Term Paper on "Racism in the Bluest Eye"

Term Paper 5 pages (1392 words) Sources: 4

[EXCERPT] . . . .

Bluest Eye

Beauty, Racism, and Identity in Toni Morrison's the Bluest Eye: Constructing a Sense of Self

The nineteenth century was not a great time to be dark skinned and living in America. Slavery was legal in much of the country throughout the majority of the century, and as the institution of slavery became ever more threatened during the century's progress the treatment of slaves and even of free African-Americans grew ever more extreme and negative in many instances. While obviously a major social problem that negatively impacted a large population of individuals, the position of African-Americans during the nineteenth century necessarily caused some deep-seated personal dilemmas and problems as well.

The end of slavery that came as a result of the Union's victory in the Civil War did not exactly fix things for African-Americans, however. Despite their new political and economic opportunities, there were still a great many legal as well as cultural barriers to African-Americans attempting to better their positions in United States' society. In addition, African-American individuals had to content with a world that viewed them in several different and often conflicting ways, leading to problems in attempts to construct personal as well as community identities. The African-American identities that grew out of this period were thus fragmented and indistinct, and individuals had to struggle against many disparate forces in order to carve out their own sense of self that was not dependent on others' constructs, beliefs, and prejudices. This problem persists in the African-American community to this day.

Much of the literature of the twentieth century actually deals with similar issues of the fragmentation and the ultimately constructed nature of identity, and African-American literature of the period reflected this larger trend from a very different perspective. Toni Morrison's novel the Bluest Eye deals with issues of racism and identity through the eyes of a young African-American girl watching her friend, Pecola, grow into a woman and attempt to find beauty and a sense of self. This is made incredibly difficult for the young African-American woman as she has very little in the way of positive guidance and reinforcement in any area of her life. Her mother's continued insistence on white and Anglo features as definitive of beauty are especially prominent throughout the book, making it difficult for Pecola to achieve a sense of self. Through systematic and institutionalized racism, beauty is very selectively defined in a manner that leaves it out of reach for many, just as many opportunities were closed to African-Americans during the time of the book's setting and arguably today.

Race, Beauty, and Identity

The relationship between racism and definitions of beauty and possibility that are so prevalent throughout the book represent a wider dichotomy between the definitions of the white world and the potentials and actualities of African-American existence. The entire social and cultural system, as well as the official avenues of power, are closed to African-Americans precisely because they do not meet specified standards of the dominant culture. This can be seen very early on in the novel, even from the first pieces of text Morrison incorporates in the novel.

Three different versions of a "Dick and Jane" text are given at the novel's outset, and these represent the breakdown of traditional white culture that Pecola and the other children in the novel find themselves facing (Klotman 1979). The ideals of beauty and properness are seen in the first page, which is standard in its use of language and mechanics, but the subsequent versions remove punctuation and then the spaces, making the language less discernable and at once less imbued with meaning and more open to possibilities. This is in some ways akin to the experiences of the characters in the novel, as they are given the standards of beauty and cultural coherence in a manner that is quite clear, yet the closer they attempt to approach these standards the more difficult and incomprehensible they become (Klotman 1979). The uglier language used in the second two versions of the "Dick and Jane" text are more representative of the African-American experience.

Interestingly, the idea that beauty could be objectively defined -- and more so, that the "white race"… READ MORE

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