The Bluest Eye

Background of the Novel

The Bluest Eye is a novel written by Toni Morrison. It is the first novel written by Toni Morrison. It was published in 1970. Toni Morrison is the Nobel Prize-winning author.

Overview

The plot of this novel is fabricated around the life of a black girl, Pecola. When her father, Cholly Breedlove, sets the house on fire, Pecola is sent by social welfare to stay with the MacTeer family. She develops a good friendship with Claudia and Frieda.

Although she befriends the two young girls yet she remains desolate, mistreated, and ignored.  Pecola Breedlove returns to live with her family, and we see parts of her life delineated in various sections of the novel.  The Breedlove home is a storefront and it is converted into a house so the Breedloves could live in. It is a cold house with a gloomy and bleak atmosphere.

Pecola`s always fighting each other. The fight turns into physical abuse. Her brother Sammy usually runs away from the house because of the fight of the parents. She is then raped by her father. This causes her to become a mother at the cost of losing her sanity and she roams around in the neighborhood as a mad girl. The novel revolves around the core issue of racial discrimination of black by white people.

Historical Context

The Bluest Eye is peened down in the era when the Civil Rights Movement in the United States was at its peak. Although the novel is written before this Movement literally gained its pace, the basic themes and core issues of the novel are the same as that of the Movement.

Inside this Civil Rights Movement, another movement emerged stating that Black is Beautiful. The Black is Beautiful Movement, intended to wipe out the possibility that dark individuals’ common traits, like the color of the skins, facial traits, and hair are inalienably appalling and ugly.

The movement urged dark individuals to acknowledge the natural features of their personality, and shun fixing their hair or endeavoring to help fade their skin. The development was a push to neutralize the then unmistakable thought that white individuals were more wonderful and attractive than dark individuals.

Setting of the novel

The Bluest Eye happens in Lorain, Ohio. It is a small town located on the bank of Lake Erie. The novel starts in 1940 when the economy of Lorain depends on the industry. A large number of the residents work in the steel mills in the town.  They also work on the ports where the load and unload ships which come from the other towns. The town has a seashore, a recreation center along the lake, a well-known beacon and a film royal residence. It is sufficiently huge to have a different populace, yet Claudia and Frieda can’t go on foot from their home to the well-off lakefront neighborhood where Mrs.Breedlove functions as a house cleaner.

The Bluest Eye Summary

Prologue

The novel opens with two short sections.

The first section is a sort of Classic Dick and Jane tale. There is a house, father, mother, Jane, Dick, dog, cat and Jane`s friend. This story appears thrice. It appears for the first time with punctuation and spacing between the words. The second time it appears without punctuation and capitalization but there is proper spacing between the words. The third time it appears with no punctuation and spacing between the words.

The second section is a passage narrated by Claudia MacTeer.  She tells us that it is 1941. Claudia and her sister think that marigolds do not bloom because Pecola is having the baby of her father. Claudia pants the seeds for many years but they do not bloom. The narrator then thinks that it might be the case that the earth may have been barren. She then connects Pecola with earth and says that the two sisters plant a seed in black dirt in a pot . The same is the case with Pecola’s father who drops his seed in black dirt in a pot. Claudia and Frieda are nine and ten years old, respectively. The girls live with their parents in Lorain situated in Ohio.

The Bluest Eye Autumn Summary

Chapter 1

This chapter opens with a discussion of a neighborhood. There is a Greek Hotel, the African narrator with a family and an Italian friend. The Italian is Rosemary and she is a rich lady. The narrator is Claudia and she is not allowed by Rosemary to sit in her car.

The narrator tells the readers that she has a painful childhood and now she has to go out at night to collect some coal so that she could help her family to heat the house. The home is full of mice and cockroaches. There is very limited light and heat so they feel cold in the house.

They rent the rooms to Mr.Henry Washington. He comes to join the family and starts paying attention to Claudia and her sister Frieda.

The girls also meet Pecola because her family house is burnt by her father and he brutally beats her mother. So Pecola comes to live with them. Her mother starts living with the family she works for and her brother Sammy stays with another family. Pecola’s father, Cholly, is in jail.

Chapter 2

The chapter opens with the lines of Dick and Jane parody which describes their house. After a brief description of the house, the narrator moves the description of a home where Breedloves` lives.

It is basically an old storefront. There is a bedroom and a front room. This front room has a piano, two sofas and a Christmas tree which is artificial. This bedroom belongs to Pecola, her brother Sammy, and a bed for Cholly and Pecola`s mother. This bedroom is kept heated with a stove.

In the house, there is a toilet bowl but it is not a real bathroom and Kitchen towards the backside of the house. The outlook and furniture show that the family is very poor. All of the things in the house show an atmosphere of gloominess and bleakness.

Chapter 3

Mrs. Cholly is angry because of her husband’s drinking habits. He is drunk and Mrs. Cholly wants him to fetch some coal but he is unable to go. Both husband and wife have a fight and they beat each other. Afterwards, Mrs. Cholly sends Sammy for the coal.

Pecola has a strange wish of seeing Blue eyes.  She thinks had he blue eyes things would have been changed for her. She goes to a shop to buy some candies but the owner of the shop is a white man and he does not treat this African girl very well. However, she soothes herself by eating candies. Pecola also knows about the three prostitutes who live near their house. She usually goes to see them and spend some time with them. They do not tell anything about their profession to Pecola. Pecola has a strong eagerness to see and experience what actually love is.

The Bluest Eye Winter Summary

Chapter 1

The chapter shifts to Claudia`s narration. The season is winter and it is very cold outside. Claudia talks about the efforts of her father for keeping the house warm. Claudia meets a new classmate in the school and she is Maureen Peal. She seems to belong to a good family because she is wearing fancy clothes and has green eyes. Claudia and Frieda do not like the girl but all other girls and teachers like Maureen.

Maureen has a locker near Claudia`s locker and one day they both come to the locker at the same time so Maureen asks her that she wants to accompany them on their way back. When they are on their way back, they find that some black boys are teasing Pecola. Claudia insults the boys but the boys feel embarrassment because of Maureen`s whiteness. Claudia and Frieda move ahead and Maureen talks to Pecola in such a way as they have been friends since their childhood.

On their way, they see an ice-cream store and Maureen offers to buy an ice-cream for Pecola but she refuses to buy ice-cream for Claudia and Frieda. She tells Pecola that her family earns through suing business. They also have a chain store and they want to use that soon. Maureen starts talking to Pecola about sexual topics and Claudia stops her which enrages Maureen and she starts shouting and insulting her.

Claudia and Frieda reach home and Mr.Henry gives them some money to buy ice-cream but they buy candies with the money. When they return, they find Mr.Henry busy with the two prostitutes of the neighborhood.

Chapter 2

This narrator in this chapter talks about the African American woman. The woman is from black neighborhood and there she has a better life than the rest of the place where the African-American people live. These women also know how to live their life with white people. Their husbands and homes are under their strict control.

The narrator then particularizes a black woman, Geraldine. She has her son Louis Junior along with the cat. Junior is jealous of the cat because he thinks that his mother loves the cat more than him. His mother tells him that they are colored people and they  live a better life than the niggers. Junior secretly likes the black boys but he plays with the white children.

One day, he finds Pecola and he asks the black girl to play with him. He takes her to his home and the cat scratches her which makes Pecola cry. Soon, the cat gets friendly with Pecola. When Junior learns this he throws the cat away. His mother comes and Junior tells that the cat is thrown by Pecola and Geraldine has always disliked the blacks so she calls her bitch. Pecola is unhappy but she leaves for home.

The Bluest Eye Spring Summary

Chapter 1

One day when Claudia comes she finds that Frieda is crying in her bedroom. She is upset because Mr.Henry has sexually molested her. She tells this to her parents and they expel Mr. Henry from the house. Mr.Henry gets beaten by Frieda`s father but Frieda is afraid because she thinks that she might be ruined because of the molestation. She thinks that drinking whiskey might save her so she goes to Pecola’s house to take whiskey because Pecola’s father drinks whiskey.

Pecola is not present at home but a prostitute is there. The sisters learn that Pecola is at their father’s workplace so they go there and find her there. Pecola’s mother invites them inside the home.

Chapter 2

This chapter talks about the mother of Pecola, Pauline Williams Breedlove. She had an accident in her early life and it damaged her foot. But she got more upset when her tooth rotted. She has a dream to go out of her routine life and waits for her dream boy and finds Cholly Breedlove. He seems a jolly person with a loving attitude towards Pauline which results in the marriage of these two.

After their marriage, they go towards their north and it is a difficult place to live in because of umpteen numbers of White people. She always stays stuck to Cholly and he does not like this at all. She then gets a job of cooking and cleaning at the house of a white family but the family does not respect her.

After some time, she gets pregnant and she remains unhappy. She gets into the habit of going to cinemas to watch movies and wishes to become a film star. When the time of delivery comes, she goes to hospital and there she learns that she needs little medication because the doctor thinks that the African women are similar to horses.

Anyway, she gives birth to two children but they do give her a moment of happiness and she remains unhappy and sobbing. She starts hating her life. She then gets a job at a wealthy white family and her life is then devoted to earning for the family and her own wishes die in the course of time.

Chapter 3

This chapter focuses on Cholly.  His mother leaves him when he is four days old on a junk heap. He is then raised by Jimmy, his great-aunt. His father has left his mother before he is even born. When Cholly turns 14, Jimmy dies.

Cholly is then taken by the girlfriend of his cousin Jake. Darlene takes her and he experiences the first nocturnal fun of his life. They are caught by two white men and they order Cholly to continue doing the fun and they would watch them. Although they are embarrassed while being intimate and physical, they cannot resist the orders of the white men.

Cholly then starts looking for his father and does some job so that he could buy a ticket. He then finds his father who is a short bald man. When he meets his father, his father tells him to leave. He gets deeply upset by the rejection of his father. This rejection makes him inclined towards more women and drinking habits. This results in the emergence of violence in Cholly. He then meets Pauline and they get married.

One day, when he is drunk he finds Pecola busy in home chores. Her gait reminds him of Pauline when he started loving her in the initial days. He flirts with Pecola, his daughter, and she gets shocked by her father. He likes  Pecola being shocked. He then rapes Pecola and she gets unconscious.

Chapter 4

This chapter introduces an old man Soaphead Church whose real name is Elihue Whitcomb. He does not like people. He grew up in the West Indies in the Mulatto Family which is half African American and Caucasian family. He then migrates to America and turns to tell fortune to people. He likes young girls and whenever he gets an opportunity he tries to molest girls. He rents a room in the town and starts living simply. The only thing he does not like about his house is the deaf dog of his room owner.

One day Pecola comes to Soaphead and tells him that she wants to have blue eyes. He  gives her a piece of meat and tells her to throw it in front of the dog. He tells her if the dog reacts, she will get blue eyes. The meat is poisoned and as soon the dog eats the meat, it dies. She watches this and runs away home.

The Bluest Eye Summer Summary

Chapter 1

Frieda and Claudia sell seed by going to various houses. They want to sell as much as they can because they want to buy a bicycle. They roam around the neighborhood and get the news that Pecola is pregnant and she carries the child of her father. Cholly gets the news and escapes. Pauline beats Pecola but the neighborhood is unable to decide whether Pecola is having a role in this pregnancy or not.

Frieda and Claudia are very much sad and angry and think that it is very tragic to Pecola. They look around and the people are very much shocked. Frieda and Claudia are confused as to why the people are shocked because it is a common thing to be a mother, without marrying someone, in their neighborhood.  But the people do not want the birth of the African American baby.

Claudia and Frieda want the baby to live and they sacrifice their money which they have earned through selling seeds. They plant the seed in the earth and want to see whether the seed grows or not. They think if the seed grows so it will be a sign from God and the baby will live.

Chapter 2

Pecola now gets the blue eyes and talks to a person about her blue eyes. She tells the person that people are jealous of her blues eyes and they do not look at her. They ignore her and because of this, she has decided to quit her school because the people in the school are prejudiced against her eyes.

The readers learn that the person Pecola is talking to is invisible. The readers also learn that this friend appears at the same time when Pecola gets her blue eyes. She then admits that Cholly raped her on the couch. Pecola also grows anxiety that her eyes are not pure blue.

The story then shifts to Claudia`s perspective. Claudia tells the readers that Pecola`s baby will get birth but because it is premature delivery so the baby dies soon. Pecola gets mad and she roams in the neighborhood talking to herself. The seeds of Claudia and Frieda do not grow and they start avoiding Pecola.

Like Cholly, Sammy also runs away from the neighborhood. Pauline cares a lot for her daughter but Pecola never recovers from her madness. Claudia thinks that Pecola gets mad because everyone treated her wrongly and inferiorly. No one cared about her and everyone threw his or her ugliness on Pecola. This caused her to be mad forever.

Claudia thinks that Cholly must have loved Pecola but people damage their own love by resorting to wrong acts. She then says that the year all this happened in the town, no flower grew because everything was shrouded by gloominess.

The Bluest Eye Characters Analysis

Pecola

Pecola is the uniting force of this novel. She is a black girl. She is eleven years old. She is treated indifferently by many of the people and this develops a sense of ugliness in her and she accepts herself as ugly. She is passive in every regard and suffers the violence and abuse of her family and surroundings.

Pecola is the central character but despite being the protagonist of the novel, she remains passive in the novel. Morrison tells the story of Pecola from an unknown narrator because she wants to maintain the mysteriousness and dignity of Pecola.

In the beginning of the novel, she is a weak and innocent character but in the end, Pecola is fully destroyed and violated. In her childhood she has two wishes; she wants to learn to love people and to disappear when her parents fight. But none of her wishes come true and across the length of the novels, she becomes the victim of brutality and indifference. She wants to have blue eyes because she thinks that the eyes might change the people to perceive Pecola humanely. Although she achieves blue eyes but has to lose her sanity for those blue eyes.

She does not get any relief from the pain and misery of her life. Pecola stands as the symbol of self-hatred and acknowledgement of ugliness for black women.  She faces hatred of various people in the novel because those people give vent to their self-hatred and it is thrown upon her. It is her ugliness which makes all these people feel beautiful. She is a symbol of human cruelty.

Claudia MacTeer

 Claudia is an independent girl of nine years. She is a strong-minded girl. She, as a character has not learned to hate herself on the grounds that she is black, fights against the tyranny of being black in America. She belongs to a moderate family and lives in Lorain with her sister Frieda and parents.

She is the narrator of some parts of this novel. She also suffers from white standards of beauty. This fear is somehow overcome by the stability of her family. Claudia is a brave fighter.  She abhors the white standards of beauty and she destroys the white baby doll that is being gifted to her. She also attacks the black boys who molest Pecola. She is the one who plans to save Pecola’s baby from the rejection of the community.

She herself admits that she has been safe from the hatred of racism in the community and it’s partly because she thinks herself as brave. She also symbolizes that all the black families do not suffer like the family of Pecola in Lorain, Ohio.

Cholly Breedlove

He is the father of Pecola. He is violent and impulsive. He has suffered in his life and he takes out these sufferings in the form of frustration on his family. He is a character who has an innate tendency of love and anger but in the novel, the readers learn that his anger is dominant.

Cholly is the detestable character in the novel because he rapes Pecola, his own daughter. But Morrison talks about Cholly as he deserves sympathy from the readers because he has suffered a lot in his life. He is the one who has been left at the junk of a heap. He is the character who has suffered humiliation by the white men. He stands for negative freedom and its implications.

Pauline Breedlove

She is the mother of miserable Pecola. She believes that Pecola is ugly which makes Pecola very lonely. She has a deformed personality and she takes out the frustration of this in her fights with her husband. This also shows that the bond between husband and wife is very weak.  She thinks she is a rejected lady hence she devotes her life to earn and care for her family.

Frieda MacTeer

She is the sister of Claudia. She is ten year old. She is near her maturity and is more fragile towards the white standards of beauty.  She has good knowledge about the world of adults.

Mr. MacTeer

He is a brave character who works hard for his family to keep them clothed and fed.  He is highly protective of his daughters.

Mrs. MacTeer

She is the mother Claudia. She loves her children. She also protects her children from the outside world. She is a woman of authority.

Henry Washington

In the novel, he lives with a rented person with the MacTeer family. He has a reputation of being notorious and has a strong inclination towards ladies. He is usually shown to be involved with the prostitute girls.

Sammy Breedlove

Sammy is the brother of Pecola. He is fourteen years old. He is frustrated with the fights of his family and usually runs away from his home. While Pecola is a passive girl, Sammy symbolizes activity. When his sister gets pregnant by his father, Sammy runs away from home to not return ever.

Maureen Peal

 Maureen Peal is a wealthy girl. She joins the school of Claudia. She is the one who thinks of herself as superior.

Geraldine

She is a black woman who belongs to the middle-class black community. She has a neat and flawless house. She keeps good care of her family. She is in love with her cat. Although the composure of her personality seems good but she is a cold character.

Junior

Junior is the son of Geraldine. He does not get love from his mother because she focuses her affections towards the cat. This makes Junior a sadist and cruel boy. He also harasses girls and is cruel towards the cat to take out his frustration.

Soaphead Church

His real name is ELihue Micah Whitcomb. He is a misanthrope and belongs to the West Indies. He considers himself the interpreter of dreams. He has a strong resentment towards the touch of the family but the only interest he has is in the touch of young girls. Though he is a religious character yet he is full of hypocrisy.

Aunt Jimmy

She is the aunt of Cholly Breedlove. When Cholly is left by his mother at the heap of junk, Jimmy rescues Cholly. Cholly is four days old then. She is a lady of strength and has a good circle of friends who also take good care of Cholly when he is a child. She dies in the due course of time and it saddens the young Cholly but he is unable to express his grief.

Themes in The Bluest Eye

Love and it Perils

Morrison throughout the novel raises questions about love. He asks what actually love is. How does it happen? But in this novel, the love shown is very hazardous and perilous

The first reference of love is the love of Pecola for her baby. Claudia also refers to love but in the context of Mr.Henry. The love shown in both cases is not pure love rather it is negative. The love Pecola has for her baby is the love that is the result of rape and incest sex while the second love is the love of a young girl to an amorous suitor who likes to molest young girls.

Across the length of this novel, the lines are drawn between sex and love, abuse and love are crossed, constantly. Pecola finds out about love when the prostitutes talk about love but she gets to know that they have no sort of love for their customers.  They abhor men yet they have fun talking about suitors and boyfriends.  Similarly, Soaphead Church wishes for young girls so that he could take fun of molesting.

Morrison doesn’t beat around the bush by praising or adoring the word love. Morrison portrays how Geraldine and ladies like her misunderstand the concept of the word love. They are unable to differentiate between sex and love. Geraldine constrains her sexual connections only to her husband yet her love is there for her cat which makes everyone jealous of the cat. It is because of this love that the cat is destroyed because love is perilous in nature.

Cholly does not want to love someone because he is an abandoned persona who is raised by an aunt. Cholly and Pecola`s connection makes this concept of love and sex more ambiguous in the novel and it becomes dangerous as well. Morrison tells the readers that Cholly loves Pecola while she has affection for her father even though he rapes her. In the end, Claudia also discusses Cholly’s love for Pecola but warns the readers that “the love of a free man is never safe.”  This is very much true because Cholly`s love for Pecola brings about the entire calamity for Pecola.

Whiteness: The criteria for beauty

The novel provides a detailed discussion of the manners in which the standard of beauty endangers the lives of women who belong to the black community.

There are a number of examples in the novel which show that being white means superiority such as the white doll which is given to Claudia, the likeness for Shirley Temple and the passage dealing with the fact the whiteness of Maureen makes her cuter than all the black girls.

The black woman endures this hate for black by the whites and in turn, they throw out their hatred on the children in different ways such as Pauline thinks that Pecola is very ugly, and Geraldine also curses the blackness of Pecola. Even it is clear in the novel that Claudia who is free from this inclination towards whiteness might start hating herself being black.

Pecola suffers the most from these white standards of beauty. For her, beauty is being loved but she sees this conception of love in the blue eyes and thinks that the blue eyes would change the situation for her. This makes her mad.

Beauty vs Ugliness

The dark characters of the novel have been educated to accept that the paragon of excellence and beauty is in whiteness. The characters are continually exposed to pictures of whiteness offered through films, books, sweets, notices, magazines, and toys.

At the very start of the novel, Pecola and Frieda spout over Shirley Temple’s magnificence. Later, Mrs. Breedlove spends her time watching films and appreciating the white actors and actresses, wishing she could become one among them. The relationship between  excellence and whiteness pushes the possibility of magnificence past the morphology of the body, making it important for reputation and value. Numerous characters in the novel accept that their magnificence characterizes their worth in the eyes of the general public and the family.

Characters build up their feeling of self-esteem depending upon the ideals of beauty. So, ugliness and beauty become disguised conditions and internalized by the characters. This affects the lives of the characters in the novel to a devastating extent. The novel tells the readers that The Breedloves are poor as they accept that they are appallingly ugly, and Pecola accepts that she deserves the maltreatment and disregard of the family and the people of the community.

As opposed to the weakening impact of ugliness which is internalized by the characters, beauty gives some of the characters the power to dominate.  The beauty of Maureen Peal empowers her to stop the savagery of the black boys when they are molesting Pecola outside the school. The force that joins beauty persuades Pecola that having blue eyes, which are a symbol of beauty, would permit her to rise above the hopelessness of her circumstance.

As her life turns out to be increasingly difficult, her fixation on blue eyes drives her to franticness and in the seclusion of that frenzy, she comes to accept that she has blue eyes in reality. At last, the novel proposes that ugliness and beauty are not damaging or hazardous. Rather, it is the internalized idea that gives beauty the power of destruction. 

Colorism

The mistreatment and the prejudice that Pecola gets as a result of the color of her skin is termed as “colorism.” It is like discrimination that has recently come under the studies and research.

In colorism, those with white skin are given particular treatment while those with darker skin are frequently treated cruelly. This is manifested in the contrasting treatment that Maureen Peal and Pecola get.

The core concept in colorism is preference and love for whiteness, while for black there is rejection.  When Black Americans started this practice of colorism, they developed racial self-hatred in which they internalized the concept of inferiority.

In simple terms, the Black Americans understood the racism towards them by American culture and internalized it. They started to detest themselves and their darkness since society instructed them to. The black boys who affront Pecola by naming her “dark e mo” is an evident example of this, and similarly, Geraldine calls Pecola a “nasty little black bitch” is another example.

They themselves are dark, but they use blackness as disdain. Thus, they are concurring with society’s judgment of dark as monstrous, and in The Bluest Eye Morrison endeavors to reveal how a kid arrives at this purpose of racial self-hatred.

Suppression of Women

The Bluest Eye is all about the mistreatment of women folk. The women in the novel endure the abhorrence and terrors of racial abuse.  They also suffer the tyranny of males in the novel.

The novel portrays a few periods of improvement of women into womanhood. Claudia, Freida and Pecola have a constrained and optimistic perspective on being a lady. Their idealistic view is limited to engage in sexual relations and to be cherished by a man. The stories of Pauline and Geraldine portray this guiltless view being broken as they face the bitter realities of marriage and the mistreatment they experience due to their family.

Despite the fact that the ladies of The Bluest Eye experience persecution from various men who are in their lives yet they are not totally weak. They practice authority over their kids through physical power and abusive attacks. 

These women are abused by men, so they throw out their frustration and oppress the individuals who are helpless and frail. The three prostitutes offer the main special case to the standard of male mistreatment over women folk. They gain control over men by misusing their womanliness and sexuality. Though they gain power over the men through sexuality, they lose their respect and self-confidence. From numerous points of view, the prostitute, through their habit of drinking, hostility, and manly quirks looks like the men they have come to detest.

The subject of women and womanliness, and male abuse over ladies in The Bluest Eye, arrives at its climax during Cholly’s rapes of Pecola. This scene, which provides a definitive type of brutality and persecution against ladies, is described totally through Cholly’s viewpoint. The absence of Pecola’s point of view during this rape exhibits the hushing impact of male mistreatment over women.

The Bluest Eye Literary Analysis

Reason Behind Writing this book

In the foreword to this novel, Morrison writes the main purpose of this novel is to unravel the happenings to an individual when he or she accepts “rejection as legitimate.” She then talks about one particular incident in which one of her friends wanted to have blue eyes. Morrison writes that she sensed in the wish of her friend “implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing.”

Structure

The novel is divided into four different sections. Every section is given a different name and the names are taken from that of four seasons. The novel starts with Autumn and finishes with Summer.  These four sections are then divided into various chapters. The titles of many of these chapters are taken from the text of classic tales of Dick and Jane. There are three versions of this text which appear at the start of the novel.

These versions of the text stand for the various lifestyles of the families that are unravelled in the novel. The first version which is with proper punctuation and grammar stands for the white families in the novel which are sound and stable families and have a broad-minded view of the black community. They consider black people as brute animals.

The second version with proper punctuation but no spacing between the words stands for MacTeer family. They are not perfect but have a reasonable lifestyle and they stand in between the White Families and the lowered outcast poor black people. The third version with no proper punctuation and grammar stands for the Breedloves who are a crumbled family and have to suffer throughout the novel.

The Great Depression

The Bluest Eye is set toward the end of the Great Depression. The repercussions of this Depression are felt by the characters in the novel. It is a result of the Depression that Cholly doesn’t have work to do.

The Great Depression (1929-39) was the most profound and long-lasting financial downturn throughout the entire existence of the Western industrialized world. In the United States, the Great Depression started not long after the securities exchange crash of October 1929, which sent Wall Street into a frenzy and cleared out a huge number of financial specialists.

Throughout the following quite a long while, customer spending and speculation dropped, causing steep decreases in mechanical yield and rising degrees of joblessness as bombing organizations laid off specialists. By 1933, when the Great Depression arrived at its nadir, about 13 to 15 million Americans were jobless and almost 50% of the nation’s banks had fizzled.

The Great Migration

In the period from 1916 to the 1960s, in excess of 6,000,000 Southern dark individuals moved toward the North. Cholly and Mrs.Breedlove left the rustic South because of the trend like numerous African Americans who came to populate Lorain and the surrounding towns of Midwest.

In the same way as other northern towns with modern economies, Lorain was the seat of this Migration. After the post-Civil War Reconstruction period that ended in 1876, racial oppression was to a great extent re-established over the South, and the segregationist approaches known as Jim Crow turned into the rule that everyone must follow.

Southern blacks had to make their living working the land as a major aspect of the sharecropping framework, which offered little in the method for monetary chance, particularly after a boll weevil scourge in 1898 which caused gigantic harvest harm over the South. And keeping in mind that the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) had been formally broken down in 1869, it proceeded with underground and terrorizing, savagery and in any event, the lynching of dark southerners were normal practices in the Jim Crow South.

Autumn Section Analysis

The beginning in 1939 in the season of Autumn proves to be an important decision by the author. The novel began in an era when World War II starts in full authority and the writer is depicting the Nazi system as a background to the events of the novel. 

Americans of 1939 consider light hair and blue eyes in the two dolls and young ladies as valuable and worthy; however, these highlights are likewise impressions of the Aryan ideal.

Similarly, the cup that has the picture of Shirley Temple is blue and white, both colors showing the racial stamps for the skin and eyes of the Aryan perfect.  By portraying such association, Morrison permeates the American standard of magnificence with meanings of brutality and massacre. 

Claudia appears to detect the peril of this style, and she responds kindly. In addition to the fact that she destroys the Caucasian dolls given to her as presents, yet she likewise fantasizes about assaulting living white young ladies. Her dissection of dolls can be interpreted in two different ways.

The first, Claudia is disappointed by the people that esteems blues eyes and pink skin and in this manner can never think about her as lovely because she is a black girl.

The second is abnormally logical. She attempts to perceive how they are assembled, how they produce voices and what they resemble inside. This examination of the dolls matches the analytical work done by the novel, which endeavors to find how social powers have joined to create Pecola’s disaster.

Both the demonstration of pulverizing the dolls and the exploratory work of the novel are types of request and the dissection of Claudia’s doll proposes that violence will be the result of learning and experience. Furthermore, the picture of the dolls wrecked by a dark young lady strangely reverses and hints Pecola’s later mental decimation, which happens halfway on account of a built white standard of magnificence that Pecola can’t accomplish.

Winter Section Analysis

This section has two parts. The first part has two main events; the walk of girls towards home and Mr.Henry`s involvement with prostitutes. The black boys call Pecola ‘black’ and it is the worst insult for an already shattered girl. Claudia says that the affront has power in light of the fact that the young men and Pecola have a disdain for their own race and have learned self-loathing. The battle with Maureen uncovers something important. When Maureen asks Pecola whether she has seen a man naked or not and Pecola`s response to the question shows that she has not only seen Cholly naked but had some other sort of experience with nakedness of her father.

The episode with Mr.Henry represents the young ladies’ profound devotion and regard for their mother. It is Mrs.MacTeer’s assessment of China and Marie that these girls avoid prostitutes. Frieda truly deciphers Mrs.MacTeer`s announcements about Marie. This misconception of her words helps the readers to remember the outrageous youth of Claudia and Frieda. The MacTeer sisters are themselves youthful and guileless, a reality which stresses Pecola’s helplessness considerably more. Pecola is of a similar age as the rest of the girls; however, she is less shrewd and doesn’t have the solid family life of the MacTeers.

The start of the second section of Winter talks about the class of women who belong to a black community. This section also talks about the migration of black people to Lorain and other places. The section is expressive, depicting the schedules of housekeeping and church-going decency with a specific level of magnificence, yet the women have married as social order not out of their love. Men wed to have a lady to take care of their family and houses and ladies wed so they may have their very own position.

Geraldine and her family have internalized the criteria of beauty as whiteness and live their lives yearning for middle-class decency. These disguises are not without their expense. Geraldine’s sexual life with the husband is very cold and it seems like a social arrangement rather than love. Geraldine doesn’t demonstrate fondness to her child instead she focuses on her cat.

The face of the cat predicts the tragedy for Pecola’s future.  The cat has a dark face with the blue eyes. By and by, Pecola is the victimized for her blackness which shows that blacks are cruel to blacks because they have internalized the concept of self-loathing.

The minute when Geraldine investigates Pecola’s eyes is a fascinating entry to contrast with the section where Pecola purchases candy from Mr. Yacobowski. In contrast to the retailer, Geraldine sees something in Pecola’s eyes, in spite of the fact that what she sees fills her with aversion and dread. Geraldine sees in Pecola a kind of dark which the novel discusses in detail.  Geraldine observes a preoccupied agent of an entire social class, a social class she abhors, and thus she is brutal and merciless to Pecola.

Spring Section Analysis

This part presents an amazing differentiation between the Breedloves and the MacTeers. Frieda’s family trusts her and they are protective towards the girl. The suggestion that Frieda may be destroyed doesn’t make her mother angry towards her Frieda. Rather her mother is angry at Miss Dunion at her for making such a comment.

Morrison figures out how to humanize Marie without glossing over her. Her politeness and cordiality are genuine, yet she has no tolerance for the young ladies’ lack of respect towards people. The journey to take the drink and the young ladies’ contempt for the Maginot Line manifests the reverence these girls have for their mother`s wisdom. The theme of the scarcity of love can be found in the treatment of Marie and different prostitute girls, whose names review their powerless status. For these girls the words of her mother are law and they do not like Marie because their mother does not like her.

They also misinterpret Mrs. MacTeer’s words and attempt to avert Frieda’s “ruin,” misunderstanding the words of adults. Their misinterpretation highlights their innocence. By the end of the novel, through Pecola’s experience, the MacTeer sisters will have a much better understanding of ruin.

They misjudged Mrs. MacTeer’s words and endeavored to turn away Frieda’s ruin, misconstruing the expressions of grown-ups. Their distortion features their honesty. Before the end of the novel, the MacTeer sisters will have a vastly improved comprehension of ruin through Pecola’s understanding.

The place where Pauline works, the readers note that Mrs. Breedlove gives a large portion of her consideration and love to that house. As opposed to her own home, which is hopeless and in dilapidation, the place of the white individuals for whom she works is flawless. The pie that ought to turn into a lovely memory for Pecola may be a wonderful memory for the little white girl, Polly, because it applies all her exertion in attempting to cause the place of the white people to feel like a home. And she is more concerned for the little white girls than her own daughter.

This part also discusses the deterministic powers that have formed Pauline`s personality. Her hopelessness appears to be an inevitable end product. Disregarded by her family, wedded to a heavy drinker leaves not many decisions for her. 

Cholly does not have anyone to teach him to be like a father. Aunt Jimmy is very old and she does not have the strength to teach him to be like a father. Cholly constantly looks for a father figure in Jack and then in his own father. When his father rejects him, it makes a turning point in his life. He does not know anything about the concept of faith and honesty. He then rapes his daughter because he loves her. The rape is the result of a mixture of hatred and tenderness for Pecola thus the tenderness for Pecola transforms into a wild action and she gets destroyed.

Summer Section Analysis

The soil which is not able to grow the marigold seeds shows that the earth or the region is very much hostile towards Pecola because she is black. The two sisters do not make the seeds grow which is a metaphor that implies Pecola has no option but she was made to suffer in almost every circumstance. This also shows that she very much relies on her environment for substance but it is not favorable for her. Her baby also symbolizes the seeds which die even before they get a chance to grow and blossom. The last words of Pecola are very much dark and hopeless. She implies that the people made her suffer.

Pecola Analysis

The novel sheds light on Pecola`s psychological disintegration when she is raped by Cholly. Morrison purposely breaks the cloud of talking about such issues openly because her main motive is to talk about the whole issues of the black community. The rape of Pecola is as a sort of revenge by her father for when he was raped by the white men when was busy with the girl. These men shock Cholly while he is engaged in sexual relations with a young lady in the forested area and afterwards he is compelled to continue it at a gunpoint. Morrison reveals to us that Cholly starts to hate that lady because she sees his failure at the hands of those white men so he takes out this shame to Pecola. Pecola is not only the victim of her father but of the racist American culture as well. 

The rape of Pecola, the death of the baby, mixed with Soaphead’s guile and the mistreatment by her people forces Pecola to become mad. In her frenzy, she starts believing that she has blue eyes and it is because Soaphead makes her believe. He himself is made and he chastens God in a letter for not offering to Pecola the one thing she wants. He appoints a degree of significance to his own individuality in his capacity to give her and other young ladies, the adoration that they need, the affection that he himself is denied. Eventually, he becomes a study of the world as well as a study of how the world legitimizes who and what it cherishes. 

In disclosing Pecola’s journey to madness, Morrison clarifies why such catastrophes happen. In her craving for blue eyes that she connects with excellence and acknowledgement, Pecola sets herself up for disillusionment. As she explains this misfortune, Morrison uncovers how the way of life wherein Pecola lives makes the false benchmarks of excellence. She uncovers how these benchmarks lead her to extreme fate. The Black’s inclination of mediocrity is the aftereffect of the estimations of America’s White man-centric framework, which treats and sees Blacks as objects of disdain. Pecola grasps this worthwhile framework alongside the resulting feeling of inadequacy that comes from predominant racial generalizations and Whites’ projection of bigot disgrace.