The Bluest Eye
The Search for Blue Eyes Racialised Beauty in The Bluest Eye
Though there have been many steps towards equality in today’s society, America, as a whole, will not reach it until races could be equal in everything. But America is still a race dominated culture, and mostly a white dominated culture. In this culture, society looks up to a racialised beauty, where beauty is defined in the terms of white beauty, or the physical features most white people have. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, who wants to be beautiful, and searches for blue eyes because she and most of the characters in the book, view her as ugly. Through Pecola’s journey for her own set of blue eyes, we learn about the main black characters and their quest for something more, and how they respond to the dominating white culture and society. Pauline Breedlove, who is Pecola’s mother, learned about beauty and why she was not beautiful through movies and through her experiences as a black woman. She escaped to the movies as a young woman, watching the white feminine stars on the screen, where “[a]long with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion” (95). Because of her viewing white femininity as the thing to strive for, she tries to conform, as do the rest of the black women, to the white ideal, despite their blackness and it leads to an internalized self-hatred. Pauline begins to see herself through the eyes of her opposite, a white woman. Pauline and other black women at the time, by trying to comform to white beauty has destructive qualities then on their communities, in the novel and during this time period. One of the cornerstones of our modern society is the value of human beings along racial lines; the most prominent that people would see during that time period is that blackness
Though there have been many steps towards equality in today’s society, America, as a whole, will not reach it until races could be equal in everything. But America is still a race dominated culture, and mostly a white dominated culture. In this culture, society looks up to a racialised beauty, where beauty is defined in the terms of white beauty, or the physical features most white people have. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, who wants to be beautiful, and searches for blue eyes because she and most of the characters in the book, view her as ugly. Through Pecola’s journey for her own set of blue eyes, we learn about the main black characters and their quest for something more, and how they respond to the dominating white culture and society. Pauline Breedlove, who is Pecola’s mother, learned about beauty and why she was not beautiful through movies and through her experiences as a black woman. She escaped to the movies as a young woman, watching the white feminine stars on the screen, where “[a]long with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another – physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion” (95). Because of her viewing white femininity as the thing to strive for, she tries to conform, as do the rest of the black women, to the white ideal, despite their blackness and it leads to an internalized self-hatred. Pauline begins to see herself through the eyes of her opposite, a white woman. Pauline and other black women at the time, by trying to comform to white beauty has destructive qualities then on their communities, in the novel and during this time period. One of the cornerstones of our modern society is the value of human beings along racial lines; the most prominent that people would see during that time period is that blackness