Claudia's Destruction Of White Baby Dolls
What does Claudia’s destruction of white baby dolls say about her relationship to the ideal of whiteness?
In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, we are presented with ideals of what it is to be black and how it is to be white and how society’s constructions of the ‘ideal’ human affects characters within this novel. Claudia Macteer is a young African-American girl who struggles with these ideas and societies notion of perfection. Claudia battles with her own identity and demonstrates her frustrations and self- hatred in outward behaviours. Utilising these themes around identity and idealism we will explore Claudia’s explosion of emotions in the form of her destroying of the dolls she received as a gift.
The event in which Claudia sees this doll looking back at her with “round moronic eyes, the pancake face, and orangeworms hair” (Morrison 18) strikes as a poignant note from her point of view. This doll that she had received was blonde haired, blue eyed with rosy pink cheeks, but more importantly she was white (Morrison 18). The doll represented everything that Claudia wished she was but knew she could never be and this bred self-hate within herself. This was channelled into her sister, Frieda and directly towards a …show more content…
The post-war baby boom meant that by the 1970’s the ‘generation of revolution’ (Gillis 1999) were young adults. This prompted an era of change. Claudia referred to idolised icons of the time such as Shirley Temple, to whom she dislikes for her societally acceptable perfections and instead found comfort and understanding to Jewish women of the Holocaust and less popular icons such as Jane Withers. This formed the notion that she admired women who rose above adversity to become successfully influential devoid of their imperfections and socially constructed
In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, we are presented with ideals of what it is to be black and how it is to be white and how society’s constructions of the ‘ideal’ human affects characters within this novel. Claudia Macteer is a young African-American girl who struggles with these ideas and societies notion of perfection. Claudia battles with her own identity and demonstrates her frustrations and self- hatred in outward behaviours. Utilising these themes around identity and idealism we will explore Claudia’s explosion of emotions in the form of her destroying of the dolls she received as a gift.
The event in which Claudia sees this doll looking back at her with “round moronic eyes, the pancake face, and orangeworms hair” (Morrison 18) strikes as a poignant note from her point of view. This doll that she had received was blonde haired, blue eyed with rosy pink cheeks, but more importantly she was white (Morrison 18). The doll represented everything that Claudia wished she was but knew she could never be and this bred self-hate within herself. This was channelled into her sister, Frieda and directly towards a …show more content…
The post-war baby boom meant that by the 1970’s the ‘generation of revolution’ (Gillis 1999) were young adults. This prompted an era of change. Claudia referred to idolised icons of the time such as Shirley Temple, to whom she dislikes for her societally acceptable perfections and instead found comfort and understanding to Jewish women of the Holocaust and less popular icons such as Jane Withers. This formed the notion that she admired women who rose above adversity to become successfully influential devoid of their imperfections and socially constructed