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  • Essay / Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye: A Life-Changing Challenge by Pecola

    Many people face some sort of challenge or extreme struggle during their lives, and it can often change completely their life. Often, their journey also reveals the values ​​of their community and the society in which they live. In Morrison's The Bluest Eye, many characters undergo a life-changing challenge, but none more so than Pecola. Pecola's extreme and unsuccessful struggle to fit into her community reveals how society is irrationally biased against her, and shows how all societies make snap decisions about people, and especially races, instead of 'slow, logical and moral thinking. Pecola's desire to feel beautiful, the desire to be accepted, and the struggle for a positive image of herself are all irrationally denied by her stubborn and uneducated community on the basis of hatred and prejudice, although it is not a morally good or logical decision. The society in The Bluest Eye, like most societies, tells and shows people of color like Pecola that they are not beautiful, due to a lack of representation in the media, all based on racial bias driven by hatred, and people of color like Pecola often feel unfairly as a result. ugly. Say no to plagiarism. Get a Custom Essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get an Original Essay The qualities of “black” and “ugly” are constantly associated with each other, even if they are unfair and wrong. This is clearly evident throughout the novel, but never more so than when Maureen tells Pecola "You're ugly!" Black and ugly! (Morrison 73). Society has dark and ugly intertwined, as well as completely ingrained in their brains, and so Pecola also feels this strongly, and it ends up affecting her strongly negatively. Pecola is constantly told and shown what society considers beautiful - everything it doesn't. Without making any moral reflections and simply jumping to a conclusion, “Everyone in the world agreed that a doll with blue eyes, yellow hair and pink skin was what every little girl cherished” (20). Pecola possesses none of these qualities, as society has decided on beauty standards based solely on race, although this is clearly immoral. This constant inability to meet society's beauty standards due to being of a different race hurts Pecola so much that she ends up believing that she must change to be beautiful. Since Pecola's race prohibits her from matching society's ideals, the following parody occurs; “Pretty eyes.” Pretty blue eyes…every night she prayed for blue eyes” (46). It is unfair to a young child, or any person of color, for society to be so prejudiced against them that they feel they have to change to feel beautiful, and yet this only happens because society makes a decision too quickly, without any thought. Pecola's struggle to feel beautiful is irrationally denied by a hateful society, clear evidence of how a community makes racial decisions too quickly. Pecola also wants to be accepted by her prejudiced community, but her biased society rejects her without any moral thought that skin color was not her choice. Pecola, like all people of color, is unfairly disadvantaged from birth due to hate-motivated racial bias. . This is especially evident when the mother of a white child “didn't want him to play with niggers.” She had explained to him the difference between people and niggers...thepeople were neat and quiet, the negroes were dirty and noisy” (Morrison 87). It is clear that this white boy's mother, like most members of society, made a rash decision towards all people of color, viewing them as "niggers", dirty and noisy, not taking no time to think that race was not a choice, that it is wrong to judge a person based on their race, and therefore Pecola, like all people of color, cannot be accepted even if the The color of her skin is not a choice she made. This hateful rejection greatly influences everyone in society, including Pecola who feels that she must change to be accepted. In a conversation with a church official, Pecola tells him about her eyes; “My eyes. » “And your eyes?” “I want them blue” (Morrison 174). Although Pecola's eye color, like her race, is not a choice, her community has decided that she must have a different eye color, an illusion of race, to be accepted, despite the horror it is . The situation is even worse: Pecola, like most people of color, is completely excluded so that immoral people who have opted into racial stereotypes can feel included and live with their insecurities. At the end of the novel, Claudia laments how Pecola made everyone feel better about themselves; “We were so beautiful when we straddled his ugliness. His simplicity decorated us, his guilt sanctified us, his pain made us radiate health, his awkwardness made us believe that we had a sense of humor” (205). The village of Pecola confided all their problems to her to make themselves feel better, but for no reason, she never wanted to have these problems and as a result, she never fits in with her peers. Overall, Pecola is excluded from her community like most people of color, based solely on the color of their skin and nothing else, which shows how society is too quick to make decisions on whole breeds. Pecola desires to have a strong self-image and confidence, but her society is driven by hatred against her race, so she accepts her so-called "destiny" with shame and timidity. Society associates and intertwines beauty and happiness, or a positive self-image, even though this is not true. Especially for people of color who never fit the standards set by society, who hear that “this [white doll] is beautiful…and if you're worthy of it [happy], you can have it” (Morrison 21). The fact that society has decided to equate physical happiness with happiness is immoral, and even worse when it specifically applies to people of color. A society with prejudice is too quick to judge, insensitive to the problems of people of color, and does not even try to understand the problems they go through just because of the color of their skin. "People would frown and argue... 'I never had a doll in my whole life and I used to cry my eyes out for them. Now you get a nice one and you tear it up, What’s wrong with you?” (21). Claudia, a person of color like Pecola, fights against the overrepresentation of white beauty in the media, but no one cares. As for Pecola, society ultimately decided to prohibit her from having a good self-image from the start, solely because of the color of her skin. Through the words of Claudia; “All our waste we dumped on her and she absorbed it. And all our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us” (205). In Pecola's case, like so many people of color, society doesn't even allow her to feel good about herself as she was quickly judged.