Morrisons Bluest Eye Essay: The American Way -- Bluest Eye Essays

The Bluest Eye The American Way Ownership, crystalise structures, and consumerism go hand in hand. Morrison illustrates this throughout the legend and in the shells identities. Many of the characters give away themselves based on material possessions the simple ownership of a car, the physical exertion of consumer products, and property ownership. Although African Americans may take these things for granted now, in the other(a) 1900s this would be considered a major accomplishment. There is an apparent contradiction of sort status among the characters illustrating how beauty determines social stratification. Morrison places each person in the discriminate hierarchy based on how close they are to the white ideal of beauty. The Fishers, the white family Pauline is employed by, are at the top of the class stratification. The only upper middle class family is white and they are the eventual(prenominal) model of the blonde and blue eyed standard. Rosemary, whom the girls to o have a tinge of jealousy for, is on the same class level as Frieda and Claudia, except that her Italian features classify her as white. Rosemarys phenotype is white yet she is also a minority. In the opening scene of the novel she is sitting in a 1939 Buick eating bread and butter. Claudia and Frieda are characterized as envious We watch at her, wanting her bread, but more than that wanting to poke the self-reliance out of her eyes and smash the pride of ownership that curls her chewing mouth. (12) Morrison opens the novel with a feeling of envy, because she is depicting how consumerism and ownership evoke competition. Each character wants to be superior to the others. Rosemary views herself as better than the African American girls because bla... ... Bluest Eye (New York Washington Press, 1970). Susan Willis, I Shop Therefore I Am Is There a Place for Afro-American Culture in goodness Culture? in Changing Our Own Words Essays on Criticsm, possibleness and Writing by Bl ack Women, ed. Charyl A. Wall (New Brunswick Rutgers University Press, 1989) 173-95. Elizabeth House, Artist and the Art of spirit Order and Disorder in Toni Morrisons Fiction, Modern Fiction Studies 34(1998)27-44. Bessie W. Jones, An Interiew with Toni Morrison, in The world of Toni Morrision, ed. Bessie Jones and Audrey Vinson (Dubuque, Iowa Kendall Hunt, 1985). Robert Stepto, Intimate Things in a Place A Conversation with Toni Morrison, in tone of Saints A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto (Urbana University of Illinois Press, 1979).