The Bluest Eye

The Doll

• “I only had one desire: to dismember it. To see of what it was made, to discover the dearness, to find the beauty, the desirability that had escaped me, but apparently only me.”

Cholly.

• “ except for the father, Cholly, whose ugliness was behaviour, the rest of the family- Mrs Breedlove, Sammy Breedlove, and Pecola Breedlove- wore their ugliness, put it on, so to speak, although it did not belong to them.”

“six-finger-dog-toothed-meringue-pie”

• “ Black boys didn’t trip her in the halls; white boys didn’t stone her, white girls didn’t suck their teeth when she was assigned to be their work partners; black girls stepped aside when she wanted to use the sink in the girls toilets, and their eyes genuflected under sliding lids”

Blacks hatred of their blackness

By Hannah and Sam

The bluest eye by Toni Morrison

“Here was an ugly little girl asking for beauty....A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes.” (page 138)

This shows that Claudia is longing for what she perceives as beauty as she is asking Soaphead church for him to give her this beauty and to no longer be black.

"Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by teachers and classmates alike."

This shows the length of time she sat looking at herself in the mirror wishing she wasn’t black as it permanently effected her social life and her education/

“I destroyed white baby dolls. But the dismembering of dolls was

not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls.” (p.15)

The frustration and anger is shown here by Claudia as

Mrs. Pauline Breedlove

Early life

• “Her general feeling separateness and unworthiness she lamed on her foot”

• “She liked, most of all, to arrange things”

• “She was not only good at housekeeping, she enjoyed it.”

Relationship with Cholly

• “Cholly was her crown of thorns”

• Very religious, Cholly is a test

• He is the origin of sin in her family

Ugliness

• “But I knowed she was ugly”

• “Sammy used his ugliness as a weapon”

• “For support of a role she frequently imagined as hers- Martyrdom”

• “a front tooth gone. Everything went then”

Belonging

• “She took the role of sole breadwinner”

• “More and more she neglected her house, her children”

• “Here she found beauty, order, cleanliness and praise”

• “Mrs. Breedlove hushing and soothing the tears of the little pink-and-yellow girl.”

By Nat & Thom

About Pecola

• First introduced in “Autumn”• Living with the McTeer family

due to her father (Cholly) burning her house

• She is 11 years old, and believes without question that she is ugly. She uses her ugliness as a shield to hide behind.

• She wishes she had blue eyes, and becomes obsessed with this notion.

Eye symbolism.

• She believes that with blue eyes, she will be seen in a better light, and will see others differently.

• “Each night without fail, she prayed for blue eyes” (p34)

• “if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different” (p34)

• “if she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs Breedlove too.” (p34)

• The Mary Jane candy. Pecola thinks that by eating the candy, she will become the little white Mary Jane.

• “to eat the candy is somehow to eat the eyes, eat Mary Jane. Love Mary Jane. Be Mary Jane” (p38)

• The Shirley Temple cup (same concept as the Mary Jane candy)

• “She was a long time with the milk, and gazed fondly at the silhouette of Shirley Temple’s dimpled face” (p12)

• Geraldine’s cat has blue eyes amidst black fur, very symbolic of Pecola, and what she wants to be like.

• “The blue eyes in the black face held her.” (p70)

• Chapter 6• Claudia and Frieda go to find

Pecola at her mothers work, in a white family’s house.

• A pie is knocked over accidentally, and Pecola is hurt. Instead of comforting her own daughter, Mrs Breedlove comforts the little white girl.

• “In one gallop she was on Pecola, and with the back of her hand knocked her to the floor.”

• “the honey in her words complemented the sundown spilling on the lake”

• In chapter 9, Pecola goes to Soaphead Church to ask for blue eyes.

• “Here was am ugly girl asking for beauty”

• “A little black girl who wanted to rise up out of the pit of her blackness and see the world with blue eyes”

• He makes her believe that she will get her wish.

• Chapter 11• Pecola is pregnant, Cholly (her

dad raped her)• She believes she has blue

eyes and starts to talk to herself.

• She want to have the bluest eyes in the whole world.

• “Just because i got blue eyes, bluer than theirs, they’re prejudiced” “that's right” “they are bluer, aren't they?”

• “oh yes. My eyes. My blue eyes. Let me look again.”

• If there is someone with bluer eyes than mine, then maybe there is someone with the bluest eyes. The bluest eyes in the whole world.”

• “Elbows bent, hands on shoulders, she flailed her arms like a bird in an eternal, grotesquely futile effort to fly”

• “she, however, stepped over into madness.”

The Bluest Eye

The Character of Maureen Peal

Physical Appearance

•First appears in the first chapter of Winter as the new girl at school

•Lighter skin than the other children at the school

•Lighter hair colour

•Always dressed in designer clothes.

“A new girl at school named Maureen Peal. A high yellow dream child with long brown hair braided into two lynch ropes that hung down her back.”

“The quality of her clothes threatened to derange Frieda and me.”

Character

•Because she’s lighter skinned, black people treat her as though she’s better than them, and white people don’t treat her as bad as other black people.

“Black boys didn’t trip her in the halls; white boys didn’t stone her, white girls didn’t suck their teeth when she was assigned to be their work partners; black girls stepped aside when she wanted to use the sink in the girls toilet.”

•To begin with, she seems to be quite pleasant to Pecola.

“Frieda and I walked behind them, surprised at Maureen’s friendliness to Pecola, but pleased. Maybe she wasn’t so bad after all”

•But her attitude to Pecola changes when they start talking about men

• Setting: Lorain, Ohio (Morrison’s home town )

• It is specifically set around Broadway Twenty-First and Thirty-Fifth Streets.

• 1939 – 1941 America

Breedloves

• The Bluest Eye is set at the end of the Depression, and its effects are

still felt by the characters. It is, in part, because of the Depression that Cholly does not have a job and that waste is so disgusting to Mrs Breedlove.

McTeer’s.

• Economic security is of particular concern for African Americans. From the beginning, we see how important every last penny is to the MacTeers, as their entire family spends time picking coal for Zick's Coal Company even though it harms their health.

Difference between North and South America.

• Southern Americans take pride in there homes. Their houses are prim and clean. They people are cold, unfriendly, unloving and passionless towards others.

Eg. Geraldine loves her cat more than she loves her son and her husband.

• “ The smell like wood, newspapers and vanilla.”

Cont.

• Northern people don’t fuss over being clean. Their homes are full of love and they are not afraid to show affection.

White Culture

The Bluest Eye

White CultureIn the book ‘The Bluest Eye’ white culture plays a big part, the way it influences the characters and some

Cinema

• When Mr Henry meets Claudia and Frieda he says: “Hello there. You must be Greta Garbo, and you must be Ginger Rogers.”

Who were famous white actors at the time the book is based. They are also idolized by little girls, black and white.

• Pauline Breedlove spent a lot of her time at the cinema in her glory days. She even once went once wearing a nice dress and had her hair like Jean Harlow, she was lookin’ fine.“The sad thing was that Pauline did not really care for clothes or makeup. She merely wanted other women to cast favourable glances her way.”

She thinks that by dressing as a white woman people will think better of her.