Mitha Arista Dewi

170110101056

The Bluest Eye

Beauty standards and race are very interesting topic to discuss because it is very common
problem that happen in every single society in the world. Social representation that appears in
my research is specifically focus on racial and beauty standards that happen in black culture
societies of America.

Bluest eye have three versions symbolize the different lifestyles explore in the story. It shows
the illustration of white middle-class family in 1940s and comment on incompatibility of black
family. The author obviously tells nonfictional story and give very positive message and racially
uplifting rhetoric story in it.

The author is Toni Marrison a black woman who expresses sentiments such as “Black is
beautiful” and uses “Black queen” as an iconic phrase. She reminds the readers how hurtful a
certain kind of racism is and shows how racial issues of the distant and non-distant past continue
characters in the present by explaining of the character’s actions. She focuses the story to
demonstrate Blackness in American culture and effects of internalized racism through the
characters of the story and explains racism from within Black community can negatively impact
self-worth and self-esteem by as well as violence, incest, and child molestation have include in
her story.

From this issues I focus on analyzing the representation of feminist perspective of

inequality racial system and discrimination of black community and the perspective that beauty
is just for light skin or white color skin and people with dark color skin in 1940s era had no same
rights to do anything instead of get discrimination pressure to be perfect according to beauty
standards in that era.

Through the Bluest eye’s novel, Toni Morrison represents the American classic tradition and
feminist perspective toward violence, discrimination and inequality in the middle class family of
different race issues between black and white societies. Thus, the research in topic is about social
representation on feminism. This research is conducted to analyze feminist perspective
represented in Toni Morrison’s novel entitled Bluest Eye.

I use ecofeminism theory to analyze the material object of The Bluest Eye novel.
Ecofeminism highlight the multiple ways in which human beings oppress each other, but these
theorists also focus on human beings domination of nonhuman world or nature, because women
are culturally tied to nature. According to Karren J. Warren, the western basic beliefs, values,
attitudes, and assumptions about itself and its inhabitants have been shaped by an oppressive
patriarchal conceptual framework, the purpose of which is to explain, justify and maintain
relationship of domination and subordination in general and men’s domination of woman in
particular.

In Bluest Eye’s novel shows some cases that obviously explain that problems of human
beings are happened in western and black culture in 1940s era.

A young girl named Pecola believes that whitness is beautiful and that she is ugly
because she is ‘black’. Her life has very difficult.

Pecola’s father who suffered from humiliations is taking out of frustration on the women
in his life. Rage increasingly dominates. Pecola’s mother who believes that she is ugly makes her
feels so lonely and cold and sees herself as the martyr of a terrible marriage. She does not find
meaning of her life in her own family instead of romantic movies and her work on caring for a
white family.

Pecola granted wish blue eyes because she thinks blue eyes is a symbol of beauty, as well
as the light skinned. Nevertheless, she receives it in darkly ironic ways and get more
discrimination from society around her that causes Pecola and other black girls to question their
self-worth and self-esteem in racist society.