The Bluest Eye: How Society Took Pecola’s Innocence Essay example -- T

The immoral acts of golf-club raped Pecola Breedlove, took her innocence, and left her to go insane. The Random House lexicon defines rape as an act of plunder, violent seizure, or abuse despoliation violation. The Random House definition perfectly describes what happens to Pecola over the course of the novel. From Pecolas standpoint, friendship rapes her repeatedly, by their judgmental attitudes towards everything that she is she is painful, she is poor, she is black. In Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye, Morrison shines a critical light on society, illumining the immoral acts that it participates in, through the story of how a little girl is throw by the wayside since she does not embody the societal ideal. Instead of one human antagonist for our protagonist, Pecola, we see most of society as the antagonist. The immoral acts of society destroy Pecola Breedlove from the inside out. One of the first immoral acts that society introduces to Pecola is lust lust for whiteness, for beau ty. She is taught from a young age that beauty is one of the standards that she depart be held up to. In addition, society tells her that the key of being beautiful is being white, something Pecola never can be. One of the major quotes in the book shows in effect(p) how powerful common belief can be. they stayed there be causal agent they believed they were ugly No one could have convinced them that they were not relentlessly and aggressively ugly, Emphasis added (Pg. 28). Although, Morrison does not really say that the Breedloves were physically ugly, she implies that society told them they were ugly, therefore they believed they were ugly. This belief came from society setting a standard that Pecola could never reach. Sadly, this poor little girl did n... ...nd Jane lifestyle that Morrison introduces us into, we see a poor girl that is put down and society rapes. You may think Pecola was just one horribly unlucky child, that her problems are the cause of being at the wrong pl ace at the wrong time. Yet, that is a nave way of thinking the evidence obviously shows that Pecola was tormented because society told everyone that she is an ugly little black bitch, that happened to be raped, making her even less human. Therefore, any negative event that happens to her, small or large, is something she is expected to have and she brought it on to herself. To me, the biggest argument that Morrison makes with her first novel is that society is the most powerful judge in our everyday life. If society deems use to be not worthy of its carry on or time, we should expect hell from it and Pecola Breedlove is deemed not to be worthy.