Poor Treatment of Women

Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye does a rather great job of showing the reader the repression of women in its pages. Pecola is the strongest example in the book. She falls under pressure of society to hate herself because she is black and desire to confirm to their ideas beauty. She is a classic example of how society around different women and girls push them to reject their self-image and lust after potentially dangerous lengths to measure up to the status quo of what makes a woman beautiful.

What is feminine beauty? Big breasts? Skinny? Perfect skin and hair? In The Bluest Eye, the idea of feminine beauty is blonde hair and blue eyes. The only black character in the book that is remotely close to this notion in Maureen. The protagonist, Pecola, is on the opposite end of the that spectrum. She is as black as they come. Throughout the entire back, everyone calls her ugly because of the color of her skin. Pecola takes these opinions to heart and values herself as ugly as well. As a result, she wishes to have the bluest eyes in the world to improve her self-value. Such beliefs result in next to tragic consequences. This holds true for poor Pecola as the story unfolds.

The media is mostly to blame for The Bluest Eye’s ideal standards of what feminine beauty is. Media is a powerful tool in the novel. Back then, the child actress, Shirley Temple, was an icon. She looked very cute when she was young. This child actress was a little white girl with fat cheeks and blonde ringlets that could sing and dance. Everybody loved her. (Some people still love the young Shirley Temple to this day.) Pecola happens to be one of those Shirley Temple fans in The Bluest Eye. She even wants to be just like the child actress. At first glance, this seems normal. But once the reader goes deeper into the book, Pecola’s love for Shirley Temple fuels into her self-hatred and unyielding desire to change who she is. For what cause? Pecola believes that if she has blue eyes just like Shirley Temple, she will be beautiful and loved. This book proves that media and low self-esteem for girls are always a deadly combination.

Along with media and society influencing the self-esteem of women and girls, there is another blinding factor into the value of the women. This is the family and home life. As it is observed in The Bluest Eye, Pecola does not have a good home life. Her father is a drunken loose cannon, her mother has soon self-image problems of her, and her brother ran away from home to escape from that all. To get a great idea of why this all plays into Pecola’s ruin, each member of the family has to be examined. In feminist theory the main person to look is Pecola’s own mother, Pauline. As it was stated above, Pauline has her own self-image problems. She herself has fallen into the “black is ugly” trap of the 1940’s. The woman is out of place because of her Southern background. Then, she has a deformed foot and a missing tooth. Along with that is the fact that she is unhappy with her current situation. Add that with movies that project negative ideas about and society’s views on beauty, and Pauline is a working time bomb. This is not healthy for Pecola herself. One of the things a girl needs to grow up right is a strong mother figure. Most of the from there, the girl grows up to be like her mother. Some girls are lucky to have that in their mother while others, like Pecola, do not. The girls that do not end up leaning unhappy lives and falling victim to the cruel world around them. Pauline’s poor choices and low self-esteem sets the stage for her daughter’s tragic fate. In fact, when Pecola was first born, Pauline reflects on pg. 126, “But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly.” That quote seems to be self-fulfilling prophecy for Pecola. From there, it just gets worse for both Pauline and Pecola.

Society plays a heavy role into feminine self-worth and develop. The end results vary when it is all said and done. Society today is seeking redemption to women everywhere by correcting its past error and portraying feminine beauty in a positive light by making the variety much wider than they started out in the past. However this was take years to accomplish and for some girls like Pecola, it is as Claudia says in the end of The Bluest Eye, “much, much, much too late.”

Works Cited

Morrison, Toni.  The Bluest Eye.  New York: First Plume Printing, 1994.  Print.