The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

Résumé du document

The Bluest Eye was written by Toni Morrison. It is the first of her novels and contains a number of autobiographical elements. The story is set in the town called Lorain. This was the town in which Morrison had earned her early childhood. It is a story which is told from the point of view of a nine-year-old girl Claudia Mac Teer. Morrison associates her childhood with that of Claudia's as the novel is built around the phase of 1941 which was circling around the time of America's Great Depression. In Morrison's association with Claudia, it is revealed that the MacTeer family just like the Morrison's family struggled to make ends meet during the time of the Great Depression. Morrison grew up listening to her mother singing and her grandfather playing the violin, just as little Claudia does in the novel. In the novel's epilogue, Morrison explains that the story developed from a conversation that took place between herself and an elementary school girl who was fascinated and longed to have blue eyes. Morrison was pondering about this conversation in the 1960s and the highlight of that year was the formation of the cultural movement ?Black is Beautiful'. This movement was working towards reclaiming the African-American beauty. In the light of this scenario and the act of dwelling into a basal angelic conversation did Morrison's first novel ?The Bluest Eye' arrive.

Extraits

[...] Not only do her parents and pets refuse to play with her, but they seem to refuse any direct communication with her. When Jane approaches her mother to play, the mother simply laughs, which makes us wonder if the mother actually is, as we have been told, “very nice.” When she asks her father to play, her father only smiles. The lack of connection between sentences mirrors the lack of connection between the individuals in this story. Morrison uses this technique to emphasize how lessons are often “drummed” into children at an early age until the lesson become fact. [...]

[...] The master had said, are ugly people.' They had looked about themeselves and saw nothing to contradict the statement [ . ] And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with p.28 The way each Breedlove deals with this ugliness gives the reader insight into their character. Mrs. Breedlove uses her ugliness for “support of a role she frequently imagined was (p.29) Cholly and Sammy use their ugliness as an excuse for being violent toward others. [...]

[...] There are moments when she temporarily succeeds in breaking the destructive connection between what she sees and how people see her. When she considers that dandelions might be beautiful for example, she implicitly recognizes that beauty can have different criteria according to people's tastes: she wonders, do people call them [the dandelions] weeds? She thought they were pretty.” (p.35) By the same logic, she could redefine herself as beautiful even without blue eyes. But just after this scene, her humiliation at the grocer's store (Mr. [...]

[...] In 1993, Morrison became the first -African-American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in literature. Autobiographical Elements in The Bluest Eye The Bluest Eye contains a number of autobiographical elements. It is set in the town where Morrison grew up (Lorain), and it is told from the point of view of a nine-year-old girl, the age Morrison would have been the year the novel takes place (1941). Like the MacTeer family, Morrison's family struggled to make ends meet during the Great Depression. [...]

[...] In the next two chapters, the event are told from an omniscient narrator that can see everything. This type of narration allows the reader to see events that Claudia could never see, such as Pecola's troubles in the candy store. An omniscient narrator may also mention the thoughts of a character, something which a first-person narrator would have no way of knowing. As a result of this new narration, these chapters provide more insight into the Breedlove family, and Pecola Breedlove in particular. [...]