Essays on The Bluest Eye

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison questions the origin and validity of truths imposed by white standards of beauty. The white standard of beauty is defined in terms of not being black, so in turn, blacks equate beauty with being white. Morrison examines this assumption...

Pecola was an eleven year old black girl who feels as if being white is the true meaning of beauty to society and to herself. The Title of this novel is ‘The Bluest Eye’ written by Toni Morrison in the African American Literature. The novel’s...

In her novel, The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison explores the burdens society places on its weakest members and the adverse effects they have on the individual’s mental stability and self worth. Society has expectations of beauty and worth that teach the individual to be unsatisfied...

Toni Morrison’s Bluest Eye is a tragic narrative of how one black community loathes itself simply for not being white. Yet, even more tragic is the fact that an innocent little girl, Pecola, also comes to hate herself for not being white. She believes that...

When discussing Toni Morrison and her novels, it’s tempting to talk about race since her body of work addresses that subject in such powerful ways. However, in an interview, Morrison stated that she actually writes “about the same thing…which is how people relate to one...

In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, there is a conceptualized ideal of beauty that, throughout the novel, is utilized to illustrate the impact this concept has on the protagonists. With each of her characters, Morrison takes innocent elements of childhood and defiles them through the...

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye depicts a chilling tale of a young girl’s experience with racism following The Great Depression. While the span of the novel is divided into four seasons, “Autumn,” “Winter,” “Spring,” and “Summer,” it is through the characters’ experiences that we see...

Introduction In Toni Morrison’s novel “The Bluest Eye,” the author delves into the nuanced distinction between jealousy and envy, shedding light on the intricacies of these emotions. According to Morrison, jealousy is characterized by harboring feelings of resentment and hostility towards another individual due to...

Humans sometimes become infatuated with certain emotions, to the point of letting these emotions control them: a single force such as anger drives their motives and controls who they become. Anger, in particular, is a belligerent and dangerous emotion because it paves the way for...

The Bluest Eye: Tough Love at the Core of Color We as humans strive for many things- comfort, success, money, beauty, but among everything, our core revolves around love. A child is born and is innocent, and as that child grows through their experiences, love...

Pauline Breedlove would be quite a sight. This minor character in Tony Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye has a missing front tooth and a severe limp that seem to mirror her hollow and warped family life. When looking at the novel from a Freudian perspective,...

“‘How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?’ But Frieda was asleep. And I didn’t know” (Morrison 32). The innocent question posed by Pecola from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is representative of a recurring theme in the...

In Toni Morrison’s graphic portrayal of racism and psychological distress, The Bluest Eye, young Pecola Breedlove faces challenges much too large for anyone her age to be able to handle. Her constant internal battles with racism and personal hatred take a large toll on her...

Love can hold us captive, chain us down and make us slaves to its cruel ways, blinding us from all judgement. The human condition of love can be expressed as a strong affection for another arising out of kinship, enthusiasm, or devotion to another human...

Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye explores the darkest depths of human depravity in the face of intersecting race, class and gender discrimination. However, the attribute that renders Morrison’s narrative unique is her desire to humanize apparently “bad” or “morally corrupt” characters by tracing their...

Among Toni Morrison’s works, “images of music pervade her work, but so also does a musical quality of language, a sound and rhythm that permeate and radiate in every novel” (Rigney 8). This rhythmic style of writing is particularly evident in The Bluest Eye. There...

In Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye, the author examines what the degradation of people, by society, can result in. She sets her story in Lorain, Ohio in the 1940s, where a society with white ideals and common standards of beauty live. Morrison demonstrates the...

In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Pauline experiences the beauty of life through her childhood ‘down South;’ extracting colors in which translate into her most fond memories. This internalization of color serves as a pivotal action, providing insight into Morrison’s ideals of beauty and self-image....

Minor characters may not be the center of action or attraction, but novelists can use them to supplement the understanding of major characters and the thematic purpose of the text. In his novel Slaughterhouse Five, published in 1969, Kurt Vonnegut depicts the fragmentation of the...

Power is the ability to overcome and influence the behavior towards an internal personal struggle. Stereotypes are the oversimplified idea of a specific gender, class, or race. A demonstration of the aspect of power in the female protagonists can be found in Toni Morrison’s novels,...

In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, three young African American girls (among many others in their society) struggle against a culture that defines them as ugly and/or invisible. They are regularly contrasted with symbols of whiteness and white icons: the white film star, Shirley Temple,...

Understanding African American sentiments during the Civil Rights Movement is crucial in understanding Ton Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye. W.E.B. Du Bois thinks that a biography of an African-American always possesses a “double-consciousness of the Afro-American” (Lewis 143-145). Du Bois asserts that a black person living in a predominately white...

“Two Kinds” “TBE” “Miss Amer” A person can change themselves or the people around them due to the pressure of society’s interests and expectations. Throughout “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison, “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, and “I Want To Be Miss America” by Julia...

Identity crisis defined as a period of uncertainty and confusion in which a person’s sense of identity becomes insecure, typically due to a change in their expected aims or role in society. The Identity crisis influences the way woman of color view beauty by making...

Controversial issues such as incest and murder are tough to discuss and even more difficult to resolve. Literature often employs such realities to leave the reader in a state of thought, rarely offering answers or even stances on the issues. In Hamlet, Prince Hamlet murders...

Never again should African individuals be physically scared by Europeans as in The Bluest Eye; never again should African individuals enjoy the childish independence of Sula; never again should African individuals disregard their obligation to pass on the learning of their history as in Song...

“Intersectionality” is term coined by the academic scholar Kimberle Crenshaw to recognize the dimensions of identity when classifying an individual by gender, race, class, or sexuality. Each group holds a space of distinctive experiences that allows them to identify with unique struggles. Two written works...