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...

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...

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...

The Unexamined Other:

Confronting the Social Hypocrisy of Maureen in The Bluest Eye

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...

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...

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 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...

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...

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...

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

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...

UnderstandingAfrican American sentiments during the Civil Rights Movement is crucialin understanding Ton Morrison's novel,The Bluest Eye. W.E.B. Du Bois thinks that a biography of an African-Americanalways possesses a"double-consciousness of the...

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...

Internalization and Externalization of Color

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...

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...

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...

There is a common symbol found throughout ancient culture, the triumvirate. From the Christian Holy Trinity, the Islamic Wudu and Salat, the First Triumvirate of Rome, etc., the number three is important. This matters to us why? Because in...

Through literature we are often various truths of life and society. In the novels "The Scarlet Letter" by Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Bluest Eye" by Toni Morrison and "The Awakening" by Kate Chopin; the reader is introduced to female characters from...

One can look to the pariahs and outcasts of the world to understand the attributes that have been deemed unworthy in our world. In the novel, The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, Pecola Breedlove is continually alienated from her community. Her...

In his seminal paper, Richard Dyer states that, ‘white people create the dominant images of the world and don’t quite see that they thus construct the world in their own image; white people set standards of humanity by which they are bound to...

Hypermasculinity is prevalent in Joe Trace and Paul D. Both of these characters assert unhealthy dominance in their lives, and especially in their relationships with women. They each have past trauma that will lead to their diminished sense of...

Textual, mnemonic, and physical gaps leave room in which identity is found through body and environment in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Toni Morrison's Jazz. Ondaatje's characters retrieve their absent personas by mutually colonizing...

Adolescence is a confusing and vulnerable time in any young woman's life. Unfortunately, the sexual decisions one makes as an immature youth can set a dreary path for a woman's future. Unhealthy sexual lives such as these are displayed in Toni...