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#The bluest eye characters skin#
She thought if she had white skin and blue eyes, her world would be different, and people would respect and love her (Morrison 39).
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Pecola was always faced with problems of maltreatment and hardship thus, she believed it was her skin color and dark eyes that were responsible. Pecola was often told, she was ugly as a black girl. Her parents always fought for each other. Pecola eventually achieves her escape with a total dissociation from reality.Pecola Breedlove was an 11 years old African American girl in Ohio who went through turbulent times growing up. Characters such as Henry, Cholly and Soaphead Church seek escape in physical pleasure. Some characters escape into whiteness, either figuratively, as in the imaginings of Pecola, or literally, as in the Soaphead Church family’s attempt to dilute their African ancestry. Cholly's childhood abandonment and sexual humiliation lead him to the rootless existence he returns to after raping his daughter. Pauline's destructive marriage drives her to the movies and the clean, ordered world of her employer's home.
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Many characters in "The Bluest Eye" cope with their circumstances through escapism. The onset of puberty confuses Pecola and leaves her vulnerable to her father, while Frieda is molested by her parents’ lodger, Henry. Sexuality is also presented as something beyond the characters’ control. Femininity bestows another kind of powerlessness, as evidenced in the type of black woman described in Chapter Five and embodied in Geraldine. Claudia and Frieda, for example, plant marigolds in an attempt to bestow health on Pecola's unborn child. Susceptibility to the influence of pop culture serves as just one facet of a pervasive powerlessness that infects most of the characters in “The Bluest Eye.” Child characters such as Claudia, Frieda, Sammy and Pecola are confronted with many adult issues beyond their comprehension. She comes to believe that happiness belongs only to the beautiful, which stunts her ability to show affection to her children. Pecola’s mother, Pauline, develops an addiction to cinema. She later develops an intense desire for blue eyes to compensate for her perceived ugliness. She displays this fixation symbolically through the compulsive consumption of milk from a Shirley Temple cup. On the obverse, Pecola yearns for an idealized beauty that she feels will grant her the love she lacks. Claudine rejects these standards, despises white children and dismembers a white doll she receives as a gift. The Role of Pop CultureĪmerican pop culture, with its homogenized standards of beauty, has a powerful impact on the novel’s black female characters. Pecola herself narrates a brief section of the final chapter through an interior dialogue.
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The third-person omniscient explores the back stories of principal characters like Pauline and Cholly Breedlove, Pecola's parents, and narrates sections like Chapter Five’s disquisition on black womanhood. Morrison employs a third-person omniscient perspective for those portions of the novel not narrated by Claudia. Most of Claudia’s narration comes from the viewpoint of her 9-year-old self, while an older, wiser Claudia offers perspective and corrects youthful misapprehensions. The point of view of “The Bluest Eye” alternates between the first-person observations of Claudia MacTeer, who befriends the main character, Pecola Breedlove, and an omniscient third-person narrator.