The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Essay Example for Free

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison Essay Tony Morrison became the prominent American writer of the second half of the 20th century mainly because of her novel â€Å"The Bluest Eye† published in 1970. The novel is narrated by a young black girl, Claudia MacTeer and the reader realizes through her perception the atmosphere in the family of her friend Pecola Breedlove. The family relations in the Pecola’s family are very hostile. The topic of racial inequality is one of the central topics. African Americans and their tragedy of the lost culture are in the center of the novel.   The novel is built on the passionate desire of Pecola to be loved by her family and her school friends. Pecola thinks that the reason of the hostile attitude towards her is her black skin and she wants to resemble the American idols like Shirley Temple. Shirley Temple is just an ideal created by the mass culture, an idol which is a part of American dream. The conventional American perception of beauty is connected with the blue eyes and white skin like those of Shirley Temple. Tony Morison studies the position of the blacks in America. She names the things which sometimes are not in public but in minds. American society is divided according to the racial principle and nobody can do anything with it.    The author states that America treats its black citizens like people of a lower grade, pariahs, â€Å"There are several levels of the pariah figure working in my writing. The black community is a pariah community. Black people are pariahs. The civilization of black people that lives apart from but in juxtaposition to other civilizations is a pariah relationship. In fact, the concept of the black in this country is almost always one of the pariahs. But a community contains pariahs within it that are very useful for the conscience of that community.†(The Bluest Eye. Review). American culture has produced a utopian image of America, called â€Å"an American Dream†. It is not bad at all; it indicates, at least the standards to be reached and the goals to be gained.   This collective image is an image of a rich country populated with the nice successful people. There is only one problem in this image. The country is rich and the society is successful, but people personifying this success are narrated with the blond hair and white skin. This is just what great American Martin Luther King said about. The racial inequity is in the very essence of the American society. Pecola identifies her personal position in the community with the position of the black community in the American society, i.e. as soon as the Blacks are pariahs in the society; she feels herself a pariah within the community. What is more, she understands the position of the black community in the American society and naively associates it with her personal position in the black community. Her dream of blue eyes is a naà ¯ve attempt to break through the concept of the faceless, i.e. it is a protest against her position of a pariah. Tony Morison intentionally uses a dream of a small girl which would never come true to underline the improbability of such a dream to resemble an American icon Shirley Temple in the same way as black community would never become an equal part of the society. The values of the society imposed on the black children are destructive. Pecola is morally suppressed by the values she accepts. These values are dominant and black children are not able to evaluate them critically. Pecola is destroyed by the cultural values she has to adopt. The white culture influences the personalities of the black people especially young ones. The Anglo Saxon standards of beauty follow the children outside the class. Movie blondes with blue eyes catch their sight from the cinema screens, billboards, newspapers and magazines. There is no place to hide from the bluest eyes. These beauties keep telling the children that if they were white with blue eyes they would achieve success. This destroys the girl’s identity. She mistakenly associates her physical appearance with the wealth and happiness. White mass culture shows white skin, blue eyes and blonde hair in association with wealth, happiness and success and a young girl realizes erroneously that her life is defined by her appearance. Pecola’s admiration of Sherley Temple is one of her personal tragic illusions. The success of the movie star Temple poisons the life of Pecola. The mass culture shows the physical beauty in the context of prosperity. This self humiliation develops the complex of inferiority of the girl. â€Å"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 teachers and classmates alike, She was the only member of her class who sat alone at a double desk.†( Tirell, Lynne) A utopian desire to resemble an American idol became an obsession for Pecola. â€Å"Each night, without fail, she prayed for blue eyes. †¦Ã¢â‚¬ ¦ She would see only what there was to see: the eyes of other people.†( Morrison, Toni, p.45) The Pecola’s aspiration to resemble the American idol drives the girl crazy. She looses the connections with the reality. As soon as the world does not understand her desire and does not want to give her a chance to become closer to her idol she decides to lock in herself and find a piece of mind keeping her dreams in herself without letting them out. The hate of people, ideal dream on the movie star physical appearance, the hostile atmosphere at school and in the family and the rape by her father followed by the hate of her mother made the girl crazy. But she is still dreaming of her ideal. It is not the white community that has directly destroyed Pecola, but the black community and her parents. They should have insulated her from the white communitys values and have protected her (Hinda Barlaz). The words of narrator about the destructiveness of the physical beauty and romantic love are given in the context when Pauline, pregnant black American woman was watching history of romantic love in the movie theatre. She broke her tooth then as if recapitulating the comparison of romantic love in the movie with her current position. The image of Jean Harlow from the screen destroys the Pauline’s identity as a woman, her belief in American dream and her own beauty. The broken tooth symbolizes her belief in happiness which is destroyed. Toni Morrison and a great American Martin Luther King, Pecola and Pauline, Hero of the Doctorow’s Ragtime and The Oedipus Rex by Sophocles, all of them have the common feature. They are all looking for identity as well as other best representatives of the humanity. Martin Luther King and Pecola, no matter how strange it may seem had the same dream, a dream of equality for all disregarding the color of the skin. Hero of the Doctorow’s novel and Oedipus Rex were looking for their lost identity. John Lennon joined Great American King in his dream of â€Å"a brotherhood of men† in his â€Å"Imagine†. Martin Luther King was looking for the identity of the black people of America and paid his life for it. Pecola was looking for her own identity and paid her mentality. John Lennon was looking for a â€Å"brotherhood of men† and paid his life for his search. These principles can not come from the outside; they should be in the people’s mind which is an identity. A hero of one Russian classic (Bulgakov, The Heart of the Dog) kept threatening himself, â€Å"there is a devastation in the country!!!† and he got a respond â€Å"this devastation is in your mind†. The same could be said of identity. We create the identity in our minds and then we apply it to the entire society. Bibliography I Have A Dream by Martin Luther King, Jr, Delivered on the steps at the Lincoln Memorial in Washington D.C. on August 28, 1963. Source: Martin Luther King, Jr: The Peaceful Warrior, Pocket Books, NY 1968, available at http://www.mecca.org/~crights/dream.html, retrieved 7.04.2005 Tirell, Lynne. â€Å"Storytelling and Moral Agency.† Toni Morrison’s Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. Ed. David Middleton. New York: Garland, 2000. 3-25. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Penguin, 1994. Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye, Review, available at http://academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu/english/melani/lit_term.html#pv Hedin, Raymond. The Structuring of Emotion in Black American Fiction. Novel 16 (1982): 35-54. Edmund A. Napieralski, Morrisons The Bluest Eye., 1994 Heldref Publications, The Explicator, Fall 1994 v53 n1 p59(4), available at http://www.cofc.edu/~farrells/Farrell/oedipus.html, retrieved 6.04.2005 Hinda A. Barlaz, A Reading Guide to Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye, available at http://students.adelphi.edu/learningcenter/pdfs/tonimorrison.pdf, retrieved 6.04.2005 Trudy Mercer. Female Childhood Icons in Toni Morrisons The Bluest Eye, available at http://www.drizzle.com/~tmercer/write/morrison/bluesteye.shtml Chris Booker, The Social Status of the African American Male: 1999, available at http://www.pressroom.com/~afrimale/status99.htm Gibson, Donald B. (1989), â€Å"Text and Countertext in Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye†, Taylor, Paul C., Journal of Aesthetics Art Criticism, MALCOLMS CONK AND DANTOS COLORS; OR, FOUR LOGICAL PETITIONS CONCERNING RACE, BEAUTY, AND ,  , available at http://www.lib.tjfsu.edu.cn/ymwx/essay/The%20Bluest%20Eye1.htm Bjork, Patrick B. The novels of Toni Morrison: the search for self and place within the community. NY: P. Lang,1996.

Women in the Apology of Socrates Essay -- essays research papers

Women in the Apology of Socrates The most striking thing about women in the Apology of Socrates is their absence from where we might expect them. Only two specific women are mentioned: 1) the Pythia, the priestess of Apollo, who answers Chaerephon's question that no one is wiser than Socrates (21a); and 2) Thetis, the mother of Achilles (who himself is not mentioned by name but only referred to as the "son of Thetis"), who warns him that he will die if he kills the Trojan hero Hector (28c). Only two other times does Socrates even mention women: 1) a disparaging reference that those who embarrass the city by coming into court, weeping and carrying on to win the sympathy of the jury, "are in no way better than women" (35c); and 2) a remark that Socrates would enjoy questioning people in the hereafter, "both men and women" (41c), although everyone he actually names is male. Socrates does not mention questioning women in his investigations. Nor do women occur either as spectators to his que stions or in relation to all his talk about educating the "youth." The "youth" are obviously all young men. And again, Socrates mentions his family and his sons without mentioning his wife. Plato relates some relationships Socrates had with women (especially with Diotima in the Symposium), but those may be fictional. The only episode of Socrates questioning a woman that is clearly historical is related by Xenophon in his Recollections of Socrates: Socrates questions the courtesan Theodotà ª, who is famous for her beauty and poses for artists. Socrates lives in a world where the spheres of life of men and women were radically separate. In Plato's Symposium, which is a drinking party, both men and women are drinking and partying, but they do so in separate parts of the house. The musicans and dancers go back and forth between the men's party and the women's party. Political life was regarded by the Greeks as part of the male sphere of things, and so there were certainly no women in Socrates's jury; but it is hard to know whether there were any in the audience. There has been some dispute about whether women attended Greek plays, the comedies and tragedies, when they were staged -- though there are references by Plato to women in theater audiences. We have this difficulty in part because it was not considered proper for strange... ...ly male and all early nude art shows males, an ideal of female beauty rapidly gained ground in the century around Plato. In the three phases we can distinguish in the decoration of the Parthenon, the female figures are shown with progressively more diaphanous and revealing clothing. One of the earliest complete female nudes was a statue of Aphrodità ª that the great sculptor Praxiteles did for the island of Cos. He used as a model a famous courtesan named Phrynà ª (the scene of Phrynà ª posing at right is by the National Geographic painter H.M. Herget in Everyday Life in Ancient Times [National Geographic Society, 1961]). This was all rather shocking for the good people of Cos, who asked Praxiteles to do a more modest statue. He did, but the original went to the island of Cnidos, where it became a major local attraction. In Vamps and Tramps, Camille Paglia mentions that male visitors were so excited by the statue that they sometimes embarrassed themselves after the fashion of Pee Wee Herman. Eventually, the goddess herself was quoted as saying, "Alas, where did Praxiteles see me naked?" By the Hellenistic Age, female nudes were as common as male nudes. Thanks to friesian.com

Crime and Punishment Essay

The themes of sacrifices and egoism are usual in his works. He believes that egoism became that reason that destroyed earlier civilizations and made a threat to contemporary societies. Despite the fact that he saw nothing wrong in the wish to self-perfection, he blamed those, who tried to oppose their â€Å"I† to the rest of the world and considered only their own needs and desires. Raskolnikov, the protagonist of Crime and Punishment is severely punished for his extreme egoism and daring to take the decision about human lives. For example in The Brothers Karamazov Zosima worries about moral responsibility for all actions, committed by the person. Ivan doubts his views and states that responsibility is nothing but abstract notion and without God it becomes impossible to talk about any limits to the behavior of an individual. In the poem Ivan declaims to his brother in the cafe he expresses his view on the free will. The Inquisitor blames Jesus for giving people free will, which has become a hard burden and the reason of misery. The feeling of guilt becomes Ivan’s price for an attempt to express his free will. Dostoevsky does not agree or disagree with any opinion discussed but he constructs the plot of the story in such a way that the readers get an opportunity to get the proofs of ideas, expressed by Zosima. (Dostoevsky) The characters of Dostoesky are haunted by their past. In many his stories people cross the limit and take excessive responsibility to make the decision for other people and get severe punishment for it. In contrast to Borges, whose characters exist in present, and to Tolstoy, who regarded human history as a reason for all the events, which happen to us, Dostoevsky made the past the reason of suffering and misery. His characters are haunted by the ghosts from the past and can not find their place in present. For Dostoevsky the conflicts between free will and determination, and between egoism and responsibility become driving force and a source for creativity. All three authors use literature not only as means to bring their messages for the readers, but also as a way to resolve their inner conflicts. Art is always a personal experience for both – creator and those, who perceive it, and Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Borges make their art serve one ultimate purpose – a quest for the meaning of life. Sources Dostoevsky, Feodor (1992). Crime and Punishment. Pevear, R. and Volokhonsky, L. transl. New York: Alfred Knopf. Dostoevsky, Feodor (1992). The Brothers Karamazov. , Pevear, R. and Volokhonsky, L. transl. New York: Alfred Knopf. Dostoevsky, Fyodor translation by Pevear, Richard and Volokhonsky, Larissa (1990). The Brothers Karamazov. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux. Tolstoy, Leo (1969). War and Peace , transl. Rosemary Edmonds, Penguin. Borges, Jorge Luis (1998). Collected Fictions(translated by Andrew Hurley), Viking Penguin

Purpose Of Education How Children Interact With Their...

Purpose of Education The purpose of education is to help children learn core subject skills and mature into independent learners with responsibility and become leaders. Bruner cited in Driscoll (2005) focuses on â€Å"complex ideas and proposes that develop in children, as a function of an interaction within their environment and personal growth experiences† (Driscoll, 2005, p. 229). Bruner focus on how children interact with their environment, and personal experiences. For example, children like to initiate solving problems and conflicts about things in the classroom, like computers, bulletin boards, and textbooks. Children interact with knowledge, and they make suggestions about using the strategies to help them learn skills. Education has been immersed in conflict for decades. Dewey (1938) spent twenty years of experience teaching with the progressive schools and endured twenty years of criticism about his theories. He tried to raise a consciousness about conditions and insight into needed and desired changes. Many of the conflicts that surrounded education was the result of various points of view concerning the purpose of education, definition of knowledge, and arguments over which knowledge was more effective. In this paper, I will assume the position that the purpose of education is to enable individuals to achieve their full potential as leaders and members of society; this defines that these individuals will receive an education that will enable them to think and actShow MoreRelatedEducation Is The Goal Of True Education Essay1001 Words   |  5 Pagesâ€Å"Intelligence plus character - that is the goal of true education.† -Martin Luther King, Jr. Education is similar to poetry, in that no one person’s interpretation is quite the same. An author may have a meaning in mind, but it’s specific meaning is determined by the reader. 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