Discrimination occurs when a person is treated less favourably because of their racial or ethnic origin, religion or belief, disability, age or sexual orientation. Jane Elliott decided to use role-play a situation portraying the discrimination that a person of different colour would be constantly exposed to in day-to-day life.…
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.…
The theme of the story, “The Bluest Eye” written by Toni Morrison, demonstrates the connection between the self-esteem of African-American people (beauty and ugliness), racism and hate. The reason why this theme is discussed was because, we can go back to the origins of African-Americans, it relates to the African diaspora, Jim Crow era, and how people negatively look at blacks today in society, and white supremacy destroyed black imaginary. But before this goes on furthermore, the audience needs to understand the importance of the dominant society which strongly removed the identity of African-American. Claudia and Maureen play perfect roles during the story. They show…
To begin, "The Bluest Eye" is Toni Morrison's first novel. This novel tells a story of an African American girl's desire for the bluest eyes, which is the symbol for her of what it means to feel beautiful and accepted in society (American). In the novel, women suffer from the racial oppression, but they also suffer from violation and harsh actions brought to them by men (LitCharts). Male oppression is told all throughout the story, but the theme of women and feminity with the actions of male oppression over the women reaches its horrible climax when one…
A three-hundred-year history of slavery in America led to a psychological oppression of black people in America, which still exists today. Toni Morrison decides not to delineate how white dominance has affected African-Americans culturally yet she challenges American standards of white beauty and how that beauty is socially constructed within our culture. In The Bluest Eye, Morrison uses society’s image of beauty to demonstrate how the value of black beauty is diminished by racial prejudices and dilemmas through the lives of Pecola Breedlove, Claudia and Freida MacTeer, whose young minds were affected by this internalized idea that the color of your skin determined how perfect or worthy you were seen, not to yourself and on the inside, but…
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 Bluest Eye, written in 1970, is novel by Toni Morrison. It is Morrison's first novel and was written while she was teaching at Howard University. The Bluest Eye tells the tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, a young black girl growing up in Morrison's hometown of Lorain, Ohio, during the hard times following the Great Depression. In this novel, Toni Morrison addresses a timeless problem of white racial dominance in the United States and points to the impact it has on the life of black females growing up in the 1930's.…
The purpose of this paper is to reflect upon and react to the exercise "Blue-eyed/Brown-eyed" conducted by Jane Elliot in relation to the ideas of diversity, race, and privilege. The objective of this exercise was to give white people an idea of what life is like to be something other than white. Elliot 's exercise pointed out both blatant and indirect ways that prejudice demoralizes people of color. Elliot facilitates everyone involved aiding their recognition of the cost that prejudice and racial behavior has on an individual. This exercise employed an open dialogue approach on topics that may be looked at as most people as off limits. The dialogue encouraged through the "Blue-eyed/Brown-eyed" experiment allows people to understand what it 's like to feel dispirited and the role they can play through daily interactions with people of the opposite race that promote the aspects of being supportive and understanding.…
The author of The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison uses a number of literary elements in order to illustrate Pecola’s desperation to try and become beautiful and thus improve her life. One of the most important literary elements used is setting. The setting of the novel as stated earlier is Lorain, Ohio during the 1940s when discrimination for being black was rampant. Located in the Midwest, Pecola grew up knowing that she was not beautiful, because she was black. Everywhere she went everyone looked down upon her and mocked her and her entire family.…
Oppression is a prevalent and reoccurring theme in black literature. African-American novelists in the early 20th century offered a predominantly white audience an insight into black culture and vocalized the injustice had by their hands. Alice Walker's The Color Purple and Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye both incorporate controversial female protagonists facing the challenge of mental oppression by both personal and societal belief, and physical abuse at the hands of their aggressors. Whilst each arguably feminist bildungsroman faces criticism for misrepresenting relationships and stereotyping behaviour in black society, it is widely accepted that both authors explore and bring attention to the oppression and abuse of women in a modern context.…
Alienation. A withdrawing or separation of a person or a person’s affections from an object or position of former attachment (Merriam Webster). Society has ways of alienating people for multiple reasons such as their race, gender, class, or beliefs. In The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison, the character Pecola was alienated not only by society, but by her family as well. Pecola’s alienation was due to the fact that she was raped by her father and carried his baby. This reveals that society has very little to no values, and that they always assume the worse about people.…
Morrison uses these figures who show how they are admired for their cleanliness and whiteness. These characters parallel Pecola, Cholly, Pauline, Claudia, Frieda and Mrs. MacTeer, who are all reflections of “blackness” which is perceived as dirty and undesirable. These characters all show how everyone in the community is a victim of racism and in return set out to change themselves, developing body dysmorphic disorder. These characters all wish to change their physical appearance and look and act more like the mixed race characters, only to gain acceptance from their community. Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye tells the story how racism and societies standard of beauty leads to body dysmorphic disorder and the demise of a village when they fall to the pressures of what is accepted by…
Beauty in the American culture has been transformed so many times most people do not even know what real beauty is. Someone can see a woman posing on a billboard in New York City and believe that she is beautiful, but who decided who and what can be beautiful. The way our culture is American people watch television, movies, internet clips constantly. People are fed images of what "beauty" is supposed to be, but this idea of beauty is from the eyes of producers, models, musicians, and actors. It seems to me that only the people who are thought to have beauty are deciding what is beautiful.…
“If happiness is anticipation with certainty, we were happy.” (pg 16) Morrison’s purpose of including Shirley Temple in the novel is to paint a picture of the ideal girl; a figure of conformity. She represented everything that Pecola thought she should be: blue eyes, blonde hair- a simply adorable little girl; and everything Maureen Peal felt she was: wealthy, light skinned, and what people liked to see. The Bluest Eye illuminates true dependence on absolute beauty; the yearn of conforming to an ultimate standard of it. The usage of Shirley Temple exemplifies this desired beauty and in extension exemplifies desired happiness through beauty.…