Instant Access To 100,000+ Essays!

In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, racism is not always overt. Rather, it affects blacks throughout American society based upon the ideals and heroes held up by society, crushing the self-esteem of minority children though simple and apparently thoughtless exclusion. Female characters in The Bluest Eye reflect on the American image that they see. American society has a certain view of what beauty is; blue eyed, blonde haired, and white. This doesn’t allow black women and little girls anyone to look to, causing resentment and hard feeling toward whites. Throughout this whole book “beauty” is questioned and looked upon by the young girls who always feel like they are being looked down on and thought of as not beautiful and the women who are bitter and have spent the majority of their lives trying to be beautiful according to American society or the whites. Pecola is a young black girl who has been taken out of her family because of her father burning down their house. Pecola idolizes Shirley Temple; she also loves the baby dolls with blonde hair and blue eyes. Pecola accepts America’s white “beauty” standards. Pecola drinks excessively out of her Shirley Temple cup, which could show her desire to secure th