1. The history of the Breedloves' home is that it use to be a store. The Breedlove's lived in a store front. It is a very unattractive building within the community. "...pedestrians, who are residents of the neighborhood, simply look away when they pass it."(Morrison 33). That statement shows me that no one cared about this abandoned store. Before the store was abandoned it was a pizza parlor, a real estate office, and a gypsies base of operations. I believe that no one remembers the Breedlove's living in the store because no one ever took notice of the store also the Breedlove's were not active with in the community to be noticed by anyone. The book states that the Breedlove's did not make a wave in the mayor's office.…
Pregnancy is source of immense joy for many people, conception represents hope and new beginnings. However in both Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye pregnancy is portrayed as tragic ending to life. Far From the Madding Crowd takes place in Pre-Industrial Revolution England and follows the complex journeys through class lines. Unlike the protagonist Bathsheba, Fanny Robin is a poor and unfortunate, similarly to Bathsheba Fanny was cuckolded by Sergeant Troy, however her class and unluckiness separated their fates. The Bluest Eye is set in a small town in Ohio Pre-Depression era, the novel is a portrait of the African American community at the time. Pecola Breedlove is…
The Bluest Eye is a novel by Toni Morrison that takes place at the end of the Great Depression in Ohio. In the novel, the MacTeer family first takes in a young boarder named Pecola Breedlove after her father Cholly has attempted to burn down the family home, but she is soon reunited with her own family despite their hardships. The MacTeer family are essential to the novel because one of the young daughters, Frieda, seems to suffer from a much less severe racism than most other characters, going as far as to destroy a white doll she is given. Cholly drinks, and Cholly and Pecola’s mother Pauline are physically abusive towards each other, leading her brother Sammy to run away from the home.…
The Bluest Eye is a complex novel written by Toni Morrison, an African American literary theorist. Morrison evokes a society still plagued by the premise of slavery and the exposes this mode of white inferiority through The Bluest Eye. “Wicked people love wickedly, violent people love violently, weak people love weakly, stupid people love stupidly, but the love of a free man is never safe”, Morrison endows these last couple of sentences with a lyrical quality that makes the readers truly understand the depth of Cholly’s character and the “freeness” he experiences. Morrison initially introduces Cholly Breedlove as the antagonist, a drunk and very abusive father; any man who would beat his wife, set his house on fire and rape his daughter couldn’t…
The characters in “The Bluest Eye” are exposed to social standards and norms. The book opens with an excerpt from the book “Dick and Jane”. This excerpt represents the perfect, ideal, suburban, white family. Each chapter in the book also begins with a quote from this book. This makes the lives of the black families in the book seem worse. The comparison of Dick and Jane’s family and life to that of the black families in the book demonstrates how the black families would compare themselves to the white families. The blacks in “The Bluest Eye” feel conflicted because their self-identity does not match up with society’s social norms. An example of this is when Geraldine does everything she can to be that same as white families. She straightens her hair, uses lotion so she does not become ashy, has a steady income, and keeps in house in exceptional shape. But no matter how similar her life style is to theirs, she still does not feel as if she fits in because she knows she is black. This theme can be seen in everyday life when comparing the first and second floor cafeterias at Osbourn Park. It is more usual for white people to sit on the second floor while more colored people sit on the first floor. No one said the setup had to be that way, but it is normal for the students and it is what they are used to.…
The process of planting consumerism into a child’s mind is evident throughout all of society. It is driven into us from such a young age that we don’t notice that it has happened. In Bruce Dawes’ poem Americanised he talks about the child’s “…toys that mark his short life.” Juxtaposition is used here between ‘toys’ and ‘marks’, which highlights the significance of the mark and triviality of toys. The word ‘toys’ is a marker for his life which is being compared to an object and the word ‘short’ is re-emphasising his youth in which he has already acquired so many toys. The child longs for the escape that other children have because he can hear them “…scream and run.” He not only longs for this escape, he fears it because it is something outside of his experience due to him being conditioned since birth. There are connotations of fear in this quote because screaming and running isn’t necessarily good in this text even though it seems to be portrayed as freedom but even though they have escaped they are still running. This provokes people to feel sorry for the children and the boy and think about the similarities to everyday life. In the photographic essay American Girls, by Ilona Szwarc, the repetition of the series and the sequencing of the images destroys the concept of individuality and the relationship with the dolls are not in any way special. This shows that the girls are lead into a false reality and that they have been told to think that…
In the exhilarating and gloomy “The Secret Life of the Lonely Doll,” Jean Nathan exposes the emotional journey that Dare Wrights experienced as she grew up in a dysfunctional home where Divorce and separation of her family damaged her drastically. Gordon Berlin an Executive vice president of MDRC, a unique nonpartisan social policy research and demonstration organization said “children who grow up in an intact, two-parent family with both biological parents present do better on a wide range of outcomes than children who grow up in a single-parent family.”(Berlin) Having lived a vulnerable, and abnormal childhood, and an extremely dependent life; Dare Wright was motivated to do whatever she could to escape the depressing reality of her life through her art work.…
We are sometimes known as our own worst critic and after reading Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use” and Tennessee Williams’ play “The Glass Menagerie”, we experience two characters that display this to be true. In “Everyday Use” we are introduced to Maggie, the timid and homely little sister who has burns throughout her arms and legs due to a house fire which occurred many years prior to when the story takes place. In “The Glass Menagerie” we read about Laura, an introverted character who suffers from a childhood illness causing her to have one leg shorter than the other leaving her to rely on the use of a brace. Throughout both pieces of literature we learn that both young ladies are being held down by their physical defects, which is all fault to their own. Although both Maggie from “Everyday Use” and Laura from “The Glass Menagerie” are from two completely different backgrounds, both share low self-esteem caused by their physical defects.…
In Toni Morrison's book The Bluest Eye there are many instances dealing with the idea of beauty, both through the eyes of some young girls and from an older point of view. For example, Claudia has a problem with white people who she believes to be more…
Feminism has created many opportunities for women, and it has expanded the rights for women in today’s society. However, women in the early 1900s were not as treated with respect and did not have as many rights as the women in our time period do. Women were looked at objectively, as possessions of men, and someone to cook, clean, and bear the children. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the portrayal of women shows the said stereotypical woman from the early 1900s. This novel shows the struggles of a young, beautiful, black woman, Janie, that is trying to fit into the world and find the love that she has always desired. Janie goes through beatings, a forced marriage, and being controlled…
In the poem “Barbie Doll,” author Marge Piercy utilizes four well-developed stanzas to depict a scornful view of American society. Applicable to all time periods, “Barbie Doll” narrates the short-lived life of a young girl despised by society for her appearance. Barbie Doll is like a fairytale, full of plasticity, fakeness, and fantasy. However, unlike a fairytale, “Barbie Doll” ends with society applauding the funeral of a princess that was torn apart into pieces and then worshiped. Written with varying tones of sadness and depression, vivid imagery, and compact concrete details, “Barbie Doll” presents a fact that society for centuries has blinded from view.…
African American mothers play a unique role in the family structure as a result of the discrimination and prejudice that they have come to expect. A role that, though not outwardly feminine or gentile, is nonetheless very significant in the American story of motherhood. This new embodiment of motherhood questions conventional standards of behaviour, standards that associate maternity with specific behavioural traits. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison pokes fun at these traditional ideals of femininity and fragility that act to restrict and dictate the behaviour of women. Commonly in literature, if a woman falls short of fulfilling her patriarchal duties she is portrayed as an archetype, specifically the archetype of the bad mother. Morrison does…
In the story “Recitatif” by Toni Morrison there is a constant theme of race, discovery and social class differentiation. The characters in Morrison’s story, Twyla and Roberta, are of different races but are more evidently separated by class based on their wealth. Wealth is one of the most important defining elements of personal identity and class differentiation. The wealth of a person will determine what products and services they will consume, what subcultures they will associate with, and their everyday code of conduct. Twyla and Roberta met after being dumped in a shelter as little girls by their mothers and spent some time together as roommates. Eventually they went their separate ways and occasionally ran into each other throughout their lives. In each of Roberta and Twyla’s encounters Toni Morrison develops a distinct lifestyle that emphasizes their class position. The theme of “Barbie-Q” by Sandra Cisneros compliments the argument that Toni Morrison makes in “Recitatif” which is that class relationships in America are based on an individual’s ability to consume, association with subcultures, and everyday code of conduct.…
Precious is sexually, physically, and mentally abused by her mother and father, two figures that are supposed to be sites of safety and nourishment. The abuse she faces in the home take the form of the physical, sexual, and mental exploitation of her for the pleasure of someone else. Her father and mother both take part in abusing her, and her father raping her resulted in Precious getting pregnant twice while still in high school. The power that the mother and father have over Precious seems boundless as they are able to abuse her through various ways. Sites of food and sex, which are ordinarily supposed to be objects of pleasurable consumption, are objects through which violence is enacted upon Precious throughout her life. Sapphire revises themes of sexuality around Black womanhood when writing about the exploitation of young Black girls. She describes the effects of the sexual abuse Precious endures, writing, “Precious put the book, doll jump rope, her head, self, down, very quietly, in the back of the class when she was six years old” (Sapphire 19). The sexual abuse of Precious also encompasses a traumatic disconnect between Precious and her body, in which she describes feeling physical pleasure at times when being raped by her father. This can be discussed in terms of Lorde’s definition of the pornographic as “sensation without feeling” (Lorde 340). Sexual…
Bibliography: Stone, Tonya Lee. The Good, The Bad, and The Barbie: A Doll’s History and Her Impact on Us. Viking Juvenile, 2010. Print.…