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Toni Morrison's novel The Bluest Eye is deals with the historical and psychological effects of defining beauty according to race. The Bluest Eye is essentially about how concepts of beauty are instilled from a very young age. It is about the life of the Breedlove family who resides in Lorain, Ohio. The novels focal point is the daughter, an eleven-year-old Black girl who is trying to conquer a bout with self-hatred. Every day she encounters racism, not just from white people, but mostly from her own race. In their eyes she is much too dark, and the darkness of her skin somehow implies that she is inferior, and according to everyone else, her skin makes her even uglier. She feels she can overcome this battle of self-hatred by obtaining blue eyes, but not just any blue. She wants the bluest eye. Morrison is able to use her critical eye to reveal to the reader the evil that is caused by a society that is indoctrinated by the inherent goodness and beauty of whiteness and the ugliness of blackness. She uses many different writing tools to depict how white beliefs have dominated American and African-American culture. The narrative structure of The Bluest Eye is important in revealing just how pervasive and destructive social racism is. The Dick and Jane snippets show...
Names play an important part in The Bluest Eye because they are often symbolic of conditions in society or in the context of the story.
The name of the novel, The Bluest Eye, is meant to get the reader thinking about how much value is placed on blue-eyed little girls. Pecola and her family are representative of the larger African-American community, and their name, Breedlove, is ironic because they live in a society that does not breed love. In fact, it breeds hate; hate of blackness, and thus hatred of oneself. The MacTeer girls are flattered when Mr. Henry said Hello there. You must be Greta Garbo, and you must be Ginger Rogers, for the names ring of beauty that the girls feel they will never reach. Soaphead Church represents, as his name suggests, the role of the church in African-American life. There are two major metaphors in The Bluest Eye, one of marigolds and one of dandelions. Claudia, looking back as an adult, says in the beginning of the novel, there were no marigolds in the fall of 141. She and her sister plant marigold seeds with the belief…
Eyes Were Watching God." It discusses the ending of the novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and precisely how and why the ending appropriately or inappropriately concludes the work. Their Eyes Were Watching God Zora Neale Hurston's "Their Eyes Were Watching God" first published in 1937. In this book Hurston uses vision along Janies way to finding a vision of her. The ending of this book was
Literary Analysis on �Their Eyes Were Watching God��The Eyes are Watching God� is written by Zora Neale Hurston, a 1935 classic novel that received great acclamation and criticism. The novel is about a white girl, Janie, and her life with three husbands and her grandmother. Life chronicles also detail facts about the people she knows or comes in contact with, which greatly shape her life experiences.Hurston�s novel is mainly enlightened
Zora Hurston THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD Zora Hurston's 'Their Eyes were watching God' occupies an important place in African-American literature on account of that fact that it is not part of the protest literature that emerged during Harlem Renaissance. The novel revolves around a powerful belief: a person's failure is caused more by his thinking than his sex or color. In other words, Hurston argues that when man refuses to strive
Janie did gain some very valuable insight into her self; she had thought that her dreams could be fulfilled through someone else's dreams. After Joe's death Janie no longer gave away her power to others, she knew what she wanted and was going to be very cautious about who she let into her life. The townspeople were eager to criticize Janie for her limited period of grief and mourning. While
Her increased sense of self-worth because of her romantic relationship with Tea Cake made her consider the possibility that she can attain her needs and wants, and be able to control her actions and behavior in order to attain these needs and wants. In effect, in order to preserve her relationship with Tea Cake, she willingly let herself be subjugated by Tea Cake's dominant nature. On a bigger plane, Janie's
This turns out not to be entirely true, however, as in one incident Tea Cakes slaps her in public, not to be mean, exactly, but because "being able to whip her reassured him in possession (Hurston, 176). Though I do not like this part of myself, I can absolutely identify with such feelings -- it sometimes seems like anger and even violence are the only effective ways to exert