Social Classes In Zora Neale Hurston's The Bluest Eye

separating further the divisions between blacks and whites, and gaining a semblance of meaning in life

from the interplay they see or imagine among these classes. The three young girls around whom the

novel revolves, Claudia, Frieda and Pecola, see in a schoolmate who is wealthier and thus higher-class,

an unattainable purer, better state than their own. Likewise, Geraldine, a black woman with contempt

for her own race, chooses to segregate herself from “blackness” by defining for herself what classiness

should be and living to that imagined standard. Each of these individuals is looking outside herself for

meaning, often with open contempt for those of the lower classes.

The young girls, long taught that wealth and privilege equal higher class, assign to their light-

skinned, wealthy schoolmate Maureen an awe an

loses her compassion for the less refined members of her own race around her, robbing herself of the

Peale represents an unattainable gracefulness which must be simultaneously despised and loved, even

themselves of their own feelings of worthlessness, which, again, derive from their long culturally-

quality of “funkiness,” (Morrison, 83) an amalgam of nature, wild emotion, uncleanness, and

with a grace that flows not from an inborn high-class heritage, but from the imaginings of these things by

black and just as petty as any other child, she moves through the world of Claudia, Frieda and Pecola

Some topics in this essay:
Bluest Eye, Likewise Geraldine, Claudia Pecola, Frieda Pecola, Maureen Peale, Eye Pecola, bluest eye, claudia frieda pecola, , wealth privilege, frieda pecola, likewise geraldine, claudia frieda, classes girls, own race, Claudia Frieda,