Through the eyes of a child beauty is taken literally when there are not any female role models of color to look up to. This is something that causes white people to think that all blacks are alike in every action that they take. The diminishing relationship that Pauline has with her family adds fuel to the fire with regards to how white society views black people as a whole. “ The Bluest Eye explores the relationship of a variety of black families and individuals to each other as well as the larger white community from which they are marginalized by racism” (Scott).
This is a way she can feel white with out actually being white, which is a way for her to justify her way of thinking which is acceptable to her.
With that being said she feels that white people in general have a better and cleaner way about them therefore, she deals with her internal dislike for herself by working with the family. Pauline uses the white family as a get away from her own because her home life is not appealing to her or society. She gives the family that she works for more attention and compassion than she does for her own because she feels that they are more appealing and comforting. White Society has put a specific type of beauty on a pedestal that is unachievable and the two characters in the novel that take this negative influence to heart are Pecola and her mother Pauline.īeing a black woman in a white society, while working for a white family, tends to have effects on Pauline, which causes her negative feelings towards her children. In Black literature this is a continuous issue being acknowledged because it is still a reoccurring problem today.
The bluest eye symbols skin#
Women like Gene Harlow had a negative impact on women in society, especially women of color because they felt obligated to look beautiful in societies standards with the classic blond straight hair and blue eyes, “Because being dark meant never being considered beautiful, being other became a canonical part of black woman’s literature.”(Rosenberg) This quote is significant to represent how society diminished the way black women perceive themselves, which is ugly because of their dark skin and naturally kinky hair. The novel The Bluest Eye uses famous women in the era of the 40’s as symbols to illistrate what the standard of beauty was during that time period. Black people in general have features that were considered to be animal like and weren’t considered to be beautiful within society. For Black women in particular this was an impossible task to fulfill because they had dark skin, which was viewed as ugly. It has painted a perfect picture of how a woman should present herself in the public eye, and if a woman doesn’t fit that specific mold then she will be scorned and disliked by society. White society has embedded a hierarchy or standard of what beauty essentially is for women. Toni Morrison uses literary elements to reveal the importance of “beauty” within the novel. Our society has focused on the shallow points in life rather than characters, actions, and intelligence. We, as a group, judge one another constantly on financial advantages, material objects, and appearance. Society has a major influence on people and determines what is acceptable for all people to abide by in their daily lives. The novel The Bluest Eye written by Toni Morrison emphasizes the vitality of beauty within society and illustrates the effects of it within the black community.
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