Forms of violence in The Bluest Eye

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Essay on Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye

Forms of violence in The Bluest Eye

        Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye is about the life of a black low class family, who resides in America in the late 1930s. Everyday they are confronted to the problem of violence. And we would see that this violence is present inside their own family as well as in all the community around them. Then we will explain that all this abuse comes for the most part from racism and the idealized concept of white beauty. In addition, with regard to racism, we will see that this oppressed black society suffers on the one hand from racism from white people and on the other hand from their own race. In addition, we will demonstrate that violence is expressed by different forms throughout the novel, namely physical, verbal and emotional.

        Firstly, the most important  representation of violence in The Bluest Eye is the one in Breedlove’s family. The daughter Pecola is an innocent little girl nevertheless, she is the principal victim of this abuse. It is bad enough that practically the whole world rejects her, but even in her own family she cannot find any kind of consolation. Indeed Pecola’s family life is brutal. Her father, who is very often drunk, hits her mother. Consequently, these ritual and terrible fights, which is here physical violence, create a terrorific mental violence to Pecola. It can be seen in the passage where she prays God to make her disappear during one of her parents’ fight “Please God…Please make me disappear”1 (p.45).  This desire of vanishing demonstrate very well the state of her spirit that is to say she is desperating and for her, life has no value anymore. Indeed, she is the witness of the destruction of her family. Moreover, this psychological violence does not stop here, it goes further. Indeed it reaches the most unbelievable and violent point of this novel, namely  the rape from Pecola’s father; he not only rapes her but also impregnates her having sexual intercouse a second time. This unimaginable and cruel scene relieves from a total lack of humanity, indeed he leaves her slightly unconscious and lying on the kitchen. In addition to this unhuman act, comes the pysycological consequences for Pecola, namely the rejection and ignorance of her mother, who does not  believe what she says. This ignorance, from which Pecola suffers, spreads in  all the novel with the rejection of  other people who ignore her. It will be one of the reasons, which  will lead her to  psychological destruction at the end of the novel.

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        As far as this form of violence is concerned, it is important to note down that Toni Morrison  does not completely condemn the actions of Pecola’s parents. Indeed, she has previously described their childhood, which makes us see things a little bit different. As regards Cholly’s childhood, we suddenly understand that his physical violence comes from his sad past. Firstly, we know that his scarcity of love and his no sense of fatherhood come from the fact that  he never knew his own parents. Secondly, he always lived  in the middle of the violence and when he grew up, ...

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