The Bluest Eye :: essays research papers

	Misdirection of Anger "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 blacks 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. 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, 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 follows the majorities' view. However, "the anger will not hold"(50), and the feelings soon gave way to shame. Pecola was the sad product of having others' anger placed on her: "All of our waste we dumped on her and she absorbed. And all of our beauty, which was hers first and which she gave to us"(205). The other black people felt beautiful next to her ugliness, wholesome next to her uncleanness, her poverty made them generous, her weakness made them strong, and her pain made them happier. In effect, they were oppressing her the same way the whites were oppressing them. When Pecola's father, Cholly Breedlove, was caught as a teenager in a field with Darlene by two white men, "never did he once consider directing his hatred toward the hunters"(150), rather her directed his hatred towards the girl because hating the white men would "consume" him.