Taking those benchmarks, Pauline makes a scale of beauty, and every face she encounters she assigns to some category on her scale, including her own and her family’s.

Beauty is in the white skin, blue eyes, and blonde hair of the actors and actresses on the silver screen. As a young woman, Pauline Breedlove often goes to the movies and encounters very distinct images of physical beauty. Pecola inherits these destructive ideas and beliefs from her mother. Rather than hope for society to change, Pecola prays that she will change and one day wake up with blue eyes, an ultimate marker of beauty. In this way, beauty becomes a type of currency, and the Breedloves are poor because they don’t possess it.Īt the root of Pecola’s personal despair and self-loathing is the idea that because she isn’t beautiful according to societal standards of conventional beauty, she deserves the ridicule, negligence, and violence meted out to her. They’ve reconciled themselves to lives of failure and impoverishment because their outward appearances require it. For the Breedloves, poverty and ugliness are linked, whereas success and beauty are linked. Thus begins a two hundred page long treatise on beauty’s pervasive power. When the Breedloves are introduced as a family, we are told that they’ve remained stagnantly poor through the years because they believe they are ugly. Beautyīeauty is one of the most powerful forces and themes in The Bluest Eye. We see a potential answer in Maureen Peal, whose “high-yellow” skin color, light eyes, and obvious wealth afford her a smooth path through life. This fire and her family’s poverty do land Pecola onto the paths of Claudia and Frieda, who become her only friends of her age group, but we wonder what Pecola could have been had her family been wealthy, or even just well-off. Breedlove, fights that result in an actual fire the day that Cholly decides to burn their house down. Their poverty fuels the fights and arguments between Cholly and Mrs. Being black only compounded the issue, and families like the Breedloves buckled under the strain. The Bluest Eye is set in 1941, a few years after the end of the Great Depression at this time, poverty was a real looming threat for most American families. Outdoors, the colloquial term Claudia and her community use for homelessness, “was the real terror of life,” and a threat that “surfaced frequently in those days” (Morrison 10).

We first learn of Pecola because her family is “outdoors,” and the county decides to place her in the MacTeer household until her parents can find their feet again.

The bluest eye sparknotes