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“What is clear now is that of all of that hope, fear, lust, love and grief, nothing remains but Pecola and the unyielding earth.” No marigolds bloomed that fall in Lorain, and Pecola’s baby did not survive. Claudia recollects how she and her sister Frieda planted marigolds in hopes that their success would signify the health of Pecola and her baby. That fall, her young friend Pecola was having her father’s baby. Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, the book begins with narration by Claudia MacTeer, a woman describing events that happened around the time she was nine years old. So when she read “The Bluest Eye,” she was only privy to her own interpretations. It would strip her of the enjoyment of these books and discourage her reading habits. She couldn’t ever derive the deeper meaning of what she thought to be insignificant details, and she did not care to delve into the motifs of revered classics. She didn’t like the analysis of the books, much like her disdain for the analysis of poetry. I asked her why she never actually took these literature classes, especially when I realized that numerous books left to me were a result of her bookstore prowl, and her answer was simple. This was how she came across Toni Morrison and “The Bluest Eye,” and how I came to find it in my bookshelf.
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She would spend her money buying other people’s mandatory reading, and later would fall in love with the books she found. She would browse the stacks of books assigned for literature classes that she was not taking. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak that what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her.When my mother was in college, she would spend hours at the campus bookstore.
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And twenty-years later I was still wondering about how one learns that. Implicit in her desire was racial self-loathing. The Bluest Eye was my effort to say something about that to say something about why she had not, or possibly never would have, the experience of what she possessed and also why she prayed for so radical an alteration. In her afterward to this novel, Morrison writes of the little girl she once knew: "Beauty was not simply something to behold, it was something one could do. In awe of her clean well-groomed schoolmates, and certain of her own intense ugliness, Pecola tries to make herself disappear as she wishes fervently, desperately for the blue eyes of a white girl.
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Shunned by the town's prosperous black families, as well as its white families, Pecola lives with her alcoholic father and embittered, overworked mother in a shabby two-room storefront that reeks of the hopeless destitution that overwhelms their lives. The story of eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, the tragic heroine of Toni Morrison's haunting first novel, grew out of her memory of a girlhood friend who wanted blue eyes. Who told her? Who made her feel that it was better to be a freak that what she was? Who had looked at her and found her so wanting, so small a weight on the beauty scale? The novel pecks away at the gaze that condemned her." Read more.Įleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different. Eleven-year-old Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl in an America whose love for blonde, blue-eyed children can devastate all others, prays for her eyes to turn blue, so that she will be beautiful, people will notice her, and her world will be different.