The book portrays the African American population as a culture fascinated by its internalization of a “blue-eyed, yellow haired, pink-skinned” beauty ideal. Women of color are judged according to white standards of beauty”, and consequently they are always considered ugly. Hence blacks learn to hate themselves; and Pecola Breedlove, prays every night for blue eyes. As a result the ideal of beauty becomes a unsafe and racist ensnare into which African Americans are born, and from which they can never completely escape. In other words, blackness is associated to ugliness and therefore weakness, while beauty is seen as a characteristic found only among whites. In addition, white beauty becomes equivalent with goodness and wholesomeness and even Pecola’s father Cholly imagines God as “a nice old white man, with long white hair, flowing
with beard, and little blues eyes”(pg 134).
Some instances that deal with beauty in the book are as follows: Claudia is constantly faced with ideals of beauty. For Christmas on e year, she receives a blue-eyed, blonde –haired, pink-skinned doll. Rather than adore the doll, she destroys and dismembers it as result of her anger. Claudia feels she can never measure up to the beauty of white children, the beauty that the entire world reveres. The Breedloves are poor and ugly. At least that is how they think the world views them. Their beliefs that they are ugly come from white American media always portraying whites as representations of what is beautiful. Because of this, they do not strive for more, for they think that they do not deserve to have more. Pecola wishes that she had blue eyes. She thinks that if her eyes were blue, and therefore beaut
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