Topic > The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison: A Life-Changing Challenge by Pecola

Many people experience some type of challenge, or extreme struggle in their life, and often it can change their life completely. Often, their journey also reveals the values ​​of their community and the society in which they live. In Morrison's The Bluest Eye, many characters face a life-changing challenge, but none more so than Pecola. Pecola's extreme and unsuccessful struggle to integrate into her community reveals how society is irrationally prejudiced against her and shows how all societies make quick decisions about people, and particularly races, instead of slow, logical moral thinking. Pecola's desire to feel beautiful, desire to be accepted, and struggle for a positive self-image are all irrationally rejected by her stubborn and ignorant community on the basis of hatred and prejudice, despite it not being a morally good decision or logic. The society in The Bluest Eye, like most societies, tells and shows people of color like Pecola that they are not beautiful, due to the lack of representation in the media, all based on hate-driven racial prejudices, and the people Black people like Pecola often feel unfairly ugly. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay The qualities of "black" and "ugly" are constantly associated with each other despite being unfair and false. This is clearly evident throughout the novel, but never more so than when Maureen tells Pecola “You're ugly! Black and ugly! ” (Morrison 73) Society has black and ugly intertwined as well as completely ingrained in their brains, and so Pecola feels this strongly as well, and this ends up affecting her greatly negatively beautiful, everything she is not. Without doing any moral thinking and simply jumping to a conclusion, "Everyone in the world agreed that a blue-eyed, yellow-haired, pink-skinned doll was what every little girl appreciated" (20). Pecola does not possess any of these qualities, because society has decided the standards of beauty exclusively based on race, even though this is clearly immoral. This constant impossibility of adapting to society's beauty standards due to Being a different race hurts Pecola so much that she ends up believing she has to change to be beautiful. Since Pecola's race prevents her from fitting in with society's ideals, the following travesty occurs; “Beautiful eyes. Beautiful blue eyes…every night he prayed for blue eyes” (46). It is unfair to a child, or any person of color, for society to be so prejudiced against them that they feel they must change to feel beautiful, and yet that only happens because society makes a decision too quickly without thinking about it. Pecola's struggle to feel beautiful is irrationally rejected by a hateful society, evidence of how a community makes decisions about race too quickly. Pecola also wants to be accepted by her prejudiced community, but her prejudiced society pushes her away without any moral thought that her skin color was not her choice. Pecola, like all people of color, is unfairly disadvantaged from birth due to hate-driven racial prejudice. . This is especially evident when the mother of a white child “did not want him to play with him to play with Negroes. She had explained to him the difference between people and Negroes… the people were clean and quiet, the Negroes were dirty and loud” (Morrison 87). It is clear that this boy's motherwhite, like most of society, made a reckless decision towards all people of color, who are "niggers", dirty and loud, without taking a moment to think that race was not a choice, that it is wrong judging a person based on race, and therefore Pecola like all black people cannot be accepted even though skin color is not their choice. This hateful rejection greatly affects everyone in society, including Pecola who feels she needs to change to be accepted. In a conversation with a church official, Pecola tells him about her eyes; “My eyes. "And your eyes?" “I want them blue” (Morrison 174). Although Pecola's eye color, like her race, is not a choice, her community has decided that she needs to have a different eye color, an illusion for race, to be accepted, despite how horrible she is. this is it. The situation gets even worse, with Pecola, once again like most black people, being completely excluded so that the immoral people who decided the racial stereotypes can feel included and live with their own insecurities. At the end of the novel, Claudia laments how Pecola left everyone else feeling better about themselves; “We were so beautiful when we straddled its ugliness. His simplicity decorated us, his guilt sanctified us, his pain made us glow with health, his clumsiness made us believe we had a sense of humor” (205). Pecola's village dumped all their problems on her to feel better, but for no reason she never wanted to have these problems and as a result never fits in with her peers. Overall, Pecola is excluded from her community like most people of color, based only on the color of their skin and nothing else, demonstrating how society makes decisions about entire races too quickly. Pecola desires to have a strong self-image and self-confidence, but her society is driven by hatred against her race, so she accepts her so-believed "destiny" with shame and shyness. Society associates and intertwines beauty and happiness, or a positive self-image, even though it is not true. Especially for people of color who never meet the standards set by society, hearing that “This [white doll] is beautiful… and if you are worthy [happy] you could have it” (Morrison 21). The fact that society has decided to attribute happiness to happiness is immoral, and even more serious when this applies specifically to people of color. Biased society judges too quickly, is insensitive to the problems of people of color, and does not even attempt to understand the problems they go through just because of the color of their skin. "People frowned and snorted... 'I've never had a doll in my whole life and I cried my eyes out over them. Now you have a beautiful one and you tear it up, what's wrong?' (21). Claudia, a person of color like Pecola struggles with the overrepresentation of white beauty in the media, but not one person cares. As for Pecola, the company ultimately decided to ban Pecola from the beginning from having a good self-image just because of the color of her skin. Through Claudia's words; “All our waste that we dumped on her and that she absorbed. And all our beauty, which was previously his and which he gave to us" (205). In Pecola's case, like so many people of color, society doesn't even allow her to feel good about herself as they are quick to judge her by the color of her skin rather than, in the immortal words of Martin Luther King, "the content of his skin." their character. The society that doesn't allow Pecola to have a good self-image is.