Tuesday, April 7, 2015
Villains in The Bluest Eye
In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison goes into great detail about the lives and childhoods of three major villains: Cholly Breedlove, Geraldine, and Soaphead Church. This choice of detail humanizes the villains making the reader excuse some, not all, of their behaviors and connects their wrongdoings to previous experiences. However, the villains do not learn from their past and, instad, they cycle of abuse for the next generation. Cholly Breedlove's view of sex was corrupted by the humiliation of white men interrupting him losing his virginity. Cholly passes on this sexual humiliation by raping and impregnating his daughter, Pecola. Geraldine lives without experiencing real feeling and love. She continues this coldness to her son, Junior, by tending only to his physical needs and only showing love to her cat. Soaphead Church is a phony religious leader, who continues this falsity by telling Pecola that he has given her blue eyes. While Morrison first allows for sympathy with the villains from painful past events, their continuation of the pain reinforces their role as villains and antagonists.
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