"Anger is better than shame . There is a sense of being in anger. A reality of presence. An awareness of worth." (50) This is how many of the African Americans in Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye felt. They faked love when they felt powerless to hate, and destroyed what love they did have with anger. The Bluest Eye shows the way that the blacks were compelled to place their anger on their own families and on their own blackness instead of on the white people who were the cause of their misery. In this manner, they kept their anger circulating among themselves, in effect oppressing themselves, at the same time they were being oppressed by the white people. The reoccurring theme in The Bluest Eye was the misdirection of anger in the African Americans and superiority of the white population that the African Americans admired so much even as to consider it the standard of perfection. The characters are a perfect manifestation of these two themes, and they take over and in some instances consume and destroy the characters.
Pecola Breedlove was a young black girl, growing up in Lorain, Ohio in the early 1940's. Her life was one of the most difficult in the novel, for she was almost totally alone. She suffered the most because she had to withstand having others' anger dumped on her, had to internalized this hate, and was unable to get angry herself. Over the course of the novel, this anger destroys her from the inside. When Geraldine yells at her to get out of her house, Pecola's eyes were fixed on the "pretty" lady and her "pretty" house. Pecola does not stand up to Maureen Peal when she made fun of her for seeing her dad naked but instead lets Freida and Claudia fight for her. Instead of getting mad at Mr. Yacobowski for looking down on her, she directed her anger toward the dandelions that she once thought were beautiful. The dandelions also represent her view of her blackness, once she may have thought that she was beautiful, but like the dandelions, she now...
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