Essay - Bluest Eye the Theme of Racial Discrimination in Toni Morrison's...

Bluest Eye

The Theme of Racial Discrimination in Toni Morrison's Novel The Bluest Eye

Toni ***** The Bluest ***** (1970) is a novel th*****t thematically portrays, ***** stark, vivid, and often poignant terms, the lives of three black girls in particular, Claudia and Frieda McTeer and Pecola Breedlove, who grow up in ***** 1940's, within a r*****cist and discriminatory America. The girls, ***** Pecola in particular, a sexually abused child who has come to stay with the McTeer girls and their family, contend (uneasily) with white-dominated *****n st*****ards of beauty; femininity; and worth. Claudia ***** Frieda McTeer are two sisters in a bl*****ck American *****, and ***** ***** is a poor girl of ********** their age who is staying with the McTeers as the story opens, because Pecola's father has raped her, ***** then tried to burn the family's house down. I will explore ways that Toni Morrison vividly and *****ly develops ***** theme of racism against blacks in America *****in her novel The Bluest Eye.

***** states near the beginning of The Bluest Eye (p. 2070), "***** fa*****r had dro*****ped his seeds in ***** own plot of black dirt" a way of say*****g that he ***** raped his own daughter. In this novel, much that has ***** do with eit*****r sexuality or the lack *****reof seems twisted, out of the ordinary, or turned around. The ***** itself is divided into seasons: Autumn; Winter; Spring, ***** as the first sentence of ***** "Autumn section, we read ***** "Nuns go by quiet as lust... "[emphasis added] (Morrison). The first paragraph of The Bluest Eye begins ***** what seems an excerpt from a child's first or second-grade primer, with simple words widely-spaced, for slow and easy *****ing: "Here is the *****.

It is green and white.

It has red door.

It is pretty.

Here ***** the family" (Morrison, p. 2068). This might be considered to be a typical or average *****, for example, for a child to learn to read such a book: slowly, deli*****r*****tely, and at his or her ***** individual pace. Soon, however, in ***** second paragraph of The Bluest Eye,the words of the previous paragraph are repeated, but this time, faster and without any punctuation: "Here is ***** house it is ***** and white it has a red door it ***** very pretty *****e is the f*****mily" (p. 2069).

This can be *****terpreted as representing the pressure on the ***** black child (e.g., Claudia; *****, *****/or Pecola) to "*****" (that is, read the world) as an adult, perhaps typical of ********** on black children to grow up and face a hostile, d*****crimina*****ry world, usually at a much younger age than white children must do. Then, in the third paragraph of the novel, the words are again *****, but ***** time with no space wh*****soever between any of ***** words or letters, now rendering them incomprehensible: "Hereisthe*****itisgreenand*****ith**********ddooritisvery*****hereis thefamily" (Morrison). This version may be ********** version in particular: that is, Pecola, more than Claudia or Frieda, has been ********** to "read"