Tuesday, February 5, 2008
Blackness/Mixedness: Contestations over Crossing Signs
In "Blackness/Mixedness: Contestation over Crossing Signs, by Naomi Pabst, discusses the problem of defiing a person as being of mixed ancestry, when they may only have one drop of "another race" in them, in the case of this essay, African blood. The essay gets involved with a lenghty discussio of exactly what can be considered "Black" in the African American Community, and includes a section on the importance of Maureen Peal in The Bluest Eye. This section, as well as the rest of the essay helps me to understand the problem that Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda have with Maureen, and in a strech helps me to understand the very minor characters of the two mixed girls in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. The essay goes on to discuss more modern situations of mixed race and how to define it, but this section does not fit he time period I am focusing on.
Racism within the African American Communities in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye and Paradise
In Maria Bring's essay, Racism within the African American Communities, published by the department of language and culture at Lulea University of Technology Autmun 2004, the author discusses two of Morrison's novels, The Bluest Eye and Paradise, however, The Bluest Eye is covered in three of the four sections of the essay. Part one is entitled "Pecola-A Life Destroyed by Hate, and discusses how Pecola's life is destroyed because she is hated and neglected because she does not match the standard of African American beauty in the 1940's, the lighter the skin the more beautiful the person. "Racism within the race is the most damaging because Pecola rarely meets whites at all (7)." Her world is shaped by those she comes in contact with rather than more of the white culture, therefore it effects her indirectly. Pecola believes that if she looked different that her parents would treat her differently, love her, something she craves.
In Part Two, "The Family Surrounding Pecola" discusses how her own families' notion that they are ugly and how Pecloa's parents ignore her and her brother, leaving them to fend for themselves. Mrs. Breedlove, the children can't even call her Mama or mother, perfers to live in her created dreamworld at work, the beautiful masion by the lake which is owned by the Fisher family. "She actually prefers the Fisher girl to her own little girl.(14)". This leaves Pecola without a safety net for when she is assaulted by her father.
In Part Three, "The Community Surrounding Pecola", discusses who the community as a whole does not aknowledge Pecola, or move to help and defend her after her assault. The community places more emphasis on passing in the white world than being beautiful as you are. Clauida and Freida, Pecola's friends and the narrators, try to understand the problem, but are to young to understand the problem. The need for being lighter skinned, and the preference for it, appears in the character of Maureen Peal. Maureen if described as a "high yellow dream child", evidence that if you cannot have a white child, Maureen is the next best thing. Maureen tries to be sympathetic to Pecola, but when the children get into an argument Maureen pulls the color card in order to put Pecola down, as well as reaffirm her position as a desireable child. When Pecola is raped the community closes ranks, against an innocent, unloved, and percieved ugly child. Has Maureen been the one that was violated, the community would have gathered arms to hunt the offender down.
These section of this essay help with my future paper because they focus on how the community affects Pecola's perception of herself and that the lack of support from both family and community pushed an already teetering souls over the cliff into madness.
In Part Two, "The Family Surrounding Pecola" discusses how her own families' notion that they are ugly and how Pecloa's parents ignore her and her brother, leaving them to fend for themselves. Mrs. Breedlove, the children can't even call her Mama or mother, perfers to live in her created dreamworld at work, the beautiful masion by the lake which is owned by the Fisher family. "She actually prefers the Fisher girl to her own little girl.(14)". This leaves Pecola without a safety net for when she is assaulted by her father.
In Part Three, "The Community Surrounding Pecola", discusses who the community as a whole does not aknowledge Pecola, or move to help and defend her after her assault. The community places more emphasis on passing in the white world than being beautiful as you are. Clauida and Freida, Pecola's friends and the narrators, try to understand the problem, but are to young to understand the problem. The need for being lighter skinned, and the preference for it, appears in the character of Maureen Peal. Maureen if described as a "high yellow dream child", evidence that if you cannot have a white child, Maureen is the next best thing. Maureen tries to be sympathetic to Pecola, but when the children get into an argument Maureen pulls the color card in order to put Pecola down, as well as reaffirm her position as a desireable child. When Pecola is raped the community closes ranks, against an innocent, unloved, and percieved ugly child. Has Maureen been the one that was violated, the community would have gathered arms to hunt the offender down.
These section of this essay help with my future paper because they focus on how the community affects Pecola's perception of herself and that the lack of support from both family and community pushed an already teetering souls over the cliff into madness.
Wednesday, January 30, 2008
Dick and Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibilty in the Bluest Eye
Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in the Bluest Eye
In Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in the Bluest Eye author Phyllis R. Klotman writes about the use of the children’s reader Dick and Jane to show the different perspectives in the breakdown of the ideal family in the African American community. As the text becomes more blurred together, the more jumbled the lives of the characters, particularly Pecola, becomes. While Dick and Jane have all the love and attention they could ever want in their perfect white house, Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda long for the attention from their parents that the perfect white children received. While Dick and Jane’s mother is loving and supportive and their father has leisure time, the characters do not perceive that they have anything like this in their lives. According to Klotman this is especially true for Pecola. For her entire life Pecola wants desperately to be loved. Because her mother cannot show Pecola the love she craves, choosing to lavish her attention on the perfect blond haired daughter of her employers, the Fishers. The only attention Pecola receives is from the whores who live in the apartment above her storefront home, not exactly the greatest role models, and the unwanted sexual attention from her drunken father. Pecola longs to be Shirley Temple because, in her mind, everyone cannot help but love Shirley Temple.
This essay is helpful towards my future paper because it supports my theory that the social climate, with the lack of a support system from family and community, causes Pecola to lose her sanity, especially when compared to Maya Angelou’s I know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
In Dick-and-Jane and the Shirley Temple Sensibility in the Bluest Eye author Phyllis R. Klotman writes about the use of the children’s reader Dick and Jane to show the different perspectives in the breakdown of the ideal family in the African American community. As the text becomes more blurred together, the more jumbled the lives of the characters, particularly Pecola, becomes. While Dick and Jane have all the love and attention they could ever want in their perfect white house, Pecola, Claudia, and Frieda long for the attention from their parents that the perfect white children received. While Dick and Jane’s mother is loving and supportive and their father has leisure time, the characters do not perceive that they have anything like this in their lives. According to Klotman this is especially true for Pecola. For her entire life Pecola wants desperately to be loved. Because her mother cannot show Pecola the love she craves, choosing to lavish her attention on the perfect blond haired daughter of her employers, the Fishers. The only attention Pecola receives is from the whores who live in the apartment above her storefront home, not exactly the greatest role models, and the unwanted sexual attention from her drunken father. Pecola longs to be Shirley Temple because, in her mind, everyone cannot help but love Shirley Temple.
This essay is helpful towards my future paper because it supports my theory that the social climate, with the lack of a support system from family and community, causes Pecola to lose her sanity, especially when compared to Maya Angelou’s I know Why the Caged Bird Sings.
The Bluest Eys; Notes on History, COmmunity, and Black Female Subjectivity
The Bluest Eye Notes on History, Community, and Black Female Subjectivity
In The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community, and Black Female Subjectivity, author Jane Kuez writes about how the community surrounding the characters in The Bluest Eye. The influence of movies and advertisements, even the wrappers of a favorite children’s candy, influence the young African American girls. Pecola can imagine herself as being just like the image of perfect white Mary Jane when she is eating the candies, just like she can one day dream she will have blue eyes like Shirley Temple. However, when things do not live up to her idealized expectations, when her life does not mirror what she sees in movies or in her Dick and Jane reader, she retreats inside herself. The ultimate withdrawal occurs after being raped by her father and being impregnated by him.
This essay covers much of the same territory as other essays I have read so far, but it does help to have another perspective on the subject of Pecola’s obsession with being blue eyed. This essay would help to relieve some of my reliance on other essays, making my final paper less one side.
In The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community, and Black Female Subjectivity, author Jane Kuez writes about how the community surrounding the characters in The Bluest Eye. The influence of movies and advertisements, even the wrappers of a favorite children’s candy, influence the young African American girls. Pecola can imagine herself as being just like the image of perfect white Mary Jane when she is eating the candies, just like she can one day dream she will have blue eyes like Shirley Temple. However, when things do not live up to her idealized expectations, when her life does not mirror what she sees in movies or in her Dick and Jane reader, she retreats inside herself. The ultimate withdrawal occurs after being raped by her father and being impregnated by him.
This essay covers much of the same territory as other essays I have read so far, but it does help to have another perspective on the subject of Pecola’s obsession with being blue eyed. This essay would help to relieve some of my reliance on other essays, making my final paper less one side.
"Allegory of the Cave"
Toni Morrison's "Allegory of the Cave": Movies, Consumption, and Platonic
Realism in "The Bluest Eye"
In Toni Morrison’s “Allegory of the Cave”: Movies, consumption, and Platonic Realism in “The Bluest Eye”, author Thomas H. Fick discusses Pecola’s obsession with blue eyes, the use of the Dick and Jane excerpts as counterpoint to the “real lives” of the character’s, and compares the societies and Pecloa’s obsession with blue eyes and whiteness with the narrator, Claudia’s, rejection of whiteness and the social images that all of the other characters in the book are so obsessed with, the commercial aspect of being “mainstream”. “Movies convey an adult version
of Dick and Jane's ideal world, but in The Bluest Eye the emphasis is not just on the
particular scenes, formulae, or characters -that special hairdo or inflection-but
on the medium itself.” Claudia rejects this world, on one occasion tearing apart a blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby doll in an effort to discern what makes this image beautiful. What she ends up with is a pile of sawdust and the conclusion that this “beauty” is a myth. Fick uses these examples of Claudia and Pecola’s reactions to the images of beauty much like the comparisons I have made between Maya and Pecola. Like the difference between Dorothy and the inhabitants of the Emerald City, One sees the “man behind the curtain”, the fakeness of the accepted world about them, the other refuses to take the green tinted glasses off and see behind that curtain.
I feel that this essay is beneficial to my understanding of The Bluest Eye because it gives another perspective on how the stereotype of beauty can affect parents like Pauline Breedlove, who in turn pass this stereotype on to their children, and the eventual problems it can have on the malleable young minds.
Realism in "The Bluest Eye"
In Toni Morrison’s “Allegory of the Cave”: Movies, consumption, and Platonic Realism in “The Bluest Eye”, author Thomas H. Fick discusses Pecola’s obsession with blue eyes, the use of the Dick and Jane excerpts as counterpoint to the “real lives” of the character’s, and compares the societies and Pecloa’s obsession with blue eyes and whiteness with the narrator, Claudia’s, rejection of whiteness and the social images that all of the other characters in the book are so obsessed with, the commercial aspect of being “mainstream”. “Movies convey an adult version
of Dick and Jane's ideal world, but in The Bluest Eye the emphasis is not just on the
particular scenes, formulae, or characters -that special hairdo or inflection-but
on the medium itself.” Claudia rejects this world, on one occasion tearing apart a blonde-haired, blue-eyed baby doll in an effort to discern what makes this image beautiful. What she ends up with is a pile of sawdust and the conclusion that this “beauty” is a myth. Fick uses these examples of Claudia and Pecola’s reactions to the images of beauty much like the comparisons I have made between Maya and Pecola. Like the difference between Dorothy and the inhabitants of the Emerald City, One sees the “man behind the curtain”, the fakeness of the accepted world about them, the other refuses to take the green tinted glasses off and see behind that curtain.
I feel that this essay is beneficial to my understanding of The Bluest Eye because it gives another perspective on how the stereotype of beauty can affect parents like Pauline Breedlove, who in turn pass this stereotype on to their children, and the eventual problems it can have on the malleable young minds.
Seeds in Hard Ground
Seeds in Hard Ground
In Seeds in Hard Ground: Black girlhood in The Bluest Eye, author Ruth Rosenberg, discusses the how young African American girls develop a sense of self, how the literature they read while growing up effects the how they see themselves. Rosenberg cites Nancy Larrick, author of “The All-White World of Children’s books” on page 436, stating that Nancy Larrick “studied 5,206 children’s books published between 1962 and 1964, claims that only 349 of those thousands of books include even one black child either in the illustrations or the text.”
Rosenberg goes on the discuss how in many novels, like the Bluest Eye, the main characters, young African American girls, are deprived of sufficient role models in the media they are bombarded with. What they experience is the sense that if they are dark skinned they are less attractive, less worthy of happiness, than those characters who have lighter skin, like the minor character Maureen Peal in the Bluest Eye. Rosenberg feels that the only way to resolve these feeling of inadequacy, not only for the characters in the novels, but for the authors who wrote them. These feelings of inadequacy leave these young girls wishing and praying that they will one day wake up to find that they have become white. Maya Angelou expedited this dream and talks about it in her autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the character of Pecola in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. While Angelou has other African American women to fill as role model, allowing her to leave the dream of whiteness behind, the character of Pecola has no really strong woman to look up to and becomes obsessed with the becoming more like the Caucasian faces that defines beauty.
Rosenberg, Ruth. Black American Literature Forum, Volume 21, Number 4 (Winter 1987)
O 1987 Indiana State University
In Seeds in Hard Ground: Black girlhood in The Bluest Eye, author Ruth Rosenberg, discusses the how young African American girls develop a sense of self, how the literature they read while growing up effects the how they see themselves. Rosenberg cites Nancy Larrick, author of “The All-White World of Children’s books” on page 436, stating that Nancy Larrick “studied 5,206 children’s books published between 1962 and 1964, claims that only 349 of those thousands of books include even one black child either in the illustrations or the text.”
Rosenberg goes on the discuss how in many novels, like the Bluest Eye, the main characters, young African American girls, are deprived of sufficient role models in the media they are bombarded with. What they experience is the sense that if they are dark skinned they are less attractive, less worthy of happiness, than those characters who have lighter skin, like the minor character Maureen Peal in the Bluest Eye. Rosenberg feels that the only way to resolve these feeling of inadequacy, not only for the characters in the novels, but for the authors who wrote them. These feelings of inadequacy leave these young girls wishing and praying that they will one day wake up to find that they have become white. Maya Angelou expedited this dream and talks about it in her autobiographical novel I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and the character of Pecola in Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. While Angelou has other African American women to fill as role model, allowing her to leave the dream of whiteness behind, the character of Pecola has no really strong woman to look up to and becomes obsessed with the becoming more like the Caucasian faces that defines beauty.
Rosenberg, Ruth. Black American Literature Forum, Volume 21, Number 4 (Winter 1987)
O 1987 Indiana State University
Thursday, January 24, 2008
Toni Morrison and Maya Angelou
While reading Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, I began to notice similarities and differences between the character of Pecola Breedlove and Maya Angelou's description of her life in I know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Both long to "pass" in the white world, to blend in rather than have the proverbial bull-eye and label of Negro on their backs.
Both Pecloa and Maya entertain the dream that one day they will wake up and be transformed into the ultimate standard of white beauty; blond hair and blue eyes. But for Maya, the dream passes as she grows older and she learns to accept herself. For Pecola, the dream becomes an obsession, one she uses to steady herself when life knocks her down and her father abuses her. With her obsession with "passing" and being impregnated by her own father, pushes Pecola over the edge and she descends into madness.
Both Pecloa and Maya entertain the dream that one day they will wake up and be transformed into the ultimate standard of white beauty; blond hair and blue eyes. But for Maya, the dream passes as she grows older and she learns to accept herself. For Pecola, the dream becomes an obsession, one she uses to steady herself when life knocks her down and her father abuses her. With her obsession with "passing" and being impregnated by her own father, pushes Pecola over the edge and she descends into madness.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)