Toni Morrison portrays the premature loss of innocence in her novel The Bluest Eye, by explaining encounters that little girls are faced with, like violence, sex, and the ideas of beauty. (what is the argument Morrison makes about those ideas? ) When one girl loses her innocence it causes a chain reaction that corrupt children’s brains because it creates the feeling of importance and maturity to share your knowledge. The things that they learn can forever affect their personalities and behavior.
Violence and fighting make way for Pecola Breedlove to have a premature loss of innocence, which occurs throughout the entire book, including many stories her parents. (statement, needs a topic sentence). Pecola loses her innocence before any of the other girls in the story, since she is raised in the most violent household. When Morrison recounts Pecola’s family she says “Cholly and Mrs. Breedlove fought each other with a darkly formalism that was paralleled only by their lovemaking.
Tacitly they had agreed not to kill each other. He fought her the way a coward fights a man – with feet, the palms of his hands, and teeth. She, in turn, fought back in a purely feminine way – with frying pans and pokers, and occasionally a flatiron would sail towards his head” (Morrison 43). This quote explains how they fight, both very cowardly. Neither was strong enough to kill the other or fight with fists (what you write here is not what the quotation says; what does it mean that she fights in a feminine way?
What does it mean that he fights cowardly? Why are you saying neither is strong enough to “kill” when that is not the topic of discussion. Morrison says “There was a difference in the reaction of the children to these battles. Sammy cursed for a while, or left the house, or threw himself into the fray…. Pecola, on the other hand, restricted by her youth and sex, experimented with methods of endurance” (43) Sammy could run away, but Pecola had to stay. She was restrained by her innocence, but lost it in the meantime.
The ideas of sex are portrayed by the sex workers, which cause the early loss of innocence in the three girls (you need a topic sentence). Pecola often visited the sex workers as an escape from her own family because. (you might spend less time passing judgment and more time engaging in analysis of the text) Morrison describes the sex worker’s actions by saying “Nor were they protective and solicitous of youthful innocence. They looked back on their own youth as a period of ignorance, and regretted that they had not made more of it.
They were not young girls in whores’ clothing, or whores regretting their loss of innocence. They were whores in whores’ clothing, whores who had never been young and had no word for innocence. With Pecola they were as free as they were with each other” (57). These sex workers thought their own innocence was a waste and didn’t care about Pecola’s (analyze the passage). They were open and told the girl about all they things they had done with men and told her not to trust the men. This is bad since she is so young, but also taught her that she doesn’t need a man to make her happy.
The pressures of societal beauty gives the girls the feeling that they aren’t good enough,(statement, needs a topic sentence). Pecola ponders, “As long as she looked the way she did, as long as she was ugly, she would have to stay with these people. Somehow she belonged to them. Long hours she sat looking in the mirror, trying to discover the secret of the ugliness, the ugliness that made her ignored or despised at school, by her teachers and classmates alike” (45). Pecola is ugly because being colored is seen as ugly and her entire family including her, began to believe that.
No matter how hard Pecola tried to disappear she couldn’t stop herself from seeing (why does she want to disappear? Whiteness? ). She thinks she wants blue eyes, but what she really wants is to be a beautiful white girl, like Shirley Temple. (again, the analytical moment here is about whiteness). In the afterword Morrison states, “The assertion of racial beauty was not a reaction to the self mocking, humorous critique of cultural/ racial foibles common in all groups, but against the damaging internalization of assumptions of immutable inferiority originating in an outside gaze.
I focused, therefore, on how something as grotesque as the demonization of an entire race could take root inside the most delicate member of society: a child; the most vulnerable member: a female” (210). Morrison discusses the tragedy of racial inequality and how terrible it is to put all of that pressure on a little girl. It seems as though the pressure of the entire race is put upon Pecola. She represents what happens when society constrains young girls, even after slavery. The premature loss of innocence is evident in all three young girls.
Pecola has the experience before Claudia and Frieda. Violence, sex, and the pressure of beauty force Pecola out of her childlike innocence. Once Pecola lost her innocence, it was a chain reaction and the others followed. It seems so “cool” to lose your innocence and become an adult but when you grow up, all you wish is to be young and ignorant again. The things that these girls learned during this period of their life will forever follow them and affect their everyday behavior. Once you know something you can never erase it, no matter how hard you try.
