How Did Toni Morrison Criticize White Women In The Bluest Eye
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In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison criticizes white dominated media as well as blacks who accept this belief for devaluing the black identity. In doing so, Pecola Breedlove, the main character in the novel, desires blue eyes because she evaluates the features of the women advertised in the media as beautiful. Toni Morrison makes a statement in her media through the eyes of a young black girl remembering a year in her childhood. The novel is separated into the four seasons: autumn, winter, spring, and summer. In literature, the seasons have symbolic meaning. Autumn represents downfall. Winter represents less life and death. Spring represents renewal. Summer represents life. Claudia has a flashback on a year in her childhood. As an adult Claudia…show more content… Claudia MacTeer, the narrator, recalls much of the story from her own memory of her childhood when her mother bought her white dolls for Christmas. Claudia says, “I destroyed white baby dolls. But the dismembering of dolls was not the true horror. The truly horrifying thing was the transference of the same impulses to little white girls” (Morrison 22). Claudia at this age is very intelligent because she notices the fact that children her age love these white dolls but she prefers not to like them. She does not quiet understand why they like these dolls because she does not see beauty in them. Morrison mentions a famous actress in the 1940s named Shirley Temple and popular white dolls that are sold at this time: “Claudia hates Shirley Temple and cannot understand the fascination blacks have for little white girls. Much to the dismay of her family members who see her actions as ungrateful” (Gale). She doesn’t see the same beauty that the other children see because the doll does not look like her. Claudia wants to discover where the beauty lies in these white dolls. She literally takes the doll apart and finds “a mere metal roundness” (Morrison 26). Morrison portrays Claudia as an innocent character to show the