Thursday, June 6, 2019

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Essay Example for Free

The Bluest centre by Toni Morrison EssayTony Morrison became the prominent American writer of the second half of the 20th century mainly because of her novel The Bluest Eye published in 1970.The novel is narrated by a young black girl, Claudia MacTeer and the reader realizes through her perception the atmosphere in the family of her friend Pecola Breedlove. The family relations in the Pecolas family atomic number 18 truly hostile.The topic of racial in equivalence is one of the central topics. African Americans and their tragedy of the lost culture are in the pertain of the novel. The novel is built on the passionate desire of Pecola to be loved by her family and her school friends.Pecola thinks that the reason of the hostile attitude towards her is her black skin and she wants to gibe the American idols like Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple is just an ideal created by the mass culture, an idol which is a part of American fancy. The conventional American perception of smash er is connected with the blue eyes and white skin like those of Shirley Temple.Tony Morison studies the position of the blacks in America. She names the things which sometimes are not in public solely in minds. American society is divided according to the racial principle and nobody can do anything with it. The author states that America treats its black citizens like quite a little of a lower grade, pariahs, There are several levels of the pariah figure working in my writing. The black community is a pariah community. Black plenty are pariahs. The civilization of black people that lives apart from just now in juxtaposition to other civilizations is a pariah relationship. In fact, the concept of the black in this country is almost always one of the pariahs. But a community contains pariahs within it that are very useful for the conscience of that community.(The Bluest Eye. Review).American culture has produced a utopian jut out of America, called an American Dream. It is not bad at all it indicates, at least the standards to be reached and the goals to be gained. This collective catch is an image of a rich country populated with the nice successful people. There is only one problem in this image. The country is rich and the society is successful, but people personifying this success are narrated with the blond hair and white skin. This is just what great American Martin Luther King said about. The racial inequity is in the very essence of the American society.Pecola identifies her individualised position in the community with the position of the black community in the American society, i.e. as soon as the Blacks are pariahs in the society she feels herself a pariah within the community. What is more, she understands the position of the black community in the American society and naively associates it with her personal position in the black community. Her dream of blue eyes is a nave attempt to break through the concept of the faceless, i.e. it is a prote st against her position of a pariah.Tony Morison by design uses a dream of a small girl which would never come true to underline the improbability of such a dream to resemble an American icon Shirley Temple in the same way as black community would never become an equal part of the society.The values of the society impose on the black children are destructive. Pecola is morally suppressed by the values she accepts. These values are dominant and black children are not able to label them critically. Pecola is destroyed by the cultural values she has to adopt.The white culture influences the personalities of the black people especially young ones. The Anglo Saxon standards of beauty follow the children outside the class. characterization blondes with blue eyes catch their sight from the cinema screens, billboards, newspapers and magazines.There is no go into to hide from the bluest eyes. These beauties keep telling the children that if they were white with blue eyes they would bri ng home the bacon success. This destroys the girls indistinguishability. She mistakenly associates her forcible appearance with the wealth and happiness. White mass culture shows white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair in association with wealth, happiness and success and a young girl realizes erroneously that her life is defined by her appearance.Pecolas admiration of Sherley Temple is one of her personal tragic illusions. The success of the movie star Temple poisons the life of Pecola. The mass culture shows the physical beauty in the context of prosperity. This self humiliation develops the multiplex of inferiority of the girl. Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike, She was the only member of her class who sat alone at a double desk.( Tirell, Lynne)A utopian desire to resemble an American idol became an infantile fixation for Pecola. Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. She would see only what there was to see the eyes of other people.( Morrison, Toni, p.45)The Pecolas aspiration to resemble the American idol drives the girl crazy. She looses the connections with the reality. As soon as the world does not understand her desire and does not want to give her a chance to become closer to her idol she decides to close up in herself and find a piece of mind keeping her dreams in herself without letting them out.The hate of people, ideal dream on the movie star physical appearance, the hostile atmosphere at school and in the family and the rape by her father followed by the hate of her mother made the girl crazy. But she is mollify dreaming of her ideal.It is not the white community that has directly destroyed Pecola, but the black community and her parents. They should have insulated her from the white communitys values and have protected her (Hinda Barlaz).The speech communication of narrator about the destructiveness of the physical beauty and romantic love are given in the context when Pauline, pregnant black American woman was watch history of romantic love in the movie theatre. She broke her tooth then as if recapitulating the comparison of romantic love in the movie with her current position. The image of Jean Harlow from the screen destroys the Paulines identity as a woman, her belief in American dream and her sustain beauty. The broken tooth symbolizes her belief in happiness which is destroyed.Toni Morrison and a great American Martin Luther King, Pecola and Pauline, Hero of the Doctorows Ragtime and The Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, all of them have the common feature. They are all looking for identity as well as other best representatives of the humanity. Martin Luther King and Pecola, no matter how strange it may seem had the same dream, a dream of equality for all disregarding the color of the skin. Hero of the Doctorows novel and Oedipus Rex were looking for their lost identity. John Lennon joined Great American King in his dream of a brotherhood of men in his Imagine.Martin Luther King was looking for the identity of the black people of America and paid his life for it. Pecola was looking for her own identity and paid her mentality. John Lennon was looking for a brotherhood of men and paid his life for his search.These principles can not come from the outside they should be in the peoples mind which is an identity. A hero of one Russian classic (Bulgakov, The Heart of the Dog) kept threatening himself, there is a devastation in the country and he got a respond this devastation is in your mind. The same could be said of identity. We create the identity in our minds and then we put one over it to the entire society.BibliographyI Have A Dream by Martin Luther King, Jr, Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on distinguished 28, 1963. Source Martin Luther King, Jr The Peaceful Warrior, Pocket Books, NY 1968, available at http//www.mecca.org/crights/dream.html, retrieved 7.04.2005Tirell, Lynne. Storytelling and Moral Agency. Toni Morrisons Fiction Contemporary Criticism. Ed. David Middleton. New York Garland, 2000. 3-25.Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York Penguin, 1994.Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Review, available at http//academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/lit_term.htmlpvHedin, Raymond. The Structuring of sense in Black American Fiction. Novel 16 (1982) 35-54.Edmund A. Napieralski, Morrisons The Bluest Eye., 1994 Heldref Publications, The Explicator, Fall 1994 v53 n1 p59(4), available at http//www.cofc.edu/farrells/Farrell/oedipus.html, retrieved 6.04.2005Hinda A. Barlaz, A Reading Guide to Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye, available at http//students.adelphi.edu/learningcenter/pdfs/tonimorrison.pdf, retrieved 6.04.2005Trudy Mercer. feminine Childhood Icons in Toni MorrisonsThe Bluest Eye, available at http//www.drizzle.com/tmercer/write/morrison/bluesteye.shtmlChris Booker, The Socia l Status of the African American Male 1999, available at http//www.pressroom.com/afrimale/status99.htmGibson, Donald B. (1989), Text and Countertext in Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye,Taylor, Paul C., Journal of Aesthetics Art Criticism, MALCOLMS CONK AND DANTOS COLORS OR, FOUR LOGICAL PETITIONS CONCERNING RACE, BEAUTY, AND ,, available at http//www.lib.tjfsu.edu.cn/ymwx/essay/The%20Bluest%20Eye1.htmBjork, Patrick B. The novels of Toni Morrison the search for self and place within the community. NY P. Lang,1996.

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