Struggle and Survival in Cultural Clash: A Case Study of Pecola in The Bluest Eye (original) (raw)
Related papers
Racial Conflicts in Tony Morrison's The Bluest Eye: A Literary Analysis
Sujana Suvin., Sch J Arts Humanit Soc Sci, Nov, 2020; 8(11): 553-559, 2020
Racism is a belief in the superiority of one race to another which results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. The life of African-American colored people has been affected by racism. For this purpose, the paper tries to focus on a system where chauvinism, malevolence, and domestically sexual harassments against Pecola Breedlove whose only target is to achieve beauty, which means happiness and survival. The novel portrays the effect of discrimination on a budding teenager's sexual being that put her in a gloomy and scary atmosphere from where the character was unable to leap out. The novel shows the prejudices that create a crater in the black man's psyche and his unexposed aggression on the white world led to his psychological repression. Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye presents black cultural heritage and solicits the African-American to be proud of female black identity. Thus, this paper would like to examine the nature of the black people's struggle for their race and endurance in a multicultural postcolonial white America.
Subversive Politics of Racism in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye
2013
The narrator in The Bluest Eye states that "A little black girl yearns for the blue eyes of a little white girl, and the horror at the heart of her yearning is exceeded only by the evil of fulfillment" (162). The little black girl is Pecola Breedlove who is dissatisfied with the world around her. She is born into a society that is confused as it shuns its own cultural values and craves for self-gratification in the culture of the whites. In the novel this tendency of the society finds its symbolic and subversive expression in Pecola's quest for blue eyes which represent the western/racist ideals of beauty. The quest results in the suffering and anguish of the blacks which is presented by Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye. This article proposes to analyse how the subversive politics of racism is operative in the narrative in the novel.
Black empowerment and Afro-American values in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
IIUC Studies
The Bluest Eye of Toni Morrison is extraordinarily significant, as it addresses the different sides of American literature, and the lives of the Afro-American people. Although the conventional theological aspects of white culture can negatively influence other characters of Morrison, it is Pecola whose life appears to be increasingly defenseless against the impulses of the individuals who have accepted the Western custom. In a democratic country, people generally have the same value, but there are still prejudices in the concepts of beauty and worthiness. The search for freedom, black identity, the nature of evil and the robust voices of African-Americans have become themes for African-American literature. Folklore covers the history of black and white interaction in the United States and also summarizes the feelings expressed in protest literature1. Morrison argues that the survival of the dark ladies in a white dominated society depends on loving their own way of life and dark rac...
Analysis of Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye from Black Feminist Perspective
Ars Artium, 2014
The Bluest Eye addresses the issue of self disapproval but in the broader black feminist perspective. More than any other human being, pain, disapproval and humiliation are an inseparable part of a black woman's life. Toni Morrison is a black woman and these are not foreign to her. She writes with a personal knowledge of the pain of the black women. In this novel she has depicted their isolation and hurdles in leading a fulfilling human life. Morrison chooses an eleven year old black girl-Pecola Breedlove-as the central character of her novel because she wants to bring forward the most neglected of human species. This novel addresses what can unquestionably be called a 'disease' in black women's psyche and analyses its root causes. This story of an ugly black girl also raises several sociological and psychological questions. The novel calls into question the contemporaneous slogan, "Black is Beautiful" and challenges readers to consider, the seeds of black hatred, the demons within black psyche, and the culprit or with the broader culture that contributes to black low self esteem.
Racial Trauma and Microaggression in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye
2022
Racial trauma is associated with the detrimental psychological impact of race-based discrimination having symptoms like those of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). With accounts of systemic racism across the globe, it is quite pertinent to discuss the distressing impact of living within a society of structural racism. Racial trauma involves exposure and re-exposure to race-based stress, which can be of different forms, microaggression being one of them. Microaggression shows how instances at a micro-level like insults and slights against black people, can have a detrimental effect on the mental health of those who experience it. The Bluest Eye (1970), the debut novel of Nobel prize-winning author Toni Morrison, is a tragic story of Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl, longing for the socially constructed idea of beauty. A study of her character will highlight the effects of internalised racism based on the tragic events of discrimination and marginalisation in Pecola's life and her psychological response to it. This paper will focus on racial trauma and Chester E. Pierce's concept of microaggression to foreground the psychological distress that Pecola is grappling with, in the narrative and how apart from acts of violence, offensive and derogatory statements against the people of colour damages their psyche.
CENSURING RACIAL SELF-LOATHING IN TONI MORRISON’S THE BLUEST EYE
Komi Begedou, 2015
At a time when white race and blue eyes are idolized by white and black people alike, the innocent Pecola Breedlove desperately, naively and vehemently seeks out beauty for herself. In order to attain beauty in her culture, she must do the undoable: have blue eyes, synonymous with white beauty. Toni Morrison denounces the disastrous effects that racial self-loathing can have on a whole culture in general and on African American culture in particular. Actually, the desire to be considered beautiful in a white dominated world was so compelling that many characters in The Bluest Eye loathe their own skin color and feel shame for their culture. These feelings of self-loathing and self-hatred are passed on from the adults to their children, creating therefore a continuous cycle of negativity and increased self-hate for one’s race. This paper explores the techniques used by Morrison to censure racial self-loathing in her masterpiece. Key words: Racial, censure, self-loathing, culture, beauty.
The African American Woman in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
2010
In this study we examine how the society, the family and one‟s own psyche are antithetical to the Afro-American woman in Toni Morrison‟s The Bluest Eye. Societal, familial and psychic factors are the triple forces that put the blacks of America in jeopardy. The article traces out the obstruction constructed against the blacks by the white community. Blacks are dehumanized and minimized from subject-hood to object-hood. The paper also discovers how an unhealthy family life alienates one from the other resulting in little sense of belonging. Family, which ought to nourish and develop the individual, degrades into a destructive factor. The study examines the psychological trauma and the danger lurking within the African-American woman. Unable to meet the needs of one‟s environment the individual is on the quest to quench the expectation of others. In the process the individual becomes a prey to depression and frustration which ultimately leads to self-mutilation. In order to have a tru...
Color Black: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Andrea Levy’s Never Far from Nowhere
Color Black: Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Andrea Levy’s Never Far from Nowhere, 2021
Throughout human history, society has been governed and controlled by man and the father figure. In a society ruled by men, in other words, in a patriarchal society, women have been viewed as simply objects to serve their male equivalent, whether her husband or father. Her function is limited to childbirth and raising, as well as satisfy her husband and father's demands, whether they be sexual or emotional. Women, especially dark-skinned women, have been forced into this socio-cultural paradigm as objects with no choice in making decisions. Through exploring two novels, this study raises questions about the suffering of black women and the difficulties they face every day in their lives. Nowadays, black feminism has been considered one of the important issues that attract a great deal of attention because of the suffering of dark-skinned women and thus, Chapter One in this thesis deals with feminist criticism and theory. Chapter Two aims to explore how Toni Morrison highlights Black women through The Bluest Eye in which the main character Pecola is often seen as unbeautiful due to her mannerisms and dark skin. As a result, she develops an inferiority complex that stimulates her desire to be blue- eyed and white-skinned. In her novel, Morrison shows the lives of dark-skinned women who experience sexism, abuse, violence, and misery as a result of male oppression. In the third chapter, I investigate Never far from nowhere by Andrea Levy which follows two black Afro sisters who battle with their identity while growing up. They feel the need to conform, and there is a constant need to find their identities while they struggle with society due to their dark skin background. The conclusion part finds some similarities and differences between the two novels through a black feminist perspective and scrutinizes the cruel effects of racialism, gender, and suffering of black women. Moreover, close analysis of the characters in these novels will show how different issues might affect the female characters’ self- conception and individuality.
Racism: Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye a Mouthpiece of Cloured People
2018
Racism is basically a belief in the superiority of one race to another which results in discrimination and prejudice towards people based on their race or ethnicity. The life of African-American cloured people have been affected by racism. These so-called systems of social and psychological restrictions make coloured people to feel inferiors. Toni Morrison has gained reputation internationally with the publication of her first novel The Bluest Eye. This novel mirroring us the terrible consequences for blacks personalizing the values of a white culture that rejects them both directly and indirectly. Even though slavery is abolished legally through the tough efforts of eminent leaders but still the African-Americans are not considered equal to the whites. The Black people are trying to identify themselves with the white and their cultural ways. Toni Morrison insists on Black cultural heritage and solicits the African-Americans to be proud of their Black identity. This paper presents t...
Journal of Arts & Humanities , 2019
The black characters' degenerative behaviours in Toni Morrison's first two novels The Bluest Eye (1970) and Sula (1973) can be attributed either to their collective unconscious or to their perceptions of the socioeconomic reality characterized by white supremacy, racial discrimination, abusive parenting and several other human depravities. Following previous research on these issues, this paper examines whether the characters of the two novels as victims and/or victimizers should be subjected to archetypal interpretation or to the black Americans' negating reality that instilled in them notions of inferiority, ugliness and self-loathing and that put their existence in a binary contrast with their white counterparts. In order to determine the main factor for black degeneracy in the two novels, this paper firstly postulates that the characters are driven by a self-imposed belief system that spurs certain behavioral traits singular to or rarely reactive to the community's conventions. However, the findings of this research do not support the prevailing ontological or psychoanalytic approaches to the black characters in the novels. Finally, this paper calls for a phenomenological analysis of the black characters and establishes that the ubiquitous perceptional influence that leaves deep negative impressions on their self-image and collective identity significantly accounts for the root of black degeneracy in the novels.