Self Hatred Leads To Self Destruction Essay

, Research Paper

Topic: Discuss the issues of self-hatred and the aesthetics of beauty in The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison. What role do they play in the novel and how do they relate to its theme.

Self-hatred leads to self-destruction.

Self-hatred is something that can thoroughly destroy an individual. As it was fictitiously evidenced in Toni Morrison.s The Bluest Eye, it can lead an individual to insanity. Toni Morrison raises the idea that racism and class can detrimentally influence people.s outlook on themselves.

It is unfortunate that we live in a society that places such a great emphasis and consideration towards the aesthetics of beauty. What is more unfortunate is that beauty itself is not defined by any realistic qualities or pragmatics. Rather it is defined by society and what the particular or dominant class in society feels beauty is. In today.s society in order for a woman to be looked at as beautiful she must posses a combination of qualities, such as, a slim body, straight hair, fair skinned, full lips, straight sort of raised nose and so on. In the society that the Breedloves lived in, beauty had a lot to do with racism and the dominant class that influenced it. To be a woman of beauty in that society you had to be blond hair, blue eyed and fair skinned. If you couldn.t exactly look like that the closer you came to it the better you were viewed. You also had to behave in a certain manner i.e. well groomed, soft spoken, and have high morals. In other words you had to look like a stereo typical European and for colored women loose all the funky things that made them who they were: .The careful development of thrift, patience, high morals, and good manners. In short, how to get rid of the funkiness. The dreadful funkiness of passion, the funkiness of nature, the funkiness of the wide range of human emotions.. (P. 83)

For the Breedloves what society defined as beauty was not something they felt

they could ever be. They were condemn by society for being ugly and they themselves succumb to that labeling. They never tried to rise above it and thus raised their children in the same manner. This created a feeling of self-hatred and worthlessness in their children especially their young daughter Pecola. From birth Pecola was said to be ugly by her mother and the poor child was never given a chance to ever establish herself: .But I knowed she was ugly. Head full of pretty hair, but Lord she was ugly.. (p.128) She was never loved but rather she was neglected and made to have self-contempt because she didn.t look like someone that her parents and society would love. She disliked herself so much that she started fantasizing, dreaming and praying that she was a pretty blue eyed girl whom her parents would love: .It had occurred to Pecola some time ago that if her eyes, those eyes that held the pictures, and knew the sights.if those eyes of hers were different, that is to say, beautiful, she herself would be different..If she looked different, beautiful, maybe Cholly would be different, and Mrs. Breedlove too. Maybe they.d say, .Why, look at pretty-eyed Pecola. We mustn.t do bad things in front of those pretty eyes.. (p. 47)

Loathing oneself can cause many problems. Pauline Breedlove (Pecola.s mother) didn.t like herself, in turn she projected that onto her kids and they will suffer a lifetime of rejection for it. Because she didn.t like herself, she also found fault with everything that reminded her of her ugliness which only escalated every problem she had: .There I was, five months pregnant, trying to look like Jean Harlow, and a front tooth gone. Everything went then. Look like I just didn.t care no more after that. I let my hair go back, plaited it up, and settled down to just being ugly.. (p. 123) She neglected her home, her children and her husband and only cared for things that she thought were beautiful: .Soon she stopped trying to keep her own house. The things she could afford to buy did not last, had no beauty or style, and were absorbed by the dingy storefront. More and more she neglected her house, her children, her man.they were like the afterthoughts one has just before sleep, they early-morning and late-evening edges of her day, the dark edges that made the daily life with the Fishers lighter, more delicate, more lovely.. (P. 127) Self-hatred was so destructive that it ruined the Breedloves family.

Other than the Breedloves being labeled as ugly by people in their society, they were also the poorest, thus poverty enhanced the problems. Morrison also brought into play the issue of racism, which was due to the dominant class being European who were supposedly superior to all other class at the time (may still be thought today). Racism and class differences lengthened the existing problem if not causing it entirely.

Morrison, however, does not seem to bring out the point of class as much as she shows racism. As one literary critic describes Morrison addressing the topic of racism and class: .Although her class analysis is immature at this point, Morrison is at least conscious of a limited role that economics plays in the exploitation of African people.. .Still, Morrison is more interested in developing the skin-color conflict (race) than the class conflict (capitalism)..

Although Morrison is criticized for an immature class analysis in The Bluest Eye I am going to speculate here to s