The Bluest Eye Research Paper

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How does beauty affect a person’s life? The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison is a novel set in the fall of 1941, just after the Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio. Claudia MacTeer and Frieda are sisters. They live with their parents in an “old, cold, and greenhouse”. They take in Pecola who believes that whiteness is beautiful and her own blackness is naturally ugly. This paper will examine Pecola’s self-hatred and how it impacts her life in some way.
First, the world that Pecola lives in adores flawless skin and fashionable girls and boys. For Pecola, black children are invisible; ugly, not special and less than nothing. White skin means beauty, wealth, and freedom. Even the beautiful black children are seen as ugly, just because they do not dress …show more content…
Pecola is desperately struggling to pull herself out of the illusional pit of blackness. “By conforming to a false pretense of white beauty, African-Americans repress their own culture and bury their own identities. By denying their own culture, they assist in keeping white society the dominant force. They can never be white, and yet they never stop trying to reach that impossibility” (Gibson 5). To be white is to be perfect; to be perfect is also to live in a faultless world where nothing bad ever takes place. Pecola is a tragic girl who apparently never had a chance to be loved. In Pecola’s case, its ethnic bias; however, the knowledge by having beautiful life would be …show more content…
Colorism is division of the same race society. The light-skinned black took advantage over it and tried to call themselves white. Some of them tried to control the dark-skinned blacks because they thought they were better than them. What they do not realize is that house slaves and field slaves are the same because they are still slaves; not free. It does not matter where light-skinned blacks or dark-skinned blacks work, they are still being treated like slaves and in the end they are all victims.
Maureen Peal’s character emphasizes this theory. Maureen proclaims her colorism. She embraces it. She accepts that she is white not black, even though she is mixed with both black and white. When she says to Pecola, Frieda, and Claudia “I am cute! And you ugly! Black and ugly e mos” (Morrison 73). Instead of relating to the girls through their shared culture; she was consequently pushing the three girls further into self-hated for their own dark skin color. She thinks she is better than the girls because of her skin and blues
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