The Bluest Eye - Pecola as a Victim of Evil Essay -- Toni Morrison The

The Bluest Eye - Pecola as a Victim of Evil      Ã‚   By constructing the chain of events that answer the question of how Pecola Breedlove is caste as a pariah in her community, Toni Morrison in The Bluest Eye attempts to satisfy the more difficult question of why. Although, unspoken, this question obsessively hovers over Pecola throughout the novel and in her circular narrative style Morrison weaves a story that seeks to answer this question by gathering all of the forces that were instrumental in the creation of a social mishap. By using what seem like tangents in the story, we are shown examples of how forces beyond human control such as nature, an omniscient being and primarily a legacy of rejection have come together to establish the heritage of desolation that has been passed on to Pecola Breedlove.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚   A pattern of precedence is pieced together in the story, showing the seeds of Pecola's present barrenness to have been planted in the lives of preceding generations. By profiling the lives of Soaphead Church and Pauline Breedlove, Morrison makes a case for the validity of generational curses. Their narratives are appropriately placed in the Spring division of the novel as an indication of the characters sowing the seeds that will be reaped by Pecola. Seemingly, as an example of the ways in which the transgressions of the fathers revisit the sons, the narrator gives an extensive account of Soaphead Church's family history, constantly citing instances in which traits of the fathers (or effects of their traits) followed the sons for generations. Of his family the author says, "They transferred this Anglophilia to their six children and sixteen grandchildren" and the family is described as one entity, the accomplishments and ... ...g the Girl's Own Story." The Girl: Construction of the Girl in Contemporary Fiction by Women. Ed. Ruth Saxton. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998. 21-42. Kubitschek, Missy Dehn. Toni Morrison: A Critical Companion. London: Greenwood, 1998. Kuenz, Jane. "The Bluest Eye: Notes on History, Community, and Black Female Subjectivity." AfricanAmerican Review 27.3 (1993): 421-31. Middleton, David. Toni Morrison: An Annotated Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1987. Middleton, David. Toni Morrison's Fiction: Contemporary Criticism. New York: Garland, 1997. Morrison, Toni. The Bluest Eye. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1993. Peterson, Nancy J. Toni Morrison: Critical and Theoretical Approaches. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1997. Pettis, Joyce. "Difficult Survival: Mothers and Daughters in The Bluest Eye." SAGE: A Scholarly Journal on Black Women 4 (1987): 26-29.