In Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, Morrison puts the spotlight on society, lighting up the corrupt acts that it partakes in, through the story of how a little, black girl is thrown by the curb since she does not exemplify the common model. Instead of our protagonist, Pecola, having one human adversary, we see how most of most of society plays as the antagonist. The wicked acts of society eat up Pecola Breedlove from the inside to the outside, as they rape her, take away her innocence and leave her to go mad.
Looking at everything from Pecola’s perspective, we realize that society rapes her constantly, by their critical attitudes towards all that she is. To them, she is black, she is poor, and hence she is ugly. One of the first heinous acts that society presents to Pecola is lust. That being, the desire for “whiteness” or as everyone else in the book believed, the desire for beauty. Pecola is taught from a very early age that beauty is one of the values that she will be held up to. In addition, society expresses to her that the crucial part to being beautiful is being …show more content…
Although, Morrison isn’t straight up saying that the Breedloves were physically ugly, she’s implying that since society told them they were ugly, they had nothing to do but also believe they were ugly. From society setting a standard of being white and owning blue eyes, it wasn’t feasible for Pecola to reach. However, she didn’t understand the unfeasibility because “Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes,” (46). She prayed and asked God for something she could never have, and because society’s view of beauty is being a beautiful, white girl, she is branded as ugly. As we all saw in Pecola’s society, people who are ugly don’t get attention because they don’t deserve