Morrison, T. (2007). The bluest eye: A novel. New York: Vintage International.

Werrlein, Debra T. “Not so Fast, Dick and Jane: Reimagining Childhood and Nation in the Bluest Eye.” MELUS, vol. 30, no. 4, 2005, pp. 53–72. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/30029634. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Vasquez, Sam. “In Her Own Image: Literary and Visual Representations of Girlhood in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Jamaica Kincaid’s Annie John.” Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism, vol. 12, no. 1, 2014, p. 58+. Gale Academic OneFile, https://link.gale.com/apps/doc/A365688777/AONE?u=cuny_hunter&sid=AONE&xid=d1f1dab9. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Bump, Jerome. “Racism and Appearance in The Bluest Eye: A Template for an Ethical Emotive Criticism.” College Literature, vol. 37 no. 2, 2010, p. 147-170. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lit.0.0108.

Wall, Cheryl A. “On Dolls, Presidents, and Little Black Girls.” Signs, vol. 35, no. 4, 2010, pp. 796–801. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/651034. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Hyman, Ramona L. “PECOLA BREEDLOVE: THE SACRIFICIAL ICONOCLAST IN ‘THE BLUEST EYE.’” CLA Journal, vol. 52, no. 3, 2009, pp. 256–264. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44325476. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Bergner, Gwen. “Black Children, White Preference: Brown v. Board, the Doll Tests, and the Politics of Self-Esteem.” American Quarterly, vol. 61, no. 2, 2009, pp. 299–332. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/27734991. Accessed 15 Nov. 2020.

Stewart, Jacqueline. “Negroes Laughing at Themselves? Black Spectatorship and the Performance of Urban Modernity.” Critical Inquiry, vol. 29, no. 4, 2003, pp. 650–677. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/377724. Accessed 16 Nov. 2020.

I used mostly Hunter Libraries OneSearch and JSTOR to find these articles. I searched through multiple databases JSTOR was the one that was really giving me a lot of results for the terms that I was searching for. I specifically searched for articles that had the terms “the bluest eye” and “the imitation of life” together so I could find more people that talk about that reference that is mentioned in Werrlein’s article. I also replaced that reference to other pop culture references in bluest eye like “Shirley Temple” and for more broader articles I simply replaced those specific terms with “children”, “media”, “racism”, and “imagery” (all of these going along with “the bluest eye”). In my research I found many people talk about “the clark doll study” so I also independently searched that with “representation” and tried to find more articles that linked this to the Bluest Eye. I think in the end I chose the articles I thought fit the most with my research topic of the effect of white narratives and representation in media on black children and how that message is portrayed in The Bluest Eye.

How does imagery and symbolism used to illustrate colorist and racism? And how is it used when telling Pecola’s story?

Hunter College Libraries. (n.d.). Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://go-gale-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/ps/retrieve.do?tabID=T002

This article is called “Representation of Child Abuse and Treatment of Colourism in Toni Morrison’s God help the Children and the Bluest Eye” the author of the peer review article is R. Muthuselvi. The reason why I chose this article was because it used two of Toni Morrison’s works I felt like by using both novels helps to have a greater understanding of colorisim and racism and how it affects children. The article explains how there are four main types of child mistreatment and they are physical abuse, emotional abuse, emotional abuse, and neglection. It mentions how in God help the children how African Americans suffered many types of alienation and victimization at the hands of oppression. This trauma transfers to children as well. This article uses references from Dubois, Alice Walker, and James Baldwin to illustrate the affect of oppression on African American Children. This article focuses on how Morrison uses history and integrate it into her novel in the form of similes and creative analogs. I also used this article because of the multiple amount of sources that this article used. This will help me by looking into he historical aspect of colorisim and how it affects African Americans. I was also thinking about connecting it to the present day if possible.

Hunter College Libraries. (n.d.). Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://search-alexanderstreet-com.proxy.wexler.hunter.cuny.edu/view/work/bibliographic_entity|bibliographic_details|4385713

This article is called “Your History from the Beginning of Time to the Present” published by Pittsburg Courier Publishing Co. This illustrates multiple picture of Black History and gives the significance of those pictures I focused on Panel 7. Panel 7 illustrates a picture of a white woman and an African American Woman. In the Panel the white woman is drawn significantly larger than the African American Woman. I used this because it relates to some of the factors that caused Pecola to turn mad. This article focuses on prominant African American people who defied the odds in white society. But I interpreted Panel 7 that way because Panel 7 was the introduction to a new page in the article and this is the first picture. One problem I noticed here was that sometimes the images did not connect to description for example it would speak about. The credibility of this source is questionable and I may not use this.

(n.d.). Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://indivisible.commons.gc.cuny.edu/etexts/blair-on-ellison-and-photography/

I wanted to use Blair on Ellison and photography because it mentions how photography is used to show the prejudice and racism that occurred during the time. My thought process while I was choosing this article was that my research wanted to focus on symbolism, and I want to add pictures from that time period to illustrate how symbolism is used to illustrate racism and colorisim. There is a moment that I look at in this article that makes me want to use this article as evidence and that is when it states “It is worth taking seriously the nexus this passage proposes: between Ellison’s identity as a writer, struggling to articulate a place for himself in an American cultural genealogy, and the instruments of photographic looking,” (Blair, Blair on Ellison and photography). This is important because it looks into the struggle that Pecola has where she struggles with her identity and how society determines what is beautiful and what is ugly. Although photography relies more on imagery I still wanted to use this because of the reasons behind the use of photography align with the symbolism in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison.

(n.d.). Retrieved November 16, 2020, from https://indivisible.commons.gc.cuny.edu/etexts/eversley-ellison/

This article Eversley Ellison and female iconography speaks about how women are viewed in a male dominant society. I wanted to use an article that uses Ellison’s works because the invisibility that the invisible man experiences is the same invisibility that Pecola experiences and is the most shown in the ending of the novel. Pecola believes that she has blue eyes and that in turn makes her invisible. People ignored what was happening to Pecola and they ignored her when she believed that she was invisible, this drove her unto her madness. This brought upon a path where no one cared for her, nor thought she was sane. What makes this story sad is that all of this could have been prevented because the downfall of Pecola occurred in the presence of many adults. In the article it mentions. “Here, both the narrator and the women appear as nameless types. Their mutual and their individual challenge is to achieve an identity, one independent of the stereotypical images that conceal the truth”. This illustrates one of the main ideas illustrated in the novel and that is the invisibility of women.

Toni Morrison’s a Bluest Eye

This is one of my sources because this is where I will be getting most of my sources. The reason why this will be my main source is because I need to be able to look into the symbolism in the novel in order to illustrate the colorism and racism that is portrayed unto Pecola. Some of the Symbolism that I want to use would be Pecola’s blue eyes,  and the Marigolds. Pecola is fascinated by the idea of having blue eyes, and she yearns to have them because she feels that she will finally be beautiful if she had blue eyes. But when she has blue eyes in the end of the novel she becomes insane. The Marigolds is connected to nature, and if the environment isn’t safe for the Marigolds or if the soil is rotten than the Marigolds don’t grow; they are tainted. The symbolism here is Pecola, she is the Marigold and her father represents the environment, when he sexually abuses her she becomes tainted.

• Butler-Evans, Elliott. Race, Gender, and Desire: Narrative Strategies in the Fiction of Toni Cade Bambara, Toni Morrison, and Alice Walker. Temple University Press, 1989.

• Byerman, Keith E. “INTENSE BEHAVIORS: THE USE OF THE GROTESQUE IN ‘THE BLUEST EYE AND EVA’S MAN.’” CLA Journal, vol. 25, no. 4, 1982, pp. 447–57.

• Rosenberg, Ruth. “Seeds in Hard Ground: Black Girlhood in The Bluest Eye.” Black American Literature Forum, vol. 21, no. 4, 1987, pp. 435–45. JSTOR, doi:10.2307/2904114.

• Sova, Dawn B. Literature Suppressed on Sexual Grounds. Facts on File, 1998.

• Thistlethwaite, Susan Brooks. Sex, Race, and God: Christian Feminism in Black and White. Crossroad, 1989.

The first image of the novel depicts a fairly modern neighborhood – the relative modernity of it is proven by the car in the driveway that we see around our own neighborhoods everyday. However, a small street sign is the actual focus of the image, as it reads “JIM CROW RD,” which is a shocking reminder of the racial segregation that was enforced in the southern United States as early as the 1880’s and was abolished in the 1960’s. One of the many things it prevented black people from doing was attending the same schools as white children in the name of “separate but equal.” However, as many knew then and as all of us (hopefully) know now, Jim Crow promoted nothing but separateness and inequality; its mantra simply gave racism a polite front. Thus, this picture was clearly taken years after the Jim Crow laws were abolished as can be seen by the new model of the car in the driveway, and it can furthermore be inferred that this neighborhood is a majority-white neighborhood due to the lingering taste of Jim Crow/anti-blackness still present near people’s homes.

This image is displayed right after the story of the narrator, one of the few black girls in her class, in a predominantly white classroom. Therefore, we can infer that this event takes place in a post Jim Crow era due to both black and white children present in the same class. However, the lingering effects of Jim Crow that are present in the post Jim Crow neighborhood in the photograph also linger in the classroom, as a white girl tries to compliment the narrator by saying she has “features more like a white person.” Clearly, this white girl thinks of blackness as an insult and whiteness as complimentary compared to this “ugliness.” Her comment is her way of thanking the narrator; it may even be her way of trying to explain to both herself and the narrator that her white features are the reason why the narrator is deemed to be “smart enough” to cheat off of. Had the narrator been any blacker, perhaps she would not have been deemed as intelligent enough in comparison to the white girl, even though it was the white girl who needed the help of her black peer. Thus, we can see that both the picture and the story take place in a society that is technically and lawfully post-segregated – but the divide between white people and black people still remains through racism, which the image illustrates. 

The picture and the text both go hand in hand to explain each other through the concept of, “yes, racism exists even though slavery has been abolished and even though segregation is technically illegal now.” As stated before, the picture shows that Jim Crow still lives on in modern day society. The text can conversely be thought of as a caption for this picture by providing a clear example to describe this image of how exactly Jim Crow’s laws still manage to survive years after they have been outlawed. The story captions the photo by explaining how although white girls and black girls can now learn in the same classroom, black girls are still not immune to the much broader concept of the racially discriminatory mindset behind Jim Crow, just as how the white neighborhood technically allows for black people to live in this community because racial residential segregation is now illegal, but that black people can slyly be kept away by white people keeping “Jim Crow Road” as a passive aggressive threat – a name that could be changed very easily with the support of these white residents. The story has the ability to support the photo as a caption by showing the mindset of why white people still want to keep black people out of their neighborhoods: people will still consider blackness as ugly as they had during the Jim Crow era, or as a trait that makes black people inherently less intelligent compared to their white counterparts, which, in turn, makes them unwanted neighbors in a white society. 

It can now be seen why Rankine puts such emphasis on the visual in a book that labels itself as a “lyric.” As stated in the lecture, lyrics typically offer an escape from narrative and help to heighten, condense, and intensify the experience. It is almost as if the photo itself is a lyric, based on the ways it is able to do exactly what a lyric does. The image of Jim Crow Road offers a form of escape by showing what is, at surface level, a picture that seems to be completely different from the actual text itself. After all, at first glance, a story about the narrator’s experience in school is vastly different from an image of a pristine neighborhood. However, once the photograph can be related to the text through analysis, the image is able to “heighten, condense, and intensify the experience” – just like a lyric. This specific image is able to condense the text by contextualizing the narrator’s experience into the Jim Crow era. Relating a post-Jim Crow era experience to the Jim Crow laws themselves helps to intensify and heighten the narrator’s experience to the audience because it emphasizes how racism has not changed despite the abolition of these laws. Therefore, Rankine’s images and their lyrical attributes can be a part of the reason why her book labels itself as a “lyric.”

What role does social class play in the novel “The Bluest Eye?”

Primary source

FIRST VINTAGE INTERNATIONAL EDITION, MAY 2007 Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye (Vintage International) Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Secondary sources

Hassan Khan, Rahman. “The Framework of Racism in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye: A Psychosocial Interpretation.” Advances in language and literary studies 5.2 (2014): 25–28. Web.

Griffin, Farah. “On The Ethical Dimensions of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” College literature 47.4 (2020): 671–677. Web.

Roye, Susmita. “TONI MORRISON’S DISRUPTED GIRLS AND THEIR DISTURBED GIRLHOODS: ‘The Bluest Eye’ and ‘A Mercy.’” Callaloo 35.1 (2012): 212–227. Web.

Holloway, Karla F. C., and Stephanie A. Demetrakopoulos. New Dimensions of Spirituality: a Biracial and Bicultural Reading of the Novels of Toni Morrison. New York: Greenwood Press, 1987. Print.

Zebialowicz, A., Palasinski, M. Probing Racial Dilemmas in the Bluest Eye with the Spyglass of Psychology. J Afr Am St 14, 220–233 (2010).

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For my search I am going to use one primary source Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Kindle Edition. For my secondary sources I am going to use from Hunter College Library Database. I am going to use five secondary sources to do my research. In this research I am going discuss details on the basis of gender, ethnicity, race, religion or social status in the novel “The Bluest Eye.” The objective of my research paper is to have a look at social barrier due to the framework of internalized racism in the African American community.