The Bluest Eyes by Toni Morrison - Book Report/Review Example

They feel socially inferior and adopt the white man's hypocrisy to use against themselves. From the life stories of Pecola, her friends and her father one finds out that the white beauty standards and white domination certainly deforms the lives of black females and males. Pecola's father, was humiliated by the two white racists who made him have sex while they both watched. To females the whiteness is viewed as a sign of superiority and beauty. Pecola for instance believed that the light skinned Maureen was much cuter than the black girls.

Maureen is envied because her complexion is a light toned black. The white baby doll presented to Claudia also symbolizes the ideal of Shirley Temple. The white beauty was also promulgated in the movies and mass media. "She was never able, after her education in the movies, to look at a face and not assign it some category in the scale of absolute beauty, and the scale was one she absorbed in full from the silver screen." (Morrison, 122) Even Pauline Breedlove prefers a little white girl rather than her own daughter.

The self-hatred that many black females develop early in their lives gets passed on to their offspring. For instance, Pauline Breedlove believes that Pecola is ugly while Geraldine directly curses the skin color of Pecola. Even the storeowner projected his disgust at Pecola "She looks up at him and sees the vacuum where curiosity ought to lodge. And something more. The total absence of human recognition-the glazed separateness." (Morrison, 48) It was only Claudia who continued to imagine the black beautiful baby of Pecola without every noting that whiteness was more beautiful.

While there are no direct quotes about it one is inclined to believe that Claudia will also start to hate herself and view whiteness as beautiful once she becomes mature. Apparently, Pecola suffers the most because she relates (white) beauty to love and success. She is convinced that if she had blue eyes, her life would not be so cruel and hard. "It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights-if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different.

" (Morrison, 46) Rather it would bring her love, affection, passion and respect. Such obsession with the standards set by mass media and the society she lived in cause Pecola to go insane: it is only in her madness she believes that she has blue eyes necessary to remain beautiful. Another theme closely related the black self-loathing and white supremacy is the contempt of blacks by each other. The Bluest Eyes in fact explores the issues of sexual initiation and abuse of ugly black girls by black men.

At the novel's start one reads that Pecola just had her first menstruation started, yet by the story's end Pecola already got raped and impregnated by her father (Cholly). Her friend Frieda, got a somewhat more pleasurable experience when she was molested by Henry Washington. Pecola's father had an extremely unpleasant first sexual experience when he was forced to have sex while two white men watched. While this might seem like a coincidence, one can argue that in an abusive environment of self-loathing that existed in black communities females were not respected at all but rather were used as inanimate sexual toys for male's satisfaction.