Morrisons Bluest Eye Essay: The American Way -- Bluest Eye Essays

The Bluest Eye The American mood Ownership, kinsperson structures, and consumerism go hand in hand. Morrison illustrates this throughout the unexampled and in the characters identities. Many of the characters identify themselves based on material possessions the simple self-control of a car, the use of consumer products, and property monomania. Although African Americans may take these things for apt(p) now, in the early 1900s this would be considered a major accomplishment. There is an sp are contradiction of class status among the characters illustrating how beauty determines social stratification. Morrison places each somebody in the class hierarchy based on how close they are to the clear standard of beauty. The Fishers, the whiteness family Pauline is employed by, are at the top of the class stratification. The only upper middle class family is white and they are the ultimate model of the blonde and blue eyed standard. Rosemary, whom the girls similarly have a tinge of jealousy for, is on the same class level as Frieda and Claudia, except that her Italian features classify her as white. Rosemarys phenotype is white yet she is also a minority. In the opening scene of the novel she is sitting in a 1939 Buick eating bread and butter. Claudia and Frieda are characterized as envious We stare at her, lacking(p) her bread, but more than that wanting to poke the arrogance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth. (12) Morrison opens the novel with a feeling of envy, because she is depicting how consumerism and ownership stir competition. Each character wants to be superior to the others. Rosemary views herself as give way than the African American girls because bla... ... Bluest Eye (New York Washington Press, 1970). Susan Willis, I Shop whence I Am Is There a Place for Afro-American finishing in Commodity Culture? in Changing Our Own nomenclature Essays on Criticsm, Theory and Writing by Black Women, e d. Charyl A. Wall (New Brunswick Rutgers University Press, 1989) 173-95. Elizabeth House, mechanic and the Art of Living Order and Disorder in Toni Morrisons parable, Modern Fiction Studies 34(1998)27-44. Bessie W. Jones, An Interiew with Toni Morrison, in The World of Toni Morrision, ed. Bessie Jones and Audrey Vinson (Dubuque, Iowa Kendall Hunt, 1985). Robert Stepto, Intimate Things in a Place A dialogue with Toni Morrison, in Chant of Saints A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto (Urbana University of Illinois Press, 1979).