emotion would have destroyed him. They were big, white, armed men. He was small, black, helpless. His subconscious knew what his conscious mind did not guess – that hating them would have consumed him, burned him up like a piece of soft coal” (Morrison). His past effects Pecola’s life ruining any chance of her having any self-worth Pecola believes that because she is ugly because things like this happen to her.
Bad things happen to ugly people. So, she believes that if her eyes were blue all the evil would leave her life. She wishes she were white so that her life could be better. Her parents post memory affect her mental health as she now views herself as ugly because of the abuse. She tries to make herself look like a movie star, but then while chewing candy at a movie, she loses one of her front teeth. From then on, she feels ugly, and she and Cholly begin to fight again. Her first baby fails to fill the hole in her life. She talks to her second baby in the womb, vowing to love her no matter what.
When she gives birth in the hospital, a doctor tells a group of students that black women do not feel pain while giving birth; they are “just like horses”. The reader now sees why she behaves the way she does, and our perception of what took place becomes complicated by her past. You see things through Pecola’s point of view which makes it easier to empathize with her and her torment. She is stuck believing she is ugly and inferior to everyone around her because of her physical appearance and treatment by Cholly.
This section recounts the history of Cholly Breedlove when mother bets him as a child which transfers over in to his relationship with his family and wife. He loves and beats women, he takes and leaves jobs, and he kills three white men—all the while remaining indifferent. This makes Pecola mentally distraught as she believes because she doesn’t have the bluest eyes she deserves these bad things, because she is not perfect, when in reality this infliction is caused by the fathers post memory.
