What is the author’s message in The Bluest Eye?

Women and Femininity. At its core, The Bluest Eye is a story about the oppression of women. The novel’s women not only suffer the horrors of racial oppression, but also the tyranny and violation brought upon them by the men in their lives. The novel depicts several phases of a woman’s development into womanhood.

By 1965 Morrison’s short story had become a novel, and between 1965 and 1969 she developed it into an extensive study of socially constructed ideals of beauty (and ugliness). In The Bluest Eye, Morrison foregrounded the demonization of Blackness in American culture, focusing on the effects of internalized racism.

Why does Claudia hate the white baby dolls? why does she destroy them? Claudia hates the white baby dolls bc they are a constant reminder to her that she is ugly and unable to be beautiful unless she is white like the baby dolls.

At the novel’s end, Claudia acknowledges that she and all of the townspeople of Lorain are partially to blame for what happened to Pecola. They do not ignore her out of fear or disgust, but because they feel responsible for what she has become. They have failed her.

Bluest Eye(s) To Pecola, blue eyes symbolize the beauty and happiness that she associates with the white, middle-class world. They also come to symbolize her own blindness, for she gains blue eyes only at the cost of her sanity. The “bluest” eye could also mean the saddest eye.

The Bluest Eye In American Literature The novel is a strong exemplification of a piece of literature that emerged during or around the Civil Rights Movement. It highlights the most important aspects of society during this time period, including social inequalities such as racism, discrimination, and sexism.

At this moment, Geraldine comes home, and Junior tells her that Pecola has killed the cat.

First Person (Central Narrator) Claudia provides the bulk of the narration in the book. This is convenient because she actually witnessed what happened to Pecola as well as the way the town spoke about her, and she makes sure to include snatches of these conversations in her narration.

Claudia MacTeer: Narrates the majority of the novel and is also a young black girl. She is the child of Pecola’s foster parents and is Frieda’s sister. She is not only Pecola’s fostering sister but she is also considered to be her friend. She is an independent, mature, and passionate nine-year-old.

When Pecola is finally granted her wish for blue eyes, she receives it in a perverse and darkly ironic form. She is able to obtain blue eyes only by losing her mind.

Alone, with no one to turn to, Pecola creates her own imaginary friend, someone who will listen while she talks about her new blue eyes. Everyone, we hear, is jealous of how pretty and “really, truly, bluely nice” they are, so perfect and powerful that not even strong sunlight can force Pecola to blink.

Most of the action takes place at the Mica Area High School. In the story the narrator is called Leo Borlock and he is one of the students at that high school. He is actually a junior who ends up meeting a new student, “star girl”. As the name of the novel suggests, the story revolves around these characters.

Characters who possess whiteness and beauty are privileged, empowered, and secure. This fact leads to Pecola’s desires for blue eyes, as she believes blue eyes would change the way others see her, allowing her to transcend her horrible situation at home and in the community.

Geraldine measures out her emotions: Her son, Junior, is bathed and slathered with white lotion, and her husband, Louis, is granted a finite amount of sex, as long as he doesn’t touch her too much. Only the blue-eyed black cat kindles any real affection within her.

A light skinned black woman from the south, Geraldine considers herself and her family superior to other black families. She keeps her house immaculately clean and is obsessed with the physical appearance of her home and family. As a mother and wife she is cold, and feels true affection only for her cat.

Pauline is standing in the garden and hears a young man whistling. Suddenly she feels him tickling her bad foot and turns to meet the gaze of Cholly Breedlove. They fall in love, and he treats her with tenderness. They decide to marry and move up north to Lorain, Ohio, where there are more jobs.

Claudia destroys the doll as an act of resistance against the idealized beauty standards that uphold white features while diminishing her own.

Claudia and Frieda tell Maureen to cut it out, and Claudia remembers the shame and strange interest of seeing her own father naked. The girls argue: Claudia accuses Maureen of being boy-crazy, and Maureen tells the girls they are black and ugly.

The Bluest Eye Growing up in a black, nurturing, functional — albeit poor — family, Claudia is Pecola’s opposite. Her negative and even violent reaction to white dolls lets us know that she has the ability to survive in an inverted world order that would teach her to despise herself.

The “Black e mo” part of the quotation means that Pecola was even more black than they were. Consequently even those who were not particularly light skinned themselves took the chance to ridicule and tease someone who was darker then they were.

MacTeer, this section introduces Maureen Peal, a light-skinned black girl who seems to personify enviable white qualities. Maureen is lauded by teachers; Pecola is ignored.

She is temporarily in county custody because her father burned down the family’s house. Pecola is the object of pity because her father has put the family “outdoors,” one of the greatest sins by community standards. Having joined the MacTeers, Pecola loves drinking milk out of their Shirley Temple cup.

Pecola’s mother beat her when she found out what happened, and Cholly run’s away. Some community members believe Pecola is to blame for the horrible situation. Some believe she should be pulled out of school.

Then Aunt Jimmy gets sick. The community calls in M’Dear, the local healing woman, whose height and authority impress Cholly. She prescribes pot liquor, and Aunt Jimmy begins to improve, but then she eats a peach cobbler and dies.

Eyes and Vision This motif underlines the novel’s repeated concern for the difference between how we see and how we are seen, and the difference between superficial sight and true insight.

Claudia can picture the baby in the womb, with beautiful eyes, lips, and skin. She thinks that wanting Pecola’s baby to live is a way to counteract everyone else’s love of white dolls and white little girls. … They will bury the money by Pecola’s house and bury the seeds in their own yard so that they can tend them.

• Rosemary Villanucci.
• Henry Washington.
• China, Poland, and Miss Marie.
• Maureen Peal.

Pecola’s father, Cholly is a violent and severely damaged man. From a young age Cholly has been free—his mother left him on a trash heap as an infant, and his caretaker dies when he is an adolescent—but his freedom is both isolating and dangerous, allowing him to commit heinous acts without remorse.

A novel is a piece of long narrative in literary prose. Narrative prose is meant to entertain and tell a story. It is a description of a chain of events which includes a cast of characters, a setting, and an ending.

novel, an invented prose narrative of considerable length and a certain complexity that deals imaginatively with human experience, usually through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. …

Fiction is fabricated and based on the author’s imagination. Short stories, novels, myths, legends, and fairy tales are all considered fiction. While settings, plot points, and characters in fiction are sometimes based on real-life events or people, writers use such things as jumping off points for their stories.

Then the paper explores the root causes of Pecola’s tragedy from two aspects: The cause of racial oppression and self-hatred, and the cause of the loss in her independent consciousness.

Pecola is also a symbol of the black community’s self-hatred and belief in its own ugliness. Others in the community, including her mother, father, and Geraldine, act out their own self-hatred by expressing hatred toward her.