Bluest Eye:

The ending to the Bluest Eye has such an impact on society. Because it goes to show what we think of a “perfect” society is not. In the novel as much as they tried to bring up their kids in a safe home, in a safe community at the end of the day, race created disfunction’s in the families. Morrison handles this novel in different ways from Dick and Jane short stories to Shirley Temple. All images and stories society to control the minds of individuals. They want girls to feel they need to look and act a certain way to be accepted into society. Morrison does a good representation of this, she brings forth a problem that is still in todays world. While the doll head was ripped apart, Morrison tried to convey a different meaning. She wanted the reader to know her taking off the dolls head was a cry for help. She wants to know why is she not the skin tone of the doll? why does she not like the doll? and at the same time it shows a relief, a freedom of some sort. She is trying to break free of societies definition of “perfection.” Morrison delivers this in a beautiful manner. We see this today but expect roles are changing. There is no longer oh you need to be skinny to be viewed was perfection. No, now it is you need to have curves, you need to be curvy for men to like you and for society to think you are perfect. Everywhere you turn there are mannequins with impossible body figures, dolls such as barbie with impossible bodies. These are things that kids are growing up with now, the idea that they need to have curves to fit the 21st century norms.

Then we have Morrison representation about Pecola. We see such an innocence in this character? How can a character be this naive?The imaginary friend Pecola has is a reminder of who she is. She loves her new blue eyes. And thinks people are jealous of them. Pecola friend is a reminder that she cannot escape her past. Pecola like Ellison invisible man has become invisible herself. Pecola is disowned by the whole family, she is left to fight her own battles. Pecola is no longer human, they treat her like an object. She will grow up feeling different, she will realize that society is not what she expected. that is Morrisons view, Morrison wants the reader to feel Pecola pain. To know what this child has been put through and the extent society will go. Pecola later will find out her beauty her “blue eyes” is not why people are not around her or why people are jealous.

The first chapter of Citizen is comprised of fragments from different racist interactions. The way the story is told, in the second person point of view using the word: you, puts the reader in the story, now a character rather than someone who is distant from the story. The interactions go all the way from honest mistakes to racist shouting, all one after another!  (The first few fragments are even from a child’s perspetive, giving the reader a feeling of being “an other” which goes away over the course of the chapter.) According to the dictionary a microaggression is a statement, action, or incident regarded as an instance of indirect, subtle, or unintentional discrimination against members of a marginalized group such as a racial or ethnic minority, these are all microaggressions. Microaggressions aren’t all out racial slurs, like from one of the fragments, but rather a man thinking it wrong that he has to hire a person of color rather than “a great writer” or a woman blaming affirmative action for the reason her son had to go a different prestigious school from the one she wanted him to go to, like from two other fragments.
One of the interactions is something we know all to well, as it is always on the news (remember Permit Patty and Cornerstore Caroline?), you went to see a movie, your black friend, who is watching you kid, stepped out of the house to make a call when your white neighbor calls the police on him. The police are gone when you arrive back home, and the neighbor is apologizing. However, this is more than just a familiar scene. Rankine names the movie: The House We Live. The House We Live is part of a documentary about racism and injustice, it focused on systematized racial inequalities. Even though this first part of Citizen focused on everyday interactions, both awake the viewer/reader to racial injustice that happens around them every day (whether it be intentional or unintentional) that, if they are white, may not experience.
Microaggressions are all over America, as much today as they were five years ago when Citizen was first published.

 To shallow thoughts, pop culture is simply there to entertain, and bring a smile to our faces. However under an analytical lense, we are able to decipher how detrimental the media is to our ego and how it fuels our insecurities, especially on young impressionable minds. In the Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison, she utilizes the cultural icon of the time for children, Shirley Temple, and how the way America put her on a pedestal, distorted the lives and minds of young girls, especially those of color. In the novel, Claudia becomes obsessed with the doll of Shirley Temple, and feels the need to rip the doll apart, searching for something inside of it that in her mind should be the answer to all of her questions. Why don’t I look like that? How can I look like that? If I look like her will I finally be loved properly? What is the secret/answer to any of this? Claudia is at the age where she is unable to distinguish that beauty is nothing more than “cultural norms” being forced against young women, so it leaves her in a state of confusion as to why she does not look like the girls presented on television or in advertisements. The major part of this thirst to look a different way lays deep into the color of her skin, with an envy as to why she must be dark, when there are other girls her age who are bright and beautiful, so therefore more desirable. This feeling of envy and confusion quickly translate into hatred for girls who are white, and how the black community basically worships anything that is white and quickly associates images of cleanliness with those that are white. She is able to distinguish that this form of hatred is in itself a form of self-hatred, as the hatred of white people, stems from the yearning of her and everyone else in the black community to be apart of a race that considers themselves superior while they are left in the dark.

  Pecola however approaches her inner battle with race in a different matter, when approached with the beauty standards that America has forced upon her at such a young age, she does not feel hatred, yet feels an immense love that translates into jealousy, as she desperately wishes she was able to have an appearances such as Shirley Temple. Due to being young and innocent in her way of thinking, she expresses this by drinking an absurd amount of milk, which can be compared to the voyage Claudia went through searching for an answer in the inside of the doll. Pecola believes that if she drinks enough milk, she may be able to become white from the inside out. This unhealthy obsession she has to be like this white child star is a result of white supremacist America, forcing girls of all ages, that you will never experience true happiness like the so called “happy” movie stars have on television, unless you are white, and beautiful, and pure like they are.

Young black women are among the most oppressed groups of people. These girls fall into discriminatory acts not only based on the color of their skin, but also their sex. Roye is aware of this kind of oppression in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye as she analyzes the characters Pecola and Claudia. The term is coined by Jan Furman, and The Bluest Eye is shown to contain elements of black girlhood. As expected, black girlhood was difficult and painful, as Claudia often describes the tragic life that Pecola suffers from. Being in a society where white and light-skinned children are held at a higher pedestal than others, black girls can find themselves in unfavorable situations.

The Bluest Eye can be viewed as not fulfilling the requirements of a bildungsroman, or a novel seeking to deal with a person’s spiritual education. Roye points out that Pecola fails to “fit the frame” of a bildungsroman while Claudia is purposely rejecting one, which ultimately leads to neither of them meeting that particular goal (Roye, 214). Both of these characters happen to be black women as well, and throughout the novel find themselves struggling with life itself in order to progress and prosper.

Pecola is especially disadvantaged in The Bluest Eye as her existence in the novel is seemingly to be disowned. Roye states that whenever she is brought up in the novel, Morrison seeks to displace her away from each and every person she comes across. She becomes disowned; by her mother, her friends, and the very society that she is supposed to be a part of. This creates a massive fragmentation of her psychology and cements her place as the Other. Her otherness is a critical aspect of the novel because it completes the narrative of awareness to the destruction of black girlhood. Pecola’s actions, reactions, events and punishments are a recurring behavior that cycles near endlessly.

Pecola, now being objectified and othered, is now subject to the complete absence of “human recognition”. She is no longer capable of seeing herself as a human being, as society herself rejects her. Eventually this will destroy her childhood and continue into adulthood, crippling her. Morrison’s characters serve the role of teaching the readers the state of society and the underlying problems, and Pecola serves as a critical example. No longer a person of her own, Pecola represents the loss of girlhood that many black women have experienced, and still do to this day.