She connects beauty With being loved and believes that if she possesses blue eyes, the cruelty in her life will be replaced by affection and respect. Since she is closer to adolescence, she is more susceptible to her society's ideas of equating beauty to whiteness. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Breedlove's preference for her employer's home over her own and symbolizing the misery of the Breedlove family. The bluest eye possibly could mean the saddest eye, seeing as how Pecola's obsession with beauty has made her depressed that she doesn't have it. The story Pauline Breedlove tells herself about her own ugliness reinforces her self-hatred, and the story she tells herself about her own martyrdom reinforces her cruelty toward her family.
She never really finds out about any of the self-hatred that her peers suffer from daily. The use of imagery in the novel shows the extent to which the African American race suffers with internal racism during the course of autumn. This aids the novel the way that Toni Morrison wanted it to be aided , by having the reader feel close to the story. Washington the book and he is very essential throughout the book and his previous years wasn't so great. Characters who possess whiteness and beauty are privileged, empowered, and secure. This is the voice that tells us the long history of the Breedloves' storefront, details Cholly's early sexual humiliation, and recounts Soaphead's journey from the West Indies to America.
Stories are as likely to distort the truth as they are to reveal it. Imagery can also be found in the repetitive descriptions of the blonde haired, blue-eyed white population. The eyes are similar to a utopia. Then we have winter that symbolizes anyone can be pretty without actually being pretty on the outside. Characters tell stories to make sense of their lives, and these stories have tremendous power for both good and evil. The novel suggests that, no matter how messy and sometimes violent human desire is, it is also the source of happiness: denial of the body begets hatred and violence, not redemption.
Poland is simply quiet at all times when she shows up in the book. Stories by other characters are often destructive to themselves and others. The fact that all of these experiences are humiliating and hurtful indicates that sexual coming-of-age is fraught with peril, especially in an abusive environment. Is there the suggestion of sexuality in Mr. The tone also indicates how the girls hated the winter and how freezing cold it was. His active response to this hectic life strongly contrasts the passivity with which Pecola handles her life there. The MacTeer family strongly contrasts the Breedlove family.
She finds meaning in her life through, romantic movies early on, and later in the well-to-do family that she works for, this is where she feels she finds her purpose -- never with her own family. Similarly, Pauline prefers cleaning and organizing the home of her white employers to expressing physical affection toward her family. The omniscient author's sections have full justification; this means that both the right and the left margins are even. Henry sexually molests her; the novel contrasts Mr. MacTeer- He is Claudia and Frieda's father who works very hard to ensure that his family is clothed and fed.
In a more basic sense, Pecola and her family are mistreated in part because they happen to have black skin. Breedlove , but also with sterility. Whiteness as the Standard of Beauty The Bluest Eye provides an extended depiction of the ways in which internalized white beauty standards deform the lives of black girls and women. And its these internalized values that weigh on the black characters of the novel causing their sadness. The term comes from the Bible; in a ceremony on the Day of Atonement, the high priest symbolically laid the sins of the Jews on the head of a goat; the goat was freed afterward.
This image is ironic, because of the marigolds which did not grow anywhere in Loraine, Ohio, in 1941. It is also a more general symbol for the cyclical renewal of nature. Themes Themes are the fundamental and often universal ideas explored in a literary work. In an interview with Gloria Naylor, Morrison explains that love for her characters is unmistakable in her writing except for Maureen Peal. The sisters have seen their father naked without any sexual implications, because of their relationship with their father. Is there love in his concern about his children's well being, which is expressed in his advice about heating and teaching them to control the fire? Likewise their mothers sandal conversation was like a wicked dance and that it was sometimes hard for Claudia and Frieda to understand.
Claudia reveals her resentment toward little Temple when she sneeringly drifts into jealous thoughts about the golden-locked girl dancing with her dearest Bojangles. In contrast, color is associated with happiness, most clearly in the rainbow of yellow, green, and purple memories Pauline Breedlove sees when making love with Cholly. Pectoral is then able to see herself as beautiful, but only at the cost of her ability to see accurately both herself and the world around her. And everybody has one of those in his or her life, but I was unfair to her. The other girls feel and become inferior when compared to her. Initially the sisters think Maureen is befriending Pecola and is going to treat them to ice cream cones and are revising their estimate of her.
Nature imagery: Geraldine associates girls like Pecola with grass not growing around their homes and flowers dying. It first made apparent to the reader when Pecola arrives to the McTeer home and drinks milk from the Shirley Temple cup. He suffered a great number of humiliations as a kid and this causes him to take out all of his pent-up frustration on the women in his life. The very last chapter has to be my favorite all around, but is the most interesting because of her stylistic choice of the point of view for the chapter. More strongly than my fondness for Pecola, I felt a need for someone to want the black baby to live—just to counteract the universal love of baby dolls, Shirley Temples, and Maureen Peals. But in this novel she did this as almost a prologue for each section, and seemingly as a prologue for the whole novel.