Bluest Eye Thesis

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. 224 pp. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston. $8.95.
The Bluest Eye, set during the 1940s after the end of the Great Depression in Lorain, Ohio, tells the heartbreaking story of eleven year old Pecola Breedlove, who perpetually prays for blues so she can be as beautiful and loved as blue-eyed, white American children. Pecola believes that she’s destined to live a tragic life due to her perceived ugliness, which is constantly reinforced by the way the people in her community treat her. Pecola lives with her holier-than-thou complex of a mother, an abusive alcoholic of a father and an absentee runaway brother until one day she has to live with the MacTeers, whose two children Claudia and Frieda befriend her,
The novel was set in her hometown Lorain, Ohio. The novel was released in 1970. This is significant because it was released after a decade of great strides in the African-American community in the 1960s. America was going through its most significant movement that would impact the black community: the Civil Rights Movement. The Civil Rights Movement was in full effect as well as the beginnings of the Black Is Beautiful campaign, when many black Americans became conscious of their beauty. Black Americans have been struggling post-slavery to be recognized in America as citizens. Although constitutionally they were giving that, Jim Crow Laws prevented them from exercising the rights of being citizens. They were treated as second class citizens and dehumanized through propaganda; the media being a huge outlet in pushing racial tropes. Morrison’s The Bluest Eye resonates with the Black Is Beautiful campaign that began in the late 1960s and early 1970s. As black Americans became conscious of their beauty, which has been denied to them by the systematic oppression placed upon them in America, many works of art began to depict black beauty in the form of their hair and content of the black skin. This time in history is relevant when discussing The Bluest Eye because it signifies how far black Americans have come to reclaim themselves and what it means to be beautiful in the black community. Morrison’s Pecola is a reminder of a
By setting the backdrop of the novel in the 1940s, it allows for Morrison to make connections with that era and the issues that plagued African-Americans throughout the story. The novel specifically points out various instances taking place in America that affected African-Americans. It speaks to the African-American experience as it delves into the lives of black innocence and youth. This is the level at which most African-Americans begin to internalize self-hatred for themselves because they have been told that they are not as beautiful and worthy enough as their Caucasian counterparts. Morrison speaks from a place of understanding black culture because she is unapologetic in how she writes. She demands her readers to carefully take heart to the matters of the novel. Morrison understands the black experience. She is of African ancestry and it shines through in her writing. She does not want to shy away from the plight of African-Americans and she shows it in her writing. Morrison uses Pecola’s heartbreaking tragedy and innocence to make a claim about the damaging effects of what it means to be black and young in