Research Paper on:
'The Bluest Eye' by Toni Morrison and the Issues of Self Hatred and Beauty

Unformatted Sample Text from the Research Paper:
standard of purity, beauty, and ultimately goodness. The dominant Western culture of 1941 was dominated by cinematic images of Nordic-looking women with blonde hair, blue eyes and ivory skin.  For children like narrator Claudia MacTeer and her ill-fated friend Pecola Breedlove, life was viewed in the simplistic terms of black and white. If white was the ideal,  then what was black, or more specifically, where did people with black skin fit in? Morrison examines the implications of culturally determined and socially reinforced value structures and how  the resulting aesthetics of beauty impacts upon an African American females sense of self. As the novel illustrates by presenting the world through the innocent eyes of an African-American  girl, racism is more than a black and white issue. It is a destructive force that negatively colors perceptions and fosters insecurities and self-hatred that only intensify with the  passage of time. When Cholly Breedlove attempted to burn his familys house down, his daughter Pecola went to live with Claudia MacTeer and her family. The Breedloves were a  dysfunctional family whose violent tendencies were fueled by the feelings of self-hatred they harbored within. Every aspect of the Breedloves existence was dictated by the fact that they were  not white, and according to Katherine McKittricks literary criticism, they accepted their substandard of living in a storefront not because of the local plants downsizing of employees, but because they  did not believe they deserved any better (125). Morrison wrote, "They believed they were ugly" (34). Pauline Breedlove received her cultural cues at the movies, which displayed on  the big screen, "the scale of absolute beauty" (Morrison 97). Patrice Cormier-Hamilton noted, "Sitting in the local cinema day after day, Pauline Breedlove dreams of looking like Jean Harlow,